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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Economic Development Corporation admitted this week that his city-owned grocery stores “might not have all the items” you’d find in a typical supermarket.
The five stores — which are expected to cost taxpayers upwards of $70 million — will likely not include hot food counters or butchers, EDC officials revealed during a board meeting Thursday.
“It may not have all the items, but it’s going to be like a typical grocery store,” insisted Jeanny Pak, interim CEO of the EDC, the powerful city-run nonprofit tasked with boosting economic growth and development.
Pak also echoed Mamdani’s assertion that only certain items in the stores would be discounted.
“We did a lot of analysis of what people buy in terms of their everyday goods,” she said. “Even if there are a lot of people who buy soda, we’re not discounting soda.”
The head-scratching statements around what exactly the city-owned stores would offer led some social media users to poke fun at the seemingly convoluted project.
“OMG, this is just destined to fail,” said one user on X. “Anyone with experience with a grocery store there? This is just such a bad idea.”
Another X user likened the concept to another popular grocery store chain. “This is a Trader Joe’s, basically,” they wrote.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani had vowed to open one city-owned grocery store in each borough, claiming that he would “use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.”
“At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation,” he also claimed.
But nearly eight months into his tenure, only two out of his five promised supermarkets have specific locations finalized, and the first one won’t open till at least 2027.
Grocery store owners and workers have sounded the alarm on the pricey project — expressing concern that the discounted goods may hurt privately owned markets near the city-owned shops.
“What effort has been made to help other stores in general?” asked Adam Friedman, an urban planner and EDC board member, asked during Thursday’s meeting, according to NY1.
“That’s the issue that I think a number of us were getting at — how is its impact on competition? All these businesses are trying to do right,” he told the outlet after.
A co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter — Mamdani’s political home — was pressed on those concerns during a Fox News interview last week, but brushed them off.
“If the government opened a big grocery store next to your bodega, what would you do?” host Martha MacCallum asked.
“If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business — maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place,” NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo replied.
Mamdani has previously said the shops will focus on selling a discounted core basket of goods, but will contain a myriad of other items sold at market price.
This week, he announced he was appointing veteran civil servant Anthony Shorris as the new CEO of the EDC, which is running point on the grocery store project. Former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan will step in to chair the government agency.
The first store is slated to open in the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunt’s Point at The Peninsula – a former Juvenile Detention Center in 2027.
The Manhattan-based shop is set to open in 2029 at a 9,000-square-foot space in La Marqueta – a marketplace running in East Harlem.
English (US)