It's expensive to live in New York City. It always has been.
New York City's socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, seems surprised by a fact of life that New Yorkers have been living with for a couple of centuries. Nevertheless, Mamdani vowed to do something about high prices and the "affordability" crisis of living in a big-city blue state on the East Coast.
Naturally, he chose the socialist solution to the affordability problem. In other words, the solution that costs the most and has the least chance of actually working.
Mamdani wants to open a city-owned, privately run grocery store in all five boroughs. Young New Yorkers who voted for the socialist in huge numbers and have the economic sense of a bunch of marmosets can hardly contain their excitement. A government grocery store! Now we're talkin'. Get in line for the free stuff!
This week, Mamdani announced the very first location for his government-owned grocery store; it's in East Harlem on a site the city already owns.
"The city will subsidize a core set of food staples," Mamdani said. "A private operator will run the store but will answer to the standards the city will set. These standards include requirements that at our stores, bread will be cheaper. Eggs will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation. And workers will be treated with dignity.
The workers' "dignity" includes getting paid union wages. I worked in a grocery store and was paid union wages. I didn't feel any more "dignified," and management still treated me like crap. What "dignified" means is that the increase in overhead will mean higher prices for items that aren't subsidized.
"Around 65,000 New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of La Marqueta, 5,000 NYCHA residents live on either side of Park Avenue, in the area of La Marqueta, and nearly 40% of East Harlem residents receive public assistance or SNAP benefits in the last year," Mamdani said. "Those are the very kinds of federal programs that are under attack at this very moment."
Between 2013 and 2023, grocery prices have skyrocketed in New York City to the tune of nearly 66%, according to the mayor, who added this is "significantly higher than the national average."
La Marqueta was the first site selected to be one of the city's stores, but it's unlikely to be the first one open — the city still needs to build out the store on the vacant lot. Construction operations are estimated to cost $30 million.
Mamdani has not yet stated where the first store will open by the end of 2027.
No one in East Harlem will have their SNAP benefits cut. The cuts that Mamdani is upset about were increases in benefits and eligibility engineered by Joe Biden and the Democrats during the COVID pandemic. We can have an argument about whether the upper middle class deserves or needs SNAP benefits, but that's for another time. The poorest Americans will not have their benefits touched.
And NBC repeats a lie that Mamdani told that food prices "skyrocketed 66% in the ten years between 2013 and 2023.
The mayor’s rationale for his public grocery-store venture, as stated in a recent press release, is that “[g]rocery prices in New York City have risen nearly 66% over the past decade—significantly outpacing the national average.” That’s a bogus statistic, and we can trace how the mayor’s staff made that error. The press release links to a report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who indeed finds that something increased by 66 percent: New York metropolitan-area consumers’ spending on food eaten at home, from 2012–2013 to 2022–23. That statistic, which includes spending by affluent people in the suburbs who shop at premium stores, says nothing about prices.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a separate price index for the cost of food consumed at home for the New York metropolitan area. Not surprisingly, the local index tracks the national index closely (see chart below). Over the ten-year period from March 2016 to March 2026, the food-at-home price index for the New York City metro area increased by 34 percent, versus 32.5 percent for the national index.
It's good to be a socialist in a city with a biased media. You never have to answer for the lies you tell.
"Affordability" is a political gimmick, not a policy. It's a buzzword, not related to the reality of Americans' economic pain or their hopes for future prosperity. City-owned grocery stores have proven to be failures everywhere they've been tried in America.
For a real view of the application of socialist principles when it comes to grocery stores, revisit the Soviet Union in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. The socialist stores were not a pleasant "shopping experience."
Customers (victims) didn't walk through aisles and aisles of food picking and choosing what they wanted. There was a counter, usually with one or two clerks, who took your order. Your choices were usually potatoes, turnips, canned fish, and other similarly appetizing food. That's if they had any of that stuff in stock.
What they always had plenty of was low-priced vodka. The lines were unspeakably long, and Russians had to stand outside in sub-zero weather, sometimes for hours, or lose the chance to eat that day.
It's a horror story repeated in socialist country after socialist country. New Yorkers are fortunate that they have alternatives to Mamdani's government-owned grocery stores, at least for now.
Who knows what the socialist crusader will order up next to make food more "affordable" for New Yorkers?
PJ Media will give you all the information you need to understand the decisions that will be made this year. Insightful commentary and straight-on, no-BS news reporting have been our hallmarks since 2005.
Get 60% off your new VIP membership by using the code FIGHT. You won't regret it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member