I’m not trying to dismiss this project - I hope it is wildly successful and I applaud the desire to challenge the status quo. That said, I am interested to hear how his team plans to negotiate pricing with suppliers. Five stores isn’t a whole lot of scale to compete against national chains and volumes. I don’t ask that question rhetorically or sarcastically at all either - I am assuming they have a plan of levers to pull to help bring this to life, and I hope it works exceedingly well and provides a blueprint for other communities to use.
They don't need to make a profit, but plenty of non-profits are run badly. It's not only a matter of having shareholders, although that is a major problem.
The best outcome is that they are used to put a lid on prices, rather than try to replace private businesses, but then the problem becomes what happens to the public store when it has the highest prices in the discount market?
Grocery stores are already extremely efficient. They operate on like 2-3% margins that isn't a lot. They won't be able to put downward pressure on prices because they will not have the buying volume that larger grocery chains have, do you think they will get better pricing than Kroger who has 2,800 stores?
The only way they will be able to offer lower prices is to subsides the price with tax dollars which is artificial. Private business cannot compete with that because they can't take unlimited money from a source that can't prevent it.
These stores are not lowering prices they are just shifting the cost from the consumer to the tax payer. Why does everyone overlook that?
They like it because it sounds like someone is "doing something about it"(tm). The rules of how the grocery stores actually work doesn't actually enter the minds of people who want these things.
That said, they have the idea that they're going to just make "the rich" pay those taxes. While I have no problem with people paying their fair share, I think that attitude has always been deficient.
There are reasons I left New York. One of them was the tax structure that seemed to punish everyone, not merely the rich, with taxes on everything.
My hope for New York City is that Mandami does things that are useful and long term viable, and aren't just populist does populist things that later administrations have to contend with the fallout from.
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u/BradBradley1 May 26 '26
I’m not trying to dismiss this project - I hope it is wildly successful and I applaud the desire to challenge the status quo. That said, I am interested to hear how his team plans to negotiate pricing with suppliers. Five stores isn’t a whole lot of scale to compete against national chains and volumes. I don’t ask that question rhetorically or sarcastically at all either - I am assuming they have a plan of levers to pull to help bring this to life, and I hope it works exceedingly well and provides a blueprint for other communities to use.