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Mamdani’s $30 Million Socialist Grocery Store Is Currently a Trash-Strewn Empty Lot

Updated: GOVERNMENT

New York City officials suited up prospective vendors in hardhats and high-visibility vests Wednesday and took them on a tour of where Mamdani’s first government-run grocery store is supposed to rise in East Harlem. The vendors arrived expecting a construction site. They found a vacant parking lot with trash blowing across it and zero sign of any building activity whatsoever.

This is socialism in practice. Not the campaign poster. This. Thirty million taxpayer dollars are committed to this scheme. Five stores — one per borough — are promised. The first one, scheduled to open in Harlem, currently consists of an empty lot under the Metro-North viaduct next to La Marqueta. The hardhat tour produced exactly the kind of confidence you’d expect from a walk through a garbage-strewn parking lot with no construction equipment visible.

The vendors who showed up were not exactly fired up. One business consultant said he was “very cautiously optimistic” and added a list of conditions — full transparency, public involvement, attention to market forces, transportation, and weather — that collectively suggest he’s already calculating the odds this thing falls apart before it opens.

A grocery store owner interviewed at the scene was more direct: he was glad the mayor was doing something about food prices, but when asked whether he’d like to compete against a government-subsidized grocery store, he said candidly that he wouldn’t.

Of course he wouldn’t. Private grocers pay rent, property taxes, payroll, utilities, insurance, and the full cost of their inventory — then price their goods to cover all of it and hopefully turn a profit. Mamdani’s government stores would have those costs absorbed by New York City taxpayers, allowing them to undercut competitors artificially and push private businesses out of the neighborhoods they’ve served for decades.

City officials, apparently aware that immigrant-owned grocers are planning to sue to stop the program, tried to ease fears by promising grants, incentives, and other handouts to private stores that would be competing against city-subsidized competitors. The city’s lead official for the grocery program said there could be “policies and programs, grants, incentives that can come alongside these grocery stores to support other local independent businesses.”

So the plan is: use taxpayer money to build government stores that undercut private grocers. Then use more taxpayer money to compensate the private grocers being undercut. Everyone gets a government check. Everyone is dependent on the government. That’s not a grocery program. That’s a socialist political machine dressed in produce.

A coalition of immigrant-owned grocery stores is planning to sue as soon as this week to block the program.

The empty trash-strewn lot is an accurate preview of what Mamdani’s grocery ambitions will deliver: a big price tag, a press event with hardhats, and not much underneath it. Venezuela started with price controls and government stores too. The shelves were empty within a decade. New York, meet your future.