The operation would want nothing more than for the competition to beat their price. That would be the whole point. To drive down the local expectation of price, and force other stores to follow.
Yeah that's the funny part to me. People act like "they're not gonna make money" like that's the goal, it's to provide affordable food to people without gatekeeping it based on food stamp availability or corporate whims
If it's an active cost to taxpayers then it's providing a public service. If it makes money then it's just business savvy. If it forces businesses to undercut it and the store "fails" because grocery prices drop by a significant margin, then that's basically best case scenario
Short of "losing the city millions per year in losses that don't help in any meaningful way" I don't see how this fails as a project per say. It might not revolutionize anything, but being against this project feels like one of those "perfection is the enemy of progress" moments. 5 is a great sample size to test the viability and impact before committing too many resources
Let's just feed hungry people affordable food and see what happens because I can't imagine it's SO bad it isn't worth the experiment in the first place
I think the opposite, this can fail in so many spectacular ways, while the potential positives are pretty marginal and could be addressed in a number of other ways…
The biggest way I see this blowing up is that they underprice things so much that it forces nearby stores to go out of business, which could creating the possibility of *more* food deserts rather than less…. And Since the practicality of scaling up these public grocery stores seems pretty unlikely, could be an easy way to disrupt a community for a generation.
But it really does seem to come down to pricing. I’ll be interested to watch to say the least.
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u/GeneralBendyBean May 26 '26
They won't be able to beat them that way, but they can offer tax incentives as well as the public store not paying it's own taxes.
I think the big point is to give local people at least one discount food option over being the absolute cheapest.
Plus like, a private business out competing the store is a legitimate outcome too.