Mamdani's city-owned grocery stores won't have time to fail before voters must judge his success. Matt Roberts/Shutterstock See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Of all the dubious things about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s government grocery stores, the one that should stand out is how far off in the future they are.
City Hall doesn’t even pretend that the first one, in Hunts Point, will open before late 2027 — and anyone familiar with government projects knows all too well that they always take far longer than initial estimates.
(And cost more, too: Expect the final price tag to exceed not just the $40 million already earmarked to build two markets, but the $70 million for five.)
The second, at East Harlem’s La Marqueta, is advertised as starting in 2029, his re-election year.
In short, they won’t have time to fail before voters must judge his success.
Yet the mayor won’t stop talking about them — this week, he made a big deal about how they’d cut prices 30% on a crucial basket of basic goods.
Of course, having the taxpayers subsidize those goods is unfair competition for real grocers, who operate on narrow profit margins and rightly fear Mamdani’s stores could put them out of business.
One immigrant-led grocer coalition is already suing over this very issue.
Meanwhile, the city’s also talking about “keeping track” of who’s shopping at the Mamdani Marts, to avoid folks turning around and re-selling the goods for their personal profit, etc., and maybe to keep out-of-towners from benefiting.
Does that mean you’ll need to show ID? Or will they have surveillance cameras?
But, again, we won’t see those warts anytime soon — because it’s all still just a happy dream.
Look: Government-run groceries have failed everywhere they’ve ever been tried, including recently in progressive cities.
And New Yorkers with family experience of communist stores, like City Councilman Phil Wong, know that what they most deliver is empty shelves — cheaper goods sell out too fast.
Opening a store really isn’t that hard; the private sector sure doesn’t take two or three years to get it done.
Our prediction: By the time New Yorkers learn that he can’t actually make this idea work, the 2029 election will already be over — and that’s the plan.
