Zohran Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York City who ran on the deeply serious economic platform of “what if groceries were free and also the landlord was in jail,” has finally released the actual details of his city-run grocery store plan. Five locations. One borough. A price tag that looks like somebody mashed the keyboard with their forehead. And a business model that Soviet central planners looked at and said, “yeah, maybe pump the brakes there, comrade.”
This is the moment. This is the part of the movie where the commissar cuts the ribbon on Bodega Number One, the cameras flash, the crowd cheers, and six months later there’s a line around the block for a single onion and the mayor is on TV blaming Walmart for sabotaging the lettuce supply.
We have been waiting for this one.
## The Plan, Such As It Is
Here’s what Mamdani actually proposed, according to the receipts that dropped on April 15th. Five city-owned grocery stores. One per borough. Run by the city government — the same city government that cannot keep a subway car free of standing water or process a building permit in under eight months. These stores will supposedly undercut private grocers on price, pay workers union wages, stock “affordable” and “ethically sourced” products, and operate at prices so low they’ll make ShopRite weep.
How much will it cost? Great question. The city’s own budget analysts looked at the numbers, squinted, looked again, and then quietly admitted that the figures Mamdani released don’t come close to penciling out. Not even in the same zip code as penciling out. The projected operating costs are a fraction of what it actually takes to run a grocery store in New York City — where rent is insane, labor is expensive, spoilage is brutal, and margins in the private sector are already razor-thin.
Actual grocery chains run on profit margins of about 1 to 3 percent. One to three percent. That’s what people who have done this for a hundred years, with massive supply chains and distribution networks and economies of scale, manage to squeeze out. And Mamdani looked at that industry and said, “I can do it cheaper, with union wages, city bureaucracy, and no experience whatsoever.”
Sure you can, buddy.
## The Soviet Bread Line Jokes Just Write Themselves
Look, we weren’t going to do the Soviet bread line jokes. We really weren’t. But then Mamdani went and named his initiative in a way that made them mandatory. Five stores. Government-run. Price-controlled. Stocked by bureaucrats. Staffed by union labor hired through city channels. Supplied through contracts awarded by a municipal government that hands out contracts the way drunk uncles hand out Christmas money.
Any questions on how this ends?
Here’s how it ends. Month one: grand opening, ribbon cutting, glowing pieces in the New York Times about “reimagining food access.” Month three: shelves start looking a little thin. Month six: the “ethically sourced” tomatoes cost $8 a pound because the city’s supply chain is three guys named Vinny who figured out they had a captive customer. Month nine: a story breaks that the store manager is the mayor’s cousin’s girlfriend’s brother and he’s been ordering $40,000 worth of kombucha nobody buys. Month twelve: the stores are losing money hand over fist, Mamdani blames “corporate sabotage,” and announces a bailout funded by — guess who — the taxpayers who already paid for the stores to exist in the first place.
We’ve seen this movie. We’ve seen it in Venezuela. We’ve seen it in Cuba. We’ve seen it in every single socialist experiment in human history. You can’t cheat the math. You can pretend you’re cheating the math. You can put out glossy press releases claiming you’re cheating the math. But at the end of the day, running a grocery store costs what it costs, and if you try to run one below cost, you go broke. It’s not complicated. A twelve-year-old with a lemonade stand gets this.
## The Part Where It Gets Funnier
Here’s the best part. The five stores are supposed to “demonstrate” that government-run grocery works, which will then justify expanding the program to dozens more. It’s a pilot program. A proof of concept. Except the proof of concept is already failing on paper — the math doesn’t work — and they haven’t even opened a single location yet.
Imagine being so committed to an idea that you can’t even fake the numbers on the brochure. Imagine the math being so catastrophically bad that your own budget office, staffed by people you hired, is leaking to reporters that the plan is a fiscal car wreck before the first cart gets rolled onto the floor.
And yet here we are. The mayor of the largest city in America, with a budget bigger than most countries, has decided that what the people of New York need — the people who are fleeing to Florida at record rates, the people who can’t afford rent, the people whose small businesses are being taxed into the grave — is for the government to go into direct competition with the corner bodega. Because apparently the problem with New York groceries isn’t the $19 minimum wage, the insane rent, the crime that makes deliveries unsafe, the shoplifting that nobody prosecutes, or the compliance paperwork that crushes small operators. No. The problem is that nobody has tried giving the guy who runs the DMV a stock of bananas.
That’s going to fix it. That’s the plan.
## What This Actually Tells Us
Here’s the real lesson, and it’s not about groceries. Mamdani doesn’t care if these stores work. He never did. The stores are a symbol. The stores are a message. The message is: the government should own things. The government should compete with private business. The government should set prices. The government should decide what you eat, how much you pay, and who gets to sell it to you. The stores losing money isn’t a bug. It’s the feature. Because losing money means more taxes, more subsidies, more government, more control.
This is how it always goes. They don’t lose because they’re incompetent. They lose because losing is the plan. And once they’ve lost enough, they come back and demand more power to fix the losing they caused.
New Yorkers voted for this. They knew who he was. They knew what he said he’d do. He said he’d open government grocery stores, and here we are, opening government grocery stores. You can’t say you weren’t warned. You can only watch it happen, and try not to laugh too loud when the shelves go bare, because laughing is probably going to be illegal by year two.
Buckle up, New York. The bread line is forming on aisle three.
