Kansas City spent $18 million on a government grocery store and ended up with empty shelves and rotting meat.
Now New York's socialist mayor just promised the same experiment – times five – and the people fighting back are not who you'd expect.
The group that just voted to sue Mamdani represents something that should embarrass every Democrat in America.
The Math Nobody in City Hall Will Do
Grocery stores run on about a 2% profit margin.
That's it. Two cents on every dollar – and that's when the store is run by people who actually know what they're doing.
Zohran Mamdani just promised to sell groceries 30% below market price.
Do that math.
https://twitter.com/BottomLineFBN/status/2074631967140720920?s=20
Even if the city somehow hired competent managers – and the New York City government is not exactly known for competence – the stores will lose at least 28 cents on every dollar they sell.
That money has to come from somewhere.
It comes from you.
The city has already set aside $70 million in capital to build five stores.
But that's just the down payment.
Every banana sold at a 30% discount is a banana New York taxpayers are subsidizing in perpetuity.
Mamdani's city is already staring at a $5.4 billion budget gap.
His answer to that budget gap was to spend more money on subsidized groceries.
Every City That Tried This Has the Same Story
The Sun Fresh Market opened on Kansas City's east side with great fanfare.
It was supposed to solve food access in a struggling neighborhood.
By the end, residents were driving past it to shop somewhere else – because the shelves were empty, the produce was rotting, and the meat had expired.
The city kept pumping in emergency cash.
It didn't matter.
The store closed in August 2025 after losing $885,000 a year.
Erie, Kansas tried it too.
The city bought their only grocery store in 2020 to prevent a food desert.
https://twitter.com/wasupscott/status/2084306963135869386?s=20
They ran it at a loss, eventually leased it to a private operator, and when that operator walked away, no one else stepped up.
Baldwin, Florida. Same story.
The city took over a grocery in 2019, struggled to break even, and shut it down in 2024.
Chicago's Mayor Brandon Johnson wanted to try it in 2023.
His administration commissioned a feasibility study, local business groups pushed back hard on the city's lack of grocery expertise, and the plan quietly died.
Chicago – not exactly a city run by free-market conservatives – looked at the evidence and walked away.
Mamdani looked at that same evidence and said yes.
Immigrant Business Owners Are Already Suing
Here is the detail that the mainstream media will bury.
The people declaring legal war on Mamdani's grocery plan are not Wall Street executives.
They are not billionaire CEOs.
The Multicultural Business Coalition – 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Jewish-owned businesses – has voted to sue the city of New York.
These are people who built something from nothing – who opened a bodega or corner market and kept it alive through a pandemic, a crime surge, and years of inflation – and now the city is telling them their competitor is the government.
Their own tax dollars will fund the stores designed to drive them out.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler put it plainly: New York taxpayers will pay $70 million to build government-run grocery stores, then pay subsidies in perpetuity to keep them alive, while funding unfair competition against the legitimate small businesses already serving those neighborhoods.
"One more problem with socialism," Loeffler said – "you eventually run out of other people's money."
GOP City Councilwoman Joann Ariola from Queens said it plainly: for $70 million, the city could just buy a million Costco memberships instead.
This Is How Government Always Breaks Things
New York City took over its transit system from private operators who used to run it profitably.
The MTA now requires billions in taxpayer subsidies just to keep the trains running – a system that costs riders and taxpayers more every single year while delivering less reliable service.
That is the model Mamdani wants to apply to food.
https://twitter.com/MichaelARothman/status/2084243446282465316?s=20
Private grocery stores pay rent, property taxes, insurance, labor, utilities, security, and the full weight of New York's regulatory machine.
Mamdani's stores get property tax exemptions and a blank check from the city treasury.
The marginal private stores – the ones barely hanging on – will close. Others will cancel expansion plans.
The market will thin out.
Then, when taxpayers eventually get tired of the losses, there will be cuts.
Quality will drop.
The stores that were supposed to solve food access problems will start selling exactly what Soviet stores sold: whatever was cheapest to procure, in whatever condition it arrived.
And when those stores finally collapse, New Yorkers won't have a private grocery market left to fall back on – because Mamdani will have already killed it.
The hallmark of socialism is that it breaks things, then uses the wreckage to justify breaking more things.
New York's socialist mayor is following the playbook perfectly.
Sources:
- Peter St. Onge and E.J. Antoni, "Mamdani's city grocery plan could leave taxpayers paying for every banana," Fox News, August 3, 2026.
- "O'Leary slams NYC's $70M grocery plan," Moneywise, July 2026.
- "Mamdani's NYC grocery stores promise 30% savings, economists aren't convinced," Fox News, July 28, 2026.
- "Immigrant business owners declare legal war on Mamdani's taxpayer grocery plan," Washington Examiner, July 29, 2026.
- "Mamdani beware: Government-run grocery stores have historically failed," Washington Examiner, July 30, 2025.
- "The Real Costs of City-Owned Grocery Stores," America First Policy Institute, October 24, 2025.