The excessive cost of New York “Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to build a $30 million, city-owned grocery store in Harlem next year has stunned supermarket executives,” reports the New York Post.
Mamdani “unveiled his plan to open the first of five such taxpayer-funded stores – a cornerstone of his campaign last fall to slash food prices for lower-income residents – during a speech on Sunday marking his first 100 days in office.”
“I almost fell back when I saw the $30 million number,” said Anthony Pena, president of the National Supermarket Association. “Even a high end, gourmet store in the middle of Manhattan wouldn’t cost that much to build.”
Avi Kaner, a former owner of New York City’s 17-store Morton Williams grocery chain, said “$30 million is an awful lot to spend to build one supermarket.”
Kaner and Pena both said that a typical, 15,000-square-foot store costs less than $10 million to build.
City-owned grocery stores have failed in other parts of the country. A smelly, city-funded grocery store in Kansas City closed last year, after receiving $18 million dollars from taxpayers.
City-run grocery stores lose money despite receiving tax exemptions, donations, and indirect subsidies. As City Journal explains, “The Erie Market in tiny, remote Erie, Kansas is the most cited example of this experiment. The store loses tens of thousands of dollars annually, requires volunteers to stock the shelves, and relies on donations of produce from local businesses. It is more like a rural co-op or food pantry than a real grocery store.” It elaborates on Mamdani’s other extremely costly ideas in “Why City-Run Grocery Stores Are A Bad Idea.”
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 2024 audit of the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC) found that the state’s complete inability to properly track its spirits inventory resulted in nearly a million dollars of liquor disappearing without a trace. $961,000 of the state’s liquor inventory—a massive 62,294 bottles—vanished between January and February 2022. The missing liquor was 20 percent of the state’s entire inventory.
Similarly, city-owned hotels have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, the government-owned Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor lost money every year in the many years it has been open. In 2005, Baltimore’s city council approved a plan to borrow $301 million to construct the hotel, after a consultant said the city would make $39 million from the hotel by 2024, and that it was too good an opportunity to miss. But the hotel has consistently lost money, year after year, including $143.7 million in direct spending by the city of Baltimore to keep the hotel afloat. The Baltimore Banner describes how the hotel became a costly white elephant.
In the past, Zohran Mamdani called for pulling police out of high crime areas. He denounced the New York Police Department [NYPD], writing, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. What we need is to Defund The NYPD.” Mandani also said that “Queer liberation means defund the police.”
Zohran Mamdani called for emptying the jails, because “Violence is an artificial construct.”
