The store does not open until 2027.
But one satirist decided not to wait to find out what it will look like. He made a video previewing what a government-owned New York City grocery store will almost certainly become based on every historical precedent available.
The aesthetic he predicts is very bare. Very minimalist. A Soviet Union era Whole Foods.
Subscribe to DeSkooled and get independent coverage of every bad idea the institutional left tries to sell as progress. This is your Learing Center discount, named after the Minnesota welfare fraud scheme where government money funded fake learning centers while the system looked the other way. 50% off for a year.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised his city-owned grocery stores will offer a 30% discount on staple items. The pitch is simple. Private grocery chains are exploiting working-class New Yorkers. The government will do it better and cheaper.
Economists across the political spectrum have been explaining for decades why this does not work. Not just conservative economists. Not just libertarian economists. Economists broadly. The incentive problem is not a partisan issue. It is a structural one.
Private grocery stores have to compete. If their produce is bad, customers go elsewhere. If their prices are too high, customers go elsewhere. If their selection is poor, customers go elsewhere. The profit motive that Mamdani wants to dismantle is also the mechanism that keeps prices low, selection wide, and quality high. Remove the competition and you remove the pressure to do any of those things well.
What you get instead is a Soviet Union era Whole Foods.
The satirist’s video imagines walking into the store and being greeted by the limited selection. Not too many choices means that you are not going to get overwhelmed with options. He celebrates finding corn boil seasoning and Jello. He pays with his oppression and racial equity cards.
Democracy wins again.
The joke lands because it is based on a pattern that has repeated itself everywhere governments have tried this. Venezuela tried government-run grocery distribution. The shelves went empty. Cuba still runs a ration system decades later. The Soviet Union built the most comprehensive centrally planned food distribution system in history and produced the bread lines that became its defining image.
Every single time the government has decided it could run retail food distribution better than the market, the result has been the same. Less selection. Lower quality. Higher real cost when you account for the taxpayer subsidy. And eventually either collapse or permanent dependence on government funding to stay open.
New York City has allocated $30 million for five stores by 2027. That is $6 million per store before a single item of produce hits a shelf.
Thomas Sowell spent six decades explaining exactly why this happens. The program sounds reasonable at stage one. Subsidized groceries for working families. Who could object? Stage two is where the Soviet Union era Whole Foods appears. The limited selection. The bare shelves. The $6 million per store price tag for a place that sells Jello.
The people paying for this are not the residents the stores are designed to serve. They are every New York City taxpayer whether they shop there or not.
The store does not open until 2027. The satirist already knows how the story ends because the story has ended the same way every time it has been told.
DeSkooled covers every experiment in bad ideas that the institutional left runs on American cities and their residents. 50% off for a year.
Upgrade your subscription today.
