[flats]

I was very skeptical of these plans at first—as a New Yorker, I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in our city’s government to run things well.

But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.

[hn_throwaway_99]

"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure.

I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at all. Grocery stores famously operate on super slim margins, so it's not like they're raking in the dough. Many of them are often run extremely well. In Texas, HEB is so beloved that a lot of people consider it far better at disaster recovery operations than the actual government.

I'm not against plans to better help people afford groceries, but somebody needs to at least explain how the plan is economically rationally viable, not just "let's try something new!"

[AnimalMuppet]

There are two errors.

Error 1: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done." Yeah, but "this" is something stupid, with no real-world chance of working.

Error 2: "We will not do anything until we can prove that it will work." You can analyze things to death and waste years in the process, and never do anything.

Somewhere in between is the right answer. You see plausible success, but still far from certain. Then you experiment.

Now, is New York striking the right balance? I have no idea. I'm not privy to their internal discussions. But I know that, if it fails, everyone is going to mock them for trying. That is, everyone is going to assume they fell into error 1. But did they? Getting the balance right still means that the experiments fail a fair amount of the time.

[itishappy]

Simple fix really, HEB should just open up stores up north.

[hnthrowaway0315]

I have a feeling that those slim margins don't really mean that Walmart is making e.g. 3 bucks on every 100 bucks (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...).

There gotta be a lot of accounting magics working here. Otherwise you can't explain why they simply don't sell everything and buy bonds. I don't have a theory so hopefully some finance people can explain.

[tacostakohashi]

If they can make 3 bucks per hundred of sales, and do that more than once per year... then that beats a bond that pays only 3 percent per year...

[RickJWagner]

Found the economist. Or maybe the mathematician, I’m not sure. Astute.

[hnthrowaway0315]

Yeah that could be the explanation.

[DetroitThrow]

As an outsider, it will be interesting to see a pilot at minimum. I'd be hesitant for NYC if it rolled out massively expensive stores across the entire city without understanding if it succeeds at the small scale. I'm not sure why this succeeding or failing has to be viewed as a violation of a sacred value.

Governments should do more experiments, and this does seem to have been thought out enough to not be a total waste of money.

[Freedom2]

I believe it's simple tribal behavior, combined with American blindness to a "free market". They'd rather be correct and put everything in a good / bad bucket instead of experimenting and learning from the experience.

[ck2]

"let's try it" is exactly the right attitude

So many conservative states and cities absolutely running things into the ground, making people miserable and oppressed and their cost of living skyrocketing for years, decades, look at Texas look at Florida, so many examples

So why not try something progressive for a change and see what happens?

Why the heck not just try?

[steanne]

and make it a good try, too. you can't improve your situation a little by jumping halfway over a hole.

[miketery]

Just because we can does not mean we should.

Here's how this will pan out.

- A number of "officials" (friends) will get cushy jobs for running this program.

- It will lose millions of tax dollars

- a small portion of the population will get cheaper produce for a photo op

- Mamdani and friends will call it a success

- But net, this will be net negative for the city (ie. tax dollars to crony jobs and subsidizing food for some).

Whats the point? The USSR has tried this (subsidized grocery stores centrally planned). Lets not.

If on the other hand, the issue was hey its expensive to bring produce XYZ, so why don't we work to reduce that cost by legalizing Kei [1] trucks and exempt from tolls. Now that would be something interesting.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_truck

[ceejayoz]

> The USSR has tried this. Lets not.

The USSR tried lots of things we do successfully.

This is actually something governments have a proven ability to do, at least in some contexts, without becoming a corrupt boondoggle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Commissary_Agency

[miketery]

Yeah it was so successful that people would line up around the block for bananas the one time a year. Or when boots came into the store you'd pick up whatever size you could, as you'd trade later.

(true stories)

[ceejayoz]

Again:

> The USSR has tried this. Lets not.

would rule out things like "going to the moon" or "building roads". It's a pretty useless rubric.

I am not doubting the USSR fucked all sorts of things up. I'm doubting that that inherently means those things must be impossible.

[miketery]

Updated - since my text was confusing. The subject at hand is subsidized grocery stores, the USSR is an example of failed centrally planned subsidized grocery stores.

[ceejayoz]

The text isn't confusing; the conclusion you draw is just unsupported.

The USSR is an example of many failed things. That they failed at those things does not mean those things cannot be done.

[bherms]

My fil owns a bunch of grocery stores in Russia. The gov't still essentially subsidizes the cost of basic goods to keep prices low for the poor. Because of this, even the poorest have access to what they need, and they worship Putin because of it - "he makes sure we're taken care of". Obviously we could get into the corruption, why they're so poor in the first place, etc, but it is clearly working pretty well.

[halflife]

Also in Israel, stable basic products (like milk) have a government mandated pricing, not even subsidized. It’s a good idea in its simplistic form, and works well most of the times, but once every 2 years you get a crunch where the manufacturers just decline to produce products at a loss, so we don’t have milk or butter for 2 weeks.

[woodruffw]

NY Post wailing aside, it’s unclear that hizzoner has engaged in that much personal graft. There’s also no evidence presented that the staff of this program are being hired through a graft scheme.

You could be right about it losing millions of dollars, we’ll see. Millions isn’t very much on the scale of NYC’s civic infrastructure; it would be difficult to even call it a waste at that scale, since the results will themselves be valuable.

(This is in pointed contrast to our last mayor.)

[kennywinker]

Por que no los dos?

The kei truck thing might be a good idea, but so is groceries managed as a public service.

The USSR had a problem with corruption. Ok? There have been gov run groceries outside the USSR, and in recent times - not decades ago.

If you don’t have an example of this leading to corruption more recent than the USSR, i gotta assume it was a USSR problem, not a gov grocery problem.

[bastawhiz]

> The USSR has tried this. Lets not.

The USSR fell before I spoke my first words. The world is a very different place, and the United States works very differently from the USSR.

At worst, some people will get some cheaper groceries out of this. If you want to get mad about government spending, maybe we shouldn't be building a ballroom attached to the White House.

[kennywinker]

*bunker.

Sounds like it’s a bunker of some kind, and the ballroom was just a cover story

(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...)

[bastawhiz]

Even better. Because lord knows we need the guy who started all these wars protected from their potential consequences.

[darth_avocado]

> It will lose millions of tax dollars

As opposed to the millions that come out of your pocket on top of the taxes you pay? At least this brings some of the tax money back to the people. When you let grocery store price gouge you without competition, the money goes to executive pay and shareholder value.

[fortran77]

It also doesn't seem fair to compete against stores that have to pay rent and taxes.

[kennywinker]

A gov run grocery store will have to pay rent and taxes.

The only difference is it doesn’t have to make profits to pay its owners.

The question is, why are you prioritizing being “fair” to people profiting off hunger, over being fair to working people trying to eat? Even if it is “unfair” this is a kind of unfair we should all support (assuming it succeeds at feeding people).

[fortran77]

The working people who own grocery stores and bodegas are trying to eat.

[kennywinker]

Afaik bodegas make most of their money from cigarettes and booze, so this is unlikely to cut into their income in any real way. As for grocery stores owned and operated by the people who work in them, there aren’t many of those but I would expect they’ll be aware of that and open these gov stores far away from small local grocers (who tend to have cheap food already).

As for people who own grocery stores and don’t work in them? That’s an investment not a job, gov has no duty to protect individual investments over people’s basic needs.

[whobenefits]

And even worse, last estimate I saw was 30 million to open a store! 30 million! Graft is alive and well. Communism is a dismal failure, and I don't want to live through it myself. Say no to communism.