“Bolsheviks can’t even organize a picnic.” — Ada Shelby, Peaky Blinders
The numbers are in. One store. Thirty million dollars. Opening in 2029.
Mamdani budgeted $70 million for five stores. The first one alone is projected to cost $30 million — nearly half the entire program’s budget, for a single location. A private operator opens a grocery store for $3 to $3.5 million. The city of New York needs ten times that. This is before a single egg is on a shelf.
And about those eggs. The cheaper prices apply only to a “core set of food staples.” A private operator will run the store. The city sets the standards. So what Mamdani is actually proposing is a privately operated grocery store, on city land, with a subsidy applied to selected items, opening in three years, at a construction cost that would have funded twenty private-sector equivalents. This is the socialist experiment. A subsidized Whole Foods with a longer timeline and a worse balance sheet.
Within a mile of the first site, there is already an Aldi and a Costco. The food desert being addressed has a Costco in it.
The city is working to open the East Harlem store by the end of 2029. Mamdani took office this year. By the time a single New Yorker buys a cheaper loaf of bread under this program, he will be in the final weeks of his term — assuming the budget holds, the construction runs on schedule, the third-party operator is procured, the city council approves funding, and nothing goes the way municipal construction projects in New York City normally go.
Kansas City tried this in 2018. It closed after struggling to keep food on shelves amid crime. That precedent received no mention at the rally.
Ada Shelby didn’t say the Bolsheviks had bad intentions. She said they couldn’t organize a picnic. The distinction matters. Mamdani clearly wants cheaper groceries for East Harlem. The want is not the problem. The problem is $30 million, one store, three years, and a private operator who will actually be running the thing — which means the city has essentially invented an extremely expensive and slow way to subsidize a grocery store it doesn’t control, in a neighborhood that already has a Costco.
The picnic is unorganized. The sausages are cold. The mustard cost thirty million dollars.
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