Burlington, Vermont, experienced a mini-version of this when the increasingly socialist city government raised property taxes on businesses to the point that all the grocery stores moved out. In response to the “food-desert” crisis, the city tried to lure food stores back, but the restrictions and requirements for what products had to be stocked, how much had to be “organic”, etc, resulted in only one taker, a “Whole-Foods” type grocery, with prices way too expensive for the low-income neighborhoods it was supposed to service.
Reductions in the Police Dept have resulted in some areas of the city becoming no-go zones, and the once-prosperous Church Street shopping district has lost its major anchor stores, and is overrun with panhandlers and homeless.
(Thanks, Bernie!)
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So Mandani wants to have city run grocery stores. Let’s say he gets his wish. Grocery stores run about a 3% profit margin. This is for the big boys: Kroger, Safeway, HEB, etc. The smaller chains have less buying power and can’t get the gross margins the big guys can so they run 1 to 2% profits. I don’t think NYC is going to get the same gross margin as Kroger. Chain grocery stores employ a lot of younger, minimum wage people. NYC stores will have to employ NYC city civil servants with all the benefits attached to being a… Read more »
It tells a lot about a city when the citizens allow such things to happen. Either they are terribly ignorant, or their elections are compromised by fraud.
As a former New Yorker I have to question the intelligence of a state that elects former Brooklynite Bernie Sanders as their senator. He’s a cartoon communist from the 1930s.
Sounds like a plan that Bernie Sanders (as the senior VT senator) would help implement. He could be a big help advising Mamdani in NYC how to implement a socialist grocery store plan. This could help get more NYers to move to Florida.
Yeah those two make quite a pair.