Mamdani’s Government Grocery Stores Won’t Last Long Enough to Put Bodegas Out of Business

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Saturday, August 01, 2026

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced that he was making good on a campaign promise to introduce state-run grocery stores — yes, that dreary Soviet fixture — to the Big Apple. Holding a bunch of bananas (currently a whopping $0.23 a pop at the local midmarket Trader Joe’s), the mayor promised that MamdaniMarts, coming in 2027, will sell meat, seafood, and fresh produce staples at prices 30 percent cheaper than “other retail stores.”

 

Notably missing from the press conference were any details about what that actually means, whether these prices would be calculated vis-à-vis ALDI or Whole Foods, or how they would avoid the uncertainty of price fluctuations while remaining pegged to 30 percent below retail prices.

 

Many on the right (or the merely sane) have responded by pointing out that grocery stores are a low-profit-margin business and that enacting the mayor’s plan, under Econ 101 rules, is liable to undercut and force out those same local mom-and-pop bodegas that New Yorkers love to brag about. And it’s true that socialism, as Milton Friedman famously quipped, could create shortages of sand in Saudi Arabia.

 

But the more likely outcome is that Mamdani’s government grocery stores get caught up in the disorder of New York’s declining state of the commons before they even have the chance to threaten more than a bodega or two in a few-block radius.

 

A realistic short-term prediction is that the stores will become havens for half-criminal resale markets, outright thievery, the homeless, and the mentally ill — that is, generally the same basket of issues that plague so many urban spaces where “discounted and/or free” stuff is on offer. Rather than relieve the very real affordability burden on the law-abiding working class, eliminating minimal barriers to entry, like normal prices and competition, that keep out the most antisocial elements of the city instead will force those workers to share space with the drug-addled, criminal, and dangerous. As surely as blood in the water attracts sharks, handouts of free or deeply discounted goods, in the melee of a populous city like New York, attract the worst kinds of crowds.

 

The importance of these small barriers, and correspondingly, the results of giveaways, can be affirmed all over New York and America’s other urban cores. For example, a “free” public pool in Central Park that opened in 2025 quickly became a hotbed for fights, disorder, and homeless “bathing.” The city has quietly stopped crowing about its success. “Free” gift stunts by companies or livestreamers in the city frequently result in unsafe mob scenes that further degenerate into violence.

 

The NYC ferry is exactly the same price as the subway for repeat customers but is, by comparison, incredibly well-ordered and pleasant. The difference? A human checking tickets at entry, which discourages fare-jumpers. A formalized study in San Francisco recently confirmed the link, finding that anti-fare-jumping gates installed on Bay Area Rapid Transit resulted in dramatic drops in subway litter, vandalism, and crime.

 

Conservatives have pointed out this connection with regard to another Mamdani promise, free buses. The mayor claimed that free buses would reduce assaults on drivers who are attacked when they turn fare-jumpers away. Mamdani avoided that statement’s logical conclusion: Making buses “free” leaves riders sitting next to the very same people who were apt to respond with violence when asked to pay a $3 fare.

 

Then there will be the lines.

 

Queuing was almost a competitive national sport for residents of the Soviet Union, spawning specialized linguistic terms and endless anekdoty — “I assume you are out of fish.” “No, comrade, we are out of meat. The place across the street is out of fish!” Assuming these government grocery stores can even properly wrangle the logistics to supply themselves at all, a 30 percent price cut means that they will quickly find themselves sold out of key discounted goods shortly after delivery. The run on shelves is likely to reward those with the time to burn waiting in line for hours to be first when shipments arrive. Rather than grandmas on fixed incomes, the people with the inclination to wait in daily lines are likely to be those seeking to turn their copious leisure hours into an income stream. The contents of city shipments, after all, could be turned around and resold for profit on card tables on 14th Street and other common spots, where they can compete in the black market with the many stolen goods already on offer.

 

Never say that socialism and entrepreneurship are opposites!

 

Between the iron laws of economics and the disorder, it’s the latter, I predict, that will be the first to fell Mamdani’s 1,000th-time’s-the-charm communist experiment. Government grocery stores, absent DSA no-nos like heavy policing, will quickly become local crime-and-violence hot spots that decent people, even those who could really use the discount, avoid. To present another live demonstration of socialist failures at the regrettable expense of the quality of life of New York City residents, all the right needs to do is sit back and watch.