Mamdani’s Not So Super Markets

By John Gustavsson

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

At a July 27 press conference, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally unveiled additional details of his city-owned grocery stores scheme. Prices on all meat, seafood, fresh produce, and 20 other “essential items” such as bread and cheese will be set 30 percent lower than private competitors’, with prices updated monthly. With grocery prices having soared since the pandemic, enthusiasm is understandable — though ultimately misguided.

 

Neither the press conference nor the “vision plan” provided by the city contained any measures to prevent hoarding and reselling, including commercial reselling. Food banks usually deal with this by limiting who can purchase food and the amount each client can purchase. At the five ZohranMarts, however, everyone will be free to enter and shop to their hearts’ delight.

 

And it really means everyone, including non–New Yorkers, presumably because requiring strong proofs of identity or residency (beyond something like a library card, the only measure that’s been discussed) is anathema to Mamdani’s ideology. After all, if such documents were required to enter a grocery store, they may soon — God forbid! — be required to vote.

 

Although New Yorkers pay more for their groceries than the residents of almost any other city in America, the difference is not as big as one may think, and prices are even higher in several other major cities in coastal states, including San Francisco and Portland on the West Coast, and Charleston on the East. At a 30 percent discount, a shopping trip becomes a profitable endeavor not just for people living in nearby Yonkers, but also those living out of state in major cities like Newark and Philadelphia.

 

With unauthorized reselling already a problem for food banks and SNAP benefits, there is no reason to think it won’t be even more of a problem in grocery stores that are open to everyone.

 

The same, of course, goes for shoplifting. While the stores will be publicly funded, they will be managed by private operators whose losses will be reimbursed by taxpayers in the form of “targeted investment.” Even though these operators will be responsible for “managing crime and loss prevention,” it is hard to see any seller taking serious measures to combat it when ultimately, the city will be on the hook for losses, and that’s on top of the already strong litigation threat all stores face when cracking down on shoplifting. If the city attempts to push back, the operator can always threaten to shut the place or leave the ZohranMart shelves empty — which would be devastating to Mamdani’s reputation and political prospects.

 

Any store that becomes a free-for-all for shoplifting will also attract a criminal clientele that could very well make the areas surrounding the stores less safe.

 

Though private operators won’t have an incentive to stop shoplifting, they will have an incentive to upsell customers on the non-subsidized items they will also be carrying. While stores will be forbidden from carrying alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets, and hot prepared food, nothing prevents them from carrying “regular” snacks, soft drinks, household items, and similar things. We should expect these items to be aggressively marketed, with many customers ending up spending their “savings” on nonsubsidized products. Some customers may be deceived by the general perception of the stores into buying these products, wrongly thinking that they, too, are a bargain.

 

Which brings us to the most fundamental error behind not just city-owned grocery stores, but all left-wing policies aimed at combating “food deserts,” of which New York City has none, and poor nutrition: The problem has never been the supply, but the demand.

 

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell summed up the reason why individuals with low incomes tend to have terrible diets:

 

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.

 

And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. . . . When you are unemployed . . . you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

 

A stated goal of the city-owned grocery stores is to combat food deserts and improve nutrition. But, as Orwell notes, the problem is not that poor people don’t have access to or are priced out of nutritious food — like brown bread and raw carrots — but rather that they don’t want much of that food (not that they are necessarily alone in that). If anything, giving them “regular” grocery items at a lower cost frees up more money to be used for indulgences, whether it be cookies and chips bought at the ZohranMart, or cigarettes and liquor bought next door.

 

Worse, even if Mamdani could somehow force New Yorkers to stop eating their feelings, behavioral research on “addiction transfer” suggests that those who eat to cheer themselves up would simply find another, often worse, coping outlet. Or they will just become more dissatisfied with life in general, which is never good when you’re the incumbent. There is a reason why the Soviet Union kept the vodka flowing even as other goods were missing from the shelves, and why Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign caused him so much grief.

 

Far from a public service, the city-owned grocery stores are perfectly designed to transfer wealth from the public into private pockets: more specifically, into those of resellers, shoplifters, and opportunistic operators, and, of course, the bureaucrats paid to supervise this project. While Mamdani will pay anything to keep shelves stocked, New Yorkers will soon find themselves paying what they save — and more — on groceries through their tax bills. As the old economics saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch.