Of all New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani&#x27;s campaign promises, his plan for government-subsidized grocery stores has resulted in the strongest, and sometimes strangest, ire. Critics have called it bad policy, bad business, and even the tipping point on our slide towards Venezuelan socialist oblivion, oh no!<br><br>Today on the show, we have one of the experts who consulted with the mayor on his grocery plan: Errol Schweizer, grocery consultant, host of the Grocery Nerds podcast, and writer at the The Checkout Grocery Update newsletter. Errol argues that far from an untested policy, many Americans already love government-run grocery stores; they just don&#x27;t realize it. Errol also dismantles much of the criticism the pilot program has received as we discuss the logistics of scale and how the private sector will actually run the stores. Among many things, we get into how the subsidies will work, grocery policy at large, and get a very frank assessment of what to make of the criticism coming from think tanks like The Manhattan Institute.

Mamdani Marts Vs. Big Grocery

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During the campaign last year for New York City Mayor, Zora Mandani had a bunch of different ideas. And one of the most intriguing ones was that he was going to initiate a pilot program of five public-owned grocery stores. A network of municipal-run grocery stores, one in each borough, so five in total, would cost the city $60 million.

The city is already set to spend more than $140 million subsidizing corporate supermarket chains without any guarantee of affordability from that subsidy. This is all part of his approach to affordability. Food is expensive. It's a big part of the affordability agenda. And it drew a huge amount of skepticism and scorn and derision and interest. Last week of July, he announced this plan to actually implement.

So we are now in the implementing stage of the campaign promise. And this idea isn't isolated to New York City. There have been cities across the country, mostly in rural areas, where the food system has just collapsed and there was no grocery store to speak of at all. There are places in Kansas, places in Florida, places in Illinois, where they have done public grocery stores. And they've had middling success with those.

But there's also another really big model for this. And it's the military commissary system, which subsidizes the cost of groceries on military bases. And it's just much, much cheaper to get your food there.

And, you know, this Mamdani idea has met a storm of criticism from libertarians, from his enemies on the right. This is so pie in the sky. This is so idealistic. It's so stupid that you're just going to have cheaper groceries with 30 percent discounts on critical goods. The problem is that he's trying to create something that's not viable.

Mamdani Marts Vs. Big Grocery

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Mamdani Marts Vs. Big Grocery

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.