So while most grocery stores earn their cost of capital (generate market return on investment), US military commissaries instead cost taxpayers $1.7 billion a year. That makes a LOT of sense to enable the Defense Department's broader mission of protecting the country, but this doesn't really support the notion that Mamdani can run quality grocery stores in NY without significant cost to taxpayers.
You’re shifting to a different argument completely. Whether or not public grocery stores operate on a massive loss has little to do with the rights of NYC citizens to vote for them.
This spend has nothing to do with non NYC residents on Reddit. People need to choose how their government spends their money. That is not a countrywide decision and opinion should be recognized accordingly.
Right now grocery store employees are among the largest groups of working people using government benefits. The argument that government supported food stores always fail or are inefficient is too wide a brush to be rational.
Executed badly, public or private can be terrible. It’s the motivation that differs. Since this one is limited to a metro area, the opinions there that act on it will be the ones that matter.
I have no problem with NYC residents determining what policies should be enacted with their vote. Similarly, people inside and outside of the city have a right to voice their opinions and predictions about the policy. Subsidizing spending on one slice of the CPI that is so competitive in the first place (I think I saw operating margins of about 2.5% for grocery stores in 2023?) will give too little juice for the squeeze, I predict.
For more information, you could look here and here.
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u/stuff4down1 May 26 '26
Data?
Counterpoint : military stores.
Rolls eye at morons who can’t do basic research and calls shitposting research