Some progressive officials want cities to have government-run grocery stores. Chicago’s Democratic mayor thinks it would be “innovative” to have “a municipally owned grocery store in Chicago.” That would be dumb, not “innovative.” A city in Kansas lost $132,000 in 2022 on its municipally-owned grocery store, showing that the government can’t manage grocery stores competently.
Government-run grocery stores are a bad idea, given how incompetently the government runs even things that should be easy to make a profit on, like liquor monopolies:
a just-released audit of the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC), the state’s complete inability to properly track its spirits inventory resulted in nearly a million dollars of liquor disappearing without a trace. Michigan is one of 17 states that still operates as a control state. MLCC is the sole wholesaler of distilled spirits, meaning all liquor sold and distributed in the state must be originally purchased by the agency. Michigan law requires MLCC to exercise “complete control over alcoholic beverage traffic,” but it turns out that the agency lacks control over pretty much everything…
Perhaps the most significant finding of the audit is that $961,000 of MLCC’s liquor inventory—totaling 62,294 bottles, housed in ADA warehouses—mysteriously vanished between January and February 2022. To put this in context, the missing liquor constituted 20 percent of the state’s entire inventory. While the state is supposed to conduct physical inventory counts at the ADA warehouses, zero inventory checks took place from October 2019 to July 2022 (which, naturally, MLCC blamed on COVID-19, despite the pandemic not starting in earnest until the spring of 2020 and Michigan lifting its lockdown orders by June 2021).
….MLCC is also wholly incapable of ordering rational amounts of each booze type it stocks. The report recounts the agency purchasing 12,204 bottles of a particular spirit in a week in which a mere 1,104 bottles of that spirit were sold. The agency then kept over 11,000 bottles of the spirit on hand for the next 48 weeks—the last 19 of which saw zero sales for it. MLCC also purchased 780 bottles of another spirit over the course of 77 weeks, with zero corresponding sales in any of the weeks those purchases were made.
