I feel many Democrats have been conflating "Newsom's a bad bet for the general election" with "Newsom's a bad bet to win the nomination." First is true IMHO. The second? He's got huge name recognition and might well be the favorite. IOW a weak nominee might well be the single likeliest outcome for the 2028 primaries. Mind you I wouldn't really mind Newsom being POTUS. Like me he's a coastal liberal. And he's a pretty good communicator. He'd be be an infinite improvement over Trump (duh). But does Newsom *maximize* our chances of beating JD Vance? Never say never, but it's hard to see how that's so.
I supported Biden last time but it turned out to be a mistake in the long run—his strategy of moderation and deliverism failed and his legacy is probably almost as bad as Bush’s. Next time Democrats need to pick someone who is not only going to win but who is going to be willing to systematically destroy the Republican power base just like Trump is doing to the Democrats. He doesn’t need to go as far as Trump literally throwing people in jail for writing op-eds in their student newspaper but they need to be willing to do things like DOGE all Republicans out of the government, condition any regulatory approvals for Fox News on ideological changes like Trump did to Paramount, etc. Newsom seems slimy and I don’t agree with him on everything but from his leadership in counter-gerrymandering seems like the person most likely to do this.
You can't do any of that unless you win. Not saying Newsom cannot win—2028 is a long way off and for all we know national conditions will be so dire Ilhan Omar could win in a landslide. Maybe!
But I'll cop to being worried Newsom is sub-optimal in terms of winning at least 270 electoral votes. Electability for me is priority #1.
Read a NY times piece where a homeless man had his tent thrown into the trash twice. He was a Trump voter. Would continue to be a Trump voter because Trump wants to create clean and beautiful cities environments. There’s a lot to unpack there.
“Trump voter gets screwed by Trump” seems like a theme we hear about a lot. Still I wonder if it’s just a couple anecdotal stories to make liberals feel better or if that actually happens a meaningful number of times.
I’d prefer democrats legally managed/solved problems in democratic cities: housing, mental health, crime as opposed to needing a thug in power who builds concentration camps and sends in the national guard.
I think maybe we're going to just have to use the Friday thread, which is a bummer, because then you have to sort by "new," and I think you miss things that way.
I know you’re not disagreeing, I think we’re on the same (missing) page, but we don’t need anything—no link, no story, no work, just a Saturday thread please so we can avoid this problem you described!
Seeing the online backlash this week to Mr. Beast donating money to help build wells in Africa and a couple of Gazans coming to the US for medical treatment, I’m afraid raising the salience of this issue could make it worse…
Egypt is taking in Sudanese refugees. It does not want to take in Gazans. It would be useful to understand why? One possible explanation is that Palestinian refugees have regularly formed armed groups that come into conflict with their host governments (e.g., Black September, Lebanon, or welcoming Safdam’s invasion of Kuwait.)
Read the article. They get 45 day visit permits , then they can be sorted and have no legal protections. Egypt isn’t taking them in, a private company is extorting their money to get them tourist visas of limited time.
Alleged to be secretly arming one side is very different from being the active participant. Even if the UAE and Russia didn’t exist, the RSF and SAF would probably still be fighting. By contrast Israel could just stop oppressing the Palestinians any time it wants.
Based on the news coming out of the recent summit in Alaska, I suggest a new tagline for Democrats. Trump is for Putin, not for you. Amazing how deferential Trump continues to be to a second-rate power like Russia.
Whoever posted here about Denver just not even trying to pretend to enforce the ‘no standing’ rule at the airport curb… you’re completely right! Not only do drivers not even pretend that “they’re just a minute, they walk slowly, they’re right there at the door”, the traffic cop(?) didn’t even pretend to encourage people clearly sitting for a few minutes to move on.
I haven't been following the DC National Guard thing very closely. But it clicked for me just now that while the stated reasons for doing so make as much sense as most of the other things Trump does (very little), "militarize and assume direct control of law enforcement in the national capital" is definitely something somebody would do if they were planning on, uh, abruptly and drastically reorganizing national power structures. Or if they suspected somebody else was about to do so, I suppose.
In other global warming new re: ticks -- apparently alpha-gal syndrome (tick-induced allergy to re meat and dairy) is spurring the adoption of vegan food in Martha's Vineyard.
Oh no, the best part is the researchers making the case that alpha-gal should be deliberately introduced into the population to correct the moral character of meat eaters.
I saw this, didn't read it, and still brought it up with multiple friends who are into hiking. The easy coast is scary! Apparently getting worse on the west coast too.
Municipal grocery stores are much more operationally viable than most people here think.
This is largely because they have a few major cost structure advantages over most small grocers: lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven), economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins), potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods. And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior. (The lack of these is the biggest problem by far for SOEs in countries whose economies are throughly centrally planned).
Now, some of these benefits would probably be offset by political constraints on the stores’ operations (eg: some of the EBIT edge would be offset by higher labor costs, because grocery store staffers would likely be public sector union members), and they probably wouldn’t be a significant improvement high-end stores with already-optimized capital and cost structures (Trader Joe’s is the best NYC example). However, in less well-served neighborhoods, it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas.
I’m not sure if this is actually a good idea— especially because if the municipal stores get too big relative to the rest of the grocery ecosystem, they could get pretty distortionary. But it also seems like they might be much less of an obvious disaster than a lot of people here think.
This discussion feels like Schrodinger’s grocery stores: simultaneously so crappy they will fail and so good they will drive all the private stores out of business.
I wanna do a break down response to really target your argument accurately:
“lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven)”
-grocery stores already only put up margins of like 1-4%, so the income tax paid from the sale of every good is really negligible. I actually don’t know how different government access to capital would be from commercial operations; I would be interested to see.
“economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins)”
-a municipality would have a substantially smaller operation than any of the massive grocery chains. Not sure how they could benefit from economies of scale compared to the existing operations that already do in a big way
“potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods”
-police cost more than joe-shmo security guard so that’s a higher input cost! If theft is such a drag on grocery store costs, then the easier policy seems to be simply putting more cops in commercial stores.
“And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior”
-grocery stores already do this
In sum, I just don’t see any value-add by a state run grocery store. The grocery business is hard, and margins are already very low. Given inexperience, higher government wage costs, no economy of scale (to start), more onerous government procurement rules, and competitive prices from the existing grocery stores, the state owned store would just have to run at a loss in order to provide people with lower cost groceries. In that way, it’s just an inefficient transfer payment to the shoppers of the store. Bad, wasteful policy imo
Could the city have lower operating costs by doing no paid sales or marketing and having synergies in administration, allowing it to sell for lower gross margins than 22%? Maybe or maybe not, but doesn’t seem obviously impossible.
1: You need to think carefully about the difference between gross, EBIT, and overall margins here— “1-4% margin” is generally *after* covering labor, capital costs, and taxes. You also need to think about the difference between national chains and the sort of shitty bodega that’s the marginal grocery store in a typical NYC food desert neighborhood— the latter has to borrow at very high interest rates
2: Again, your comparison needs to be with the shitty independent bodega, not Trader Joe’s, Target, or Costco— if you think those are what this is intended to replace or supplement, your understanding of NYC’s retail landscape is deficient.
3: The city already pays for police, and it’s easier to build in infrastructure overlap in real estate that you control yourself. FWIW, I do think that basing cops on
4: Private grocery stores do already do this, this point was an explanation of why you shouldn’t have a strong prior that the municipal grocery stores would look like the Venezuelan or Soviet grocery stores that always get trotted out in the hysterical arguments about this stuff; those stores’ biggest problem is that they’re operating in an environment where the market is no longer giving them real information about how to allocate resources; a non-universal municipal store would not be operating in this sort of post-Hayekian information environment
Re: your final summation: your core problem is that you don’t understand NYC’s distinctive business environment and imagine that the municipal outlets would be primarily competing with well-operated large chain stores with strong economies of scale and low cost of capital. But in the typical underserved NYC area, it’s relatively inconvenient for residents to get to one of those big chain grocers and they need to go to a shitty independent bodega that generally has no economies of scale, very high costs of capital, and very high prices!
Do I think this is an optimal use of public funds? Probably not. But could it operate viably at relatively low net cost to the city, perceptibly ease cost of living pressures in a lot of neighborhoods, and be well-received by the public? I think that’s quite possible.
The budget for this is a rounding error, and likewise any effects good or bad.
The bigger criticism, I think, and this applies to other candidates for other offices, but since we are talking NYC here we can narrow our focus.
There's a quote from President Clinton from around 2008, in the context of presidential races, but the idea applies more widely.
"I think that any candidate for president has a three-fold responsibility. Number one, you have a responsibility to demonstrate that you have the capacity to be president... Number two, you have a responsibility to lay out for the American people what you believe the great challenges and great opportunities are. And number three, you have to tell them specifically what you're going to do about it."
See the second and third in particular.
And later "Because people, when they tune in, they have a limited amount of time. And what they want to know is, is this person strong enough to be president? Does this person see the world I'm living in? And does this person have some answers that I think will work?"
This is the key: have you identified the big issues, and do you use the limited bandwidth that voters have to get that across?
"Food deserts" are not in the top 100 most important issues or opportunities. Voters tell us what the issues are. There is detailed survey and analytic data.
And what are these issues?
Public safety, in particular subway safety at night (80% report feeling unsafe)
Housing affordability (75% residents say this is the #1 reason they consider leaving the city)
High commercial real estate vacancies
A good public servant would be laser focused on these. Particularly city officials and mayors. It is not a job for proving ideology or having a grand vision for how society ought to work.
Bloomberg rezoned 40% of NYC, got Cornell to setup a campus here, historic low crime, school reform. That is the scale at which the Mayor needs to operate. Municipal grocery stores and stronger rent control show the poverty of ideas.
If he wins, I wish him well and hope he focuses on issues that matter.
Holding charisma and ability to get press coverage constant, he could have gotten the buzz from big important problems. We can't be sure about counterfactuals, and I'm not a candidate or political consultant, but just as a voter in NYC I want the mayor candidates to demonstrate they know what the big challenges are.
We can't know the counterfactuals, but Mamdani is a random state assemblyman who came out of nowhere to win handily in a crowded field. We can't know the counterfactuals if the Kansas City Chiefs didn't trade up for Patrick Mahomes but uhhhh my hunch is that they made the right call.
To be fair, the grocery stores thing is much higher salience in what Mamdani’s detractors say about him than it is in his own messaging,which is very heavily focused on the housing issue (with a general-public messaging track focused on the easy to understand and popular if economically questionable stabilized unit rent freeze, and a high-information actor messaging track focused on permitting reform and rezoning for higher density— the latter set of policies will do all of the actual work on long-term affordability, of course, but the former was probably necessary to build the sort of coalition that can tell the homevoters to get fucked and enact it.)
Or maybe a rent freeze is his long-term solution and permitting reform and higher zoning density are things he had to pretend to care about to build a big enough coalition for the primary.
That version seems grounded in a backwards conception of the political bases for both of these things? The rent freeze polls at something like 70% approval in NYC, it was high-salience throughout the campaign, and it’s simple enough that low-engagement normies can easily understand it. Zoning and permitting reform are complicated, the people who very actively want them are mostly a small group of weird nerds (including me), and the candidate who went most all in on them got 1% in the primary (RIP to my top-ranked candidate Zellnor Myrie).
I suspect that Zohran’s interest in YIMBY policy ideas is driven by the typical mechanism that the movement has used to succeed— persuasion of elite political actors, not mass politics. (The YIMBY movement is very effective and this isn’t a knock on it; being able to convince politicians of all different ideological stripes that your policy suggestion would help them deal with core problems is very powerful, but it’s important to understand how it actually works.)
The problem with Mandami's city-owned grocery stores is they will be hives of addicts, schizophrenics, and kleptomaniacs because employees won't be allowed to kick anyone out and police won't be allowed to intervene.
I have no faith that Mandami will be able to control the activists he staffs his administration with, in the same way Biden couldn't control the activists he staffed the White House with.
I find it virtually impossible to imagine that municipal grocery stores will have anything even approximating the procedural and managerial efficiencies of commercial grocery stores. Why haggled with suppliers when you're spending other people's money on their goods and services (and as a public sector union member you may not face any credible threats of discipline for screwing up.)
I think this take is far too cynical about public sector employees? In my personal observation, government workers aren’t meaningfully less conscientious than their analogous-qualification private sector counterparts (and indeed, often are more so because they have a stronger sense of mission.)
I don't thinknit is. I am an acquisition coded employee for the DoD. I don't buy entire weapons platforms but I am responsible for the engineering responsibilities tied to buying industrial equipment. The issues we face aren't that we all don't care because it's "someone else's money" its that the inputs into spending decisions consist of things almost entirely unrelated to "good business decisions." We pay more for everything, wait longer to get it, spend ungodly numbers of man hours on the internal contracting paper work to ensure we aren't being unfair, not putting this equipment on an ancient native American burial site, have passed 87 million environmental revies, make sure we offer to spend 10% more if we can get it from a small business owned by a vet/woman/minority etc.
For reference it took 3 years to get a contracting vehicle created to buy stock powders for one of our processes. These powders are advertised online by the manufacturer for about 40% of what we pay to get them. We dont buy from the manufacturer. We buy from a minority/vet/woman owned small business that is effectively drop shipping them to us. The "small business" in question is basically some vet/minority/woman that is well connected or knows how to game the system with a P.O. box and 1 friend on the payroll. They get to charge these markup because they have thier business status and produce stacks of paperwork to CYA the government on all the environmental, burial grounds, etc type things.
It isn't even clear we are actually obligated to do things like this. The laws get "interpreted" by finance/contracting people who likely have no true understanding of the laws and are just afraid of "going to jail" (nobody ever actually goes to jail) if they don't do the bumble things.
It is indeed more difficult, but even with this constraint, the average public worker is not demonstrably actually worse at their job or less conscientious than the average private sector worker.
I think it was one of the Reason staff who tweeted something when Mamdani first announced the grocery store policy like, "Mamdani vows to use state power to bankrupt minority-owned small businesses."
This all seems predicated on stealing a base with the assumption that private grocers are small. It wouldn't shock me if Target (with their cute little neighborhood-size stores that they at least started testing a decade ago) has a larger operating budget than New York City government.
Does this argument potentially torpedo the family-owned corner bodega? Sure, but I don't give two hoots about the family corner bodega.
I'll admit to mixed feelings about Trump's Washington, DC law enforcement theatrics...
My son just started a job in DC, and I was there last week helping him move into his new place, a rented house shared with several other new grads in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that struck me as borderline sketchy, but gentrifying. Troops on the streets has a scary, authoritarian vibe, but if they clear out some of the creepy people (including the homeless guy sleeping in front of my son's house) from the area, I won't be too unhappy.
I owned a place in CH 2002-2004, when it was really starting to gentrify. Interesting times. Illegal gambling nextdoor, along with the (reportedly transexual) whoreshouse. Had to remove people from my neighbor's porch 2X because they went to the wrong door (looking for aforementioned brothel). People doing drugs in the basement stoop. Dice game next to the ghetto Chinese place. Sadly it never quite seemed to achieve full take off -- imagine too much public/low income housing remains, along with the concomitant crews. But sold and never really went back. Almost bought a beautiful Wardman but a neighbor mentioned how one of the young gentlemen in the neighborhhod had put a gun to her head the previous week, so new wife and I decided we just did not want to deal. Instead moved to SE....only one killing near our house, and it was the cross street!
Not sure what Trump is doing, but in principle -- DC needs lots more law enforcement, focused on the very obvious areas where the majority of the criminals are, and the laws need to be changed to stop allowing a revolving door for young criminals (all criminals). And yes the culture of the black community needs to change etc. etc., but in the absence of some kind of great awakening, crush crime. Actually worked before, and it can work again, just need to accept reality of what that will mean.
I can't remember who said it, but a few months ago I saw someone comment that David Frum's dictum about fascism and immigration applied to homelessness and other urban "social disorder" phenomena too.
If we could just send everyone in city government (or determining city related policies) to Europe to meet with their peers for a week the US would be in much better shape soon.
Just gotta make sure they don't talk to them about anything related to business or regulation.
I feel many Democrats have been conflating "Newsom's a bad bet for the general election" with "Newsom's a bad bet to win the nomination." First is true IMHO. The second? He's got huge name recognition and might well be the favorite. IOW a weak nominee might well be the single likeliest outcome for the 2028 primaries. Mind you I wouldn't really mind Newsom being POTUS. Like me he's a coastal liberal. And he's a pretty good communicator. He'd be be an infinite improvement over Trump (duh). But does Newsom *maximize* our chances of beating JD Vance? Never say never, but it's hard to see how that's so.
I supported Biden last time but it turned out to be a mistake in the long run—his strategy of moderation and deliverism failed and his legacy is probably almost as bad as Bush’s. Next time Democrats need to pick someone who is not only going to win but who is going to be willing to systematically destroy the Republican power base just like Trump is doing to the Democrats. He doesn’t need to go as far as Trump literally throwing people in jail for writing op-eds in their student newspaper but they need to be willing to do things like DOGE all Republicans out of the government, condition any regulatory approvals for Fox News on ideological changes like Trump did to Paramount, etc. Newsom seems slimy and I don’t agree with him on everything but from his leadership in counter-gerrymandering seems like the person most likely to do this.
You can't do any of that unless you win. Not saying Newsom cannot win—2028 is a long way off and for all we know national conditions will be so dire Ilhan Omar could win in a landslide. Maybe!
But I'll cop to being worried Newsom is sub-optimal in terms of winning at least 270 electoral votes. Electability for me is priority #1.
I sadly have to say that I am on board with that project of principled retaliation.
Read a NY times piece where a homeless man had his tent thrown into the trash twice. He was a Trump voter. Would continue to be a Trump voter because Trump wants to create clean and beautiful cities environments. There’s a lot to unpack there.
I refuse to believe that a homeless man has actually voted, let alone for Trump...
Studies show that 10% vote in federal elections so it’s entirely possible
“Trump voter gets screwed by Trump” seems like a theme we hear about a lot. Still I wonder if it’s just a couple anecdotal stories to make liberals feel better or if that actually happens a meaningful number of times.
Or the voter actually wants cleaner streets, which he knows includes him, and votes for Trump because he knows democrats have failed him.
Well, hope he enjoys whatever concentration camp Trump puts him in.
I’d prefer democrats legally managed/solved problems in democratic cities: housing, mental health, crime as opposed to needing a thug in power who builds concentration camps and sends in the national guard.
Can someone at SB *please* bring back the Saturday thread? Thanks!
At the very least, I’d be interested to know the decision behind not having the Saturday thread.
I think maybe we're going to just have to use the Friday thread, which is a bummer, because then you have to sort by "new," and I think you miss things that way.
😕
I know you’re not disagreeing, I think we’re on the same (missing) page, but we don’t need anything—no link, no story, no work, just a Saturday thread please so we can avoid this problem you described!
Exactly! Just an open post saying "Have at it, kids."
Your regular reminder on the toll of the civil war in Sudan: 4 million refugees. https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-four-million-people-fled-155904383.html
It’s really striking that no one actually wants to talk about Sudan, except as a way to talk about Israel/Palestine.
Seeing the online backlash this week to Mr. Beast donating money to help build wells in Africa and a couple of Gazans coming to the US for medical treatment, I’m afraid raising the salience of this issue could make it worse…
Egypt is taking in Sudanese refugees. It does not want to take in Gazans. It would be useful to understand why? One possible explanation is that Palestinian refugees have regularly formed armed groups that come into conflict with their host governments (e.g., Black September, Lebanon, or welcoming Safdam’s invasion of Kuwait.)
Egypt has taken over 100,000 Gazans, 5% of the prewar population: https://www.972mag.com/gazans-egypt-legal-limbo-exile/
Read the article. They get 45 day visit permits , then they can be sorted and have no legal protections. Egypt isn’t taking them in, a private company is extorting their money to get them tourist visas of limited time.
If Israel can't be blamed, it isn't a story worth discussing.
The situation in Gaza is much worse than anywhere else. There’s been a 35-year drop in life expectancy compared to only 10 for the peak of the Syrian Civil War. https://original.antiwar.com/Noah_Carl/2025/08/12/bret-stephens-is-wrong-about-mortality-in-gaza/. Only the Rwandan genocide comes close: https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2025/08/06/how-much-of-gaza-is-left-standing. And it does matter that a rich and powerful country that we suppose should be civilized is doing it.
You mean the UAE in Sudan? Or Russia?
Alleged to be secretly arming one side is very different from being the active participant. Even if the UAE and Russia didn’t exist, the RSF and SAF would probably still be fighting. By contrast Israel could just stop oppressing the Palestinians any time it wants.
Based on the news coming out of the recent summit in Alaska, I suggest a new tagline for Democrats. Trump is for Putin, not for you. Amazing how deferential Trump continues to be to a second-rate power like Russia.
Also the whole I wouldn’t have gone to war if you were in power but now you are in power I won’t even stop fighting for a day.
I didn't know I wanted this. Thanks.
When is the column on how democrats have no strategy to help the middle/working class except we are not Trump.
So , I suppose it is time for sanctions on Russia since we didn’t get a deal. Time to pass that bill in Congress.
Whoever posted here about Denver just not even trying to pretend to enforce the ‘no standing’ rule at the airport curb… you’re completely right! Not only do drivers not even pretend that “they’re just a minute, they walk slowly, they’re right there at the door”, the traffic cop(?) didn’t even pretend to encourage people clearly sitting for a few minutes to move on.
I haven't been following the DC National Guard thing very closely. But it clicked for me just now that while the stated reasons for doing so make as much sense as most of the other things Trump does (very little), "militarize and assume direct control of law enforcement in the national capital" is definitely something somebody would do if they were planning on, uh, abruptly and drastically reorganizing national power structures. Or if they suspected somebody else was about to do so, I suppose.
Am I reading too much into this?
It's really funny* that Trump just kind of sucks at closing deals.
*or perhaps as Ralph would say "Funny, but not haha funny"
In other global warming new re: ticks -- apparently alpha-gal syndrome (tick-induced allergy to re meat and dairy) is spurring the adoption of vegan food in Martha's Vineyard.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/dining/marthas-vineyard-alpha-gal-tick-bites.html
Oh no, the best part is the researchers making the case that alpha-gal should be deliberately introduced into the population to correct the moral character of meat eaters.
i don't believe that's anywhere in the linked article.
It's not. https://open.substack.com/pub/michelleperromd337477/p/bioengineered-ticks-alpha-gal-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ki68r
I saw this, didn't read it, and still brought it up with multiple friends who are into hiking. The easy coast is scary! Apparently getting worse on the west coast too.
We should be pouring money into fixing this.
Ticks delenda sunt
I approve of making a weekly links round-up. Thanks!
Trump has agreed to swap the Donbas for the Dumbass Steven Seagal since both are similar in size.
Also, a provocative/devil’s advocate-y argument:
Municipal grocery stores are much more operationally viable than most people here think.
This is largely because they have a few major cost structure advantages over most small grocers: lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven), economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins), potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods. And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior. (The lack of these is the biggest problem by far for SOEs in countries whose economies are throughly centrally planned).
Now, some of these benefits would probably be offset by political constraints on the stores’ operations (eg: some of the EBIT edge would be offset by higher labor costs, because grocery store staffers would likely be public sector union members), and they probably wouldn’t be a significant improvement high-end stores with already-optimized capital and cost structures (Trader Joe’s is the best NYC example). However, in less well-served neighborhoods, it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas.
I’m not sure if this is actually a good idea— especially because if the municipal stores get too big relative to the rest of the grocery ecosystem, they could get pretty distortionary. But it also seems like they might be much less of an obvious disaster than a lot of people here think.
Except when actually tried they don't work
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/07/18/city-owned-grocery-stores-crime-funding/
One particular instance of the policy in a very different environment didn’t work, yes. Weak Bayesian evidence against, but not really a slam dunk.
This discussion feels like Schrodinger’s grocery stores: simultaneously so crappy they will fail and so good they will drive all the private stores out of business.
It probably just mostly depends on how competent the people running them are.
I wanna do a break down response to really target your argument accurately:
“lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven)”
-grocery stores already only put up margins of like 1-4%, so the income tax paid from the sale of every good is really negligible. I actually don’t know how different government access to capital would be from commercial operations; I would be interested to see.
“economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins)”
-a municipality would have a substantially smaller operation than any of the massive grocery chains. Not sure how they could benefit from economies of scale compared to the existing operations that already do in a big way
“potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods”
-police cost more than joe-shmo security guard so that’s a higher input cost! If theft is such a drag on grocery store costs, then the easier policy seems to be simply putting more cops in commercial stores.
“And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior”
-grocery stores already do this
In sum, I just don’t see any value-add by a state run grocery store. The grocery business is hard, and margins are already very low. Given inexperience, higher government wage costs, no economy of scale (to start), more onerous government procurement rules, and competitive prices from the existing grocery stores, the state owned store would just have to run at a loss in order to provide people with lower cost groceries. In that way, it’s just an inefficient transfer payment to the shoppers of the store. Bad, wasteful policy imo
Grocery store gross margins appear to be over 22%: https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios.php?ind=1305. So 20% is going to marketing, sales, administration, etc.
Could the city have lower operating costs by doing no paid sales or marketing and having synergies in administration, allowing it to sell for lower gross margins than 22%? Maybe or maybe not, but doesn’t seem obviously impossible.
Point by point:
1: You need to think carefully about the difference between gross, EBIT, and overall margins here— “1-4% margin” is generally *after* covering labor, capital costs, and taxes. You also need to think about the difference between national chains and the sort of shitty bodega that’s the marginal grocery store in a typical NYC food desert neighborhood— the latter has to borrow at very high interest rates
2: Again, your comparison needs to be with the shitty independent bodega, not Trader Joe’s, Target, or Costco— if you think those are what this is intended to replace or supplement, your understanding of NYC’s retail landscape is deficient.
3: The city already pays for police, and it’s easier to build in infrastructure overlap in real estate that you control yourself. FWIW, I do think that basing cops on
4: Private grocery stores do already do this, this point was an explanation of why you shouldn’t have a strong prior that the municipal grocery stores would look like the Venezuelan or Soviet grocery stores that always get trotted out in the hysterical arguments about this stuff; those stores’ biggest problem is that they’re operating in an environment where the market is no longer giving them real information about how to allocate resources; a non-universal municipal store would not be operating in this sort of post-Hayekian information environment
Re: your final summation: your core problem is that you don’t understand NYC’s distinctive business environment and imagine that the municipal outlets would be primarily competing with well-operated large chain stores with strong economies of scale and low cost of capital. But in the typical underserved NYC area, it’s relatively inconvenient for residents to get to one of those big chain grocers and they need to go to a shitty independent bodega that generally has no economies of scale, very high costs of capital, and very high prices!
Do I think this is an optimal use of public funds? Probably not. But could it operate viably at relatively low net cost to the city, perceptibly ease cost of living pressures in a lot of neighborhoods, and be well-received by the public? I think that’s quite possible.
Isn't the cost savings from no income tax effectively just transferring the lost state and federal tax revenue to the city budget?
That’s certainly a fair point.
The budget for this is a rounding error, and likewise any effects good or bad.
The bigger criticism, I think, and this applies to other candidates for other offices, but since we are talking NYC here we can narrow our focus.
There's a quote from President Clinton from around 2008, in the context of presidential races, but the idea applies more widely.
"I think that any candidate for president has a three-fold responsibility. Number one, you have a responsibility to demonstrate that you have the capacity to be president... Number two, you have a responsibility to lay out for the American people what you believe the great challenges and great opportunities are. And number three, you have to tell them specifically what you're going to do about it."
See the second and third in particular.
And later "Because people, when they tune in, they have a limited amount of time. And what they want to know is, is this person strong enough to be president? Does this person see the world I'm living in? And does this person have some answers that I think will work?"
This is the key: have you identified the big issues, and do you use the limited bandwidth that voters have to get that across?
"Food deserts" are not in the top 100 most important issues or opportunities. Voters tell us what the issues are. There is detailed survey and analytic data.
And what are these issues?
Public safety, in particular subway safety at night (80% report feeling unsafe)
Housing affordability (75% residents say this is the #1 reason they consider leaving the city)
High commercial real estate vacancies
A good public servant would be laser focused on these. Particularly city officials and mayors. It is not a job for proving ideology or having a grand vision for how society ought to work.
Bloomberg rezoned 40% of NYC, got Cornell to setup a campus here, historic low crime, school reform. That is the scale at which the Mayor needs to operate. Municipal grocery stores and stronger rent control show the poverty of ideas.
If he wins, I wish him well and hope he focuses on issues that matter.
This is an odd remark considering this policy stunt clearly earned Mamdani a lot of buzz.
Holding charisma and ability to get press coverage constant, he could have gotten the buzz from big important problems. We can't be sure about counterfactuals, and I'm not a candidate or political consultant, but just as a voter in NYC I want the mayor candidates to demonstrate they know what the big challenges are.
We can't know the counterfactuals, but Mamdani is a random state assemblyman who came out of nowhere to win handily in a crowded field. We can't know the counterfactuals if the Kansas City Chiefs didn't trade up for Patrick Mahomes but uhhhh my hunch is that they made the right call.
To be fair, the grocery stores thing is much higher salience in what Mamdani’s detractors say about him than it is in his own messaging,which is very heavily focused on the housing issue (with a general-public messaging track focused on the easy to understand and popular if economically questionable stabilized unit rent freeze, and a high-information actor messaging track focused on permitting reform and rezoning for higher density— the latter set of policies will do all of the actual work on long-term affordability, of course, but the former was probably necessary to build the sort of coalition that can tell the homevoters to get fucked and enact it.)
Or maybe a rent freeze is his long-term solution and permitting reform and higher zoning density are things he had to pretend to care about to build a big enough coalition for the primary.
That version seems grounded in a backwards conception of the political bases for both of these things? The rent freeze polls at something like 70% approval in NYC, it was high-salience throughout the campaign, and it’s simple enough that low-engagement normies can easily understand it. Zoning and permitting reform are complicated, the people who very actively want them are mostly a small group of weird nerds (including me), and the candidate who went most all in on them got 1% in the primary (RIP to my top-ranked candidate Zellnor Myrie).
I suspect that Zohran’s interest in YIMBY policy ideas is driven by the typical mechanism that the movement has used to succeed— persuasion of elite political actors, not mass politics. (The YIMBY movement is very effective and this isn’t a knock on it; being able to convince politicians of all different ideological stripes that your policy suggestion would help them deal with core problems is very powerful, but it’s important to understand how it actually works.)
> economically questionable
Questionable is not a great adjective to describe a policy about which there really aren't any actual questions about whether or not it's a good idea.
The problem with Mandami's city-owned grocery stores is they will be hives of addicts, schizophrenics, and kleptomaniacs because employees won't be allowed to kick anyone out and police won't be allowed to intervene.
I think you took a wrong turn and wound up at the Mos Eisley spaceport.
I recommend reading some stuff about Mamdani’s actual position on public safety issues before just very confidently making stuff up.
I have no faith that Mandami will be able to control the activists he staffs his administration with, in the same way Biden couldn't control the activists he staffed the White House with.
I find it virtually impossible to imagine that municipal grocery stores will have anything even approximating the procedural and managerial efficiencies of commercial grocery stores. Why haggled with suppliers when you're spending other people's money on their goods and services (and as a public sector union member you may not face any credible threats of discipline for screwing up.)
I think this take is far too cynical about public sector employees? In my personal observation, government workers aren’t meaningfully less conscientious than their analogous-qualification private sector counterparts (and indeed, often are more so because they have a stronger sense of mission.)
I don't thinknit is. I am an acquisition coded employee for the DoD. I don't buy entire weapons platforms but I am responsible for the engineering responsibilities tied to buying industrial equipment. The issues we face aren't that we all don't care because it's "someone else's money" its that the inputs into spending decisions consist of things almost entirely unrelated to "good business decisions." We pay more for everything, wait longer to get it, spend ungodly numbers of man hours on the internal contracting paper work to ensure we aren't being unfair, not putting this equipment on an ancient native American burial site, have passed 87 million environmental revies, make sure we offer to spend 10% more if we can get it from a small business owned by a vet/woman/minority etc.
For reference it took 3 years to get a contracting vehicle created to buy stock powders for one of our processes. These powders are advertised online by the manufacturer for about 40% of what we pay to get them. We dont buy from the manufacturer. We buy from a minority/vet/woman owned small business that is effectively drop shipping them to us. The "small business" in question is basically some vet/minority/woman that is well connected or knows how to game the system with a P.O. box and 1 friend on the payroll. They get to charge these markup because they have thier business status and produce stacks of paperwork to CYA the government on all the environmental, burial grounds, etc type things.
It isn't even clear we are actually obligated to do things like this. The laws get "interpreted" by finance/contracting people who likely have no true understanding of the laws and are just afraid of "going to jail" (nobody ever actually goes to jail) if they don't do the bumble things.
Will take some time to digest this. Thanks for the thoughtful, high-quality, and informative response.
Except private workers can and will be fired for not doing their jobs.
With public employees it's almost impossible
It is indeed more difficult, but even with this constraint, the average public worker is not demonstrably actually worse at their job or less conscientious than the average private sector worker.
"...it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas...."
Why does Mamdani hate minority-owned businesses? I always knew that he was a Neo-liberal shill underneath.
I think it was one of the Reason staff who tweeted something when Mamdani first announced the grocery store policy like, "Mamdani vows to use state power to bankrupt minority-owned small businesses."
This all seems predicated on stealing a base with the assumption that private grocers are small. It wouldn't shock me if Target (with their cute little neighborhood-size stores that they at least started testing a decade ago) has a larger operating budget than New York City government.
Does this argument potentially torpedo the family-owned corner bodega? Sure, but I don't give two hoots about the family corner bodega.
In NYC, a lot of the private grocers are in fact relatively small firms or local chains. (Unusual business environment.)
Okay? So bring in Target or whoever, an organization that has a proven track record of competently running stores.
NYC municipal is not the only large organization out there, but it's definitely one of the more dysfunctional!
That’s honestly not really true; a lot of city government-run things (eg: the library system, the DMV, the police force, CUNY) work pretty well.
Isn't the main criticism of them that they would operate at a substantial loss because Mamdani said that the stores would sell products at cost? (The quote from him here is, "They will buy and sell at wholesale prices . . . ." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/25/mamdani-nyc-public-grocery-stores )
I interpreted that in a “take seriously, not literally way” to mean operating at cost; literally operating at a large loss would definitely be bad.
I'll admit to mixed feelings about Trump's Washington, DC law enforcement theatrics...
My son just started a job in DC, and I was there last week helping him move into his new place, a rented house shared with several other new grads in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that struck me as borderline sketchy, but gentrifying. Troops on the streets has a scary, authoritarian vibe, but if they clear out some of the creepy people (including the homeless guy sleeping in front of my son's house) from the area, I won't be too unhappy.
I owned a place in CH 2002-2004, when it was really starting to gentrify. Interesting times. Illegal gambling nextdoor, along with the (reportedly transexual) whoreshouse. Had to remove people from my neighbor's porch 2X because they went to the wrong door (looking for aforementioned brothel). People doing drugs in the basement stoop. Dice game next to the ghetto Chinese place. Sadly it never quite seemed to achieve full take off -- imagine too much public/low income housing remains, along with the concomitant crews. But sold and never really went back. Almost bought a beautiful Wardman but a neighbor mentioned how one of the young gentlemen in the neighborhhod had put a gun to her head the previous week, so new wife and I decided we just did not want to deal. Instead moved to SE....only one killing near our house, and it was the cross street!
Not sure what Trump is doing, but in principle -- DC needs lots more law enforcement, focused on the very obvious areas where the majority of the criminals are, and the laws need to be changed to stop allowing a revolving door for young criminals (all criminals). And yes the culture of the black community needs to change etc. etc., but in the absence of some kind of great awakening, crush crime. Actually worked before, and it can work again, just need to accept reality of what that will mean.
The troops won't be in Columbia Heights though: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/us/politics/trump-washington-crime.html
I can't remember who said it, but a few months ago I saw someone comment that David Frum's dictum about fascism and immigration applied to homelessness and other urban "social disorder" phenomena too.
Yep.
If we could just send everyone in city government (or determining city related policies) to Europe to meet with their peers for a week the US would be in much better shape soon.
Just gotta make sure they don't talk to them about anything related to business or regulation.