Target and Whole Foods LEAVE NYC... as Mamdani Launches 5 FREE GROCERY STORES

Here come New York City run grocery stores! Uh oh!

Of five city owned grocery stores, one in each building.

Wow!

Five stores!

Today, we make good on that promise.

Uh oh!

All they cheer and they love it. They don't know what it means, but they're so excited.

Ha ha!

I am proud to announce that we will open every single one of these stores by the end of our These people don't know what the class and the first one will open next year people are really excited

But there's a big problem America's tried these and they haven't worked

It's clear this Sun fresh at 31st and prospect is struggling. This is the first section people see when they come in. There's barely any produce.

Why isn't anyone clapping?

A lot of the cools and shelves around the store look the same way, empty. So shoppers have been asking us, if the store isn't closing, then where is all the food? Right. A rotten smell comes through the door,

and anywhere you turn, you'll see products that need to be restocked. No hot food or deli. I watch people walk in and walk out.

There's nothing there.

The grocery store has received financial assistance from the city, but has been unable to keep those shelves stocked in an area that in the past has often been referred to as a food desert.

A food desert.

Around here, a good thing don't last too long.

And it will impact a lot of people and a lot of families.

The city owns the Lynwood Shopping Center. A non-profit operates the grocery store.

Wow, this plan didn't work, but it's the same plan we're going to try in New York. And if it works, it could force Whole Foods and Target to shut down, kick them out of the city.

Across the world? During his rally to celebrate 100 days in office, New York City's Mayor, Zoran Mamdani, announced the first site for the City Run Grocery Store will be at La Marqueta in East Harlem. The property is already owned by New York City residents who need it most.

And they didn't even buy the food!

Now Mayor Mamdani says his administration is creating the city-run grocery stores because he believes the market has failed.

Whoa!

Saying quote, when corporations control every part of the food supply chain, go up Wages stay flat and workers and customers both lose The mayor plans to partner with a third-party grocery operator and pass the savings along the shoppers

But how are the shoppers gonna save money if their taxes and living expenses have to go up to pay for these?

Grocery prices are out of control the cost of eggs and milk has skyrocketed Yeah Pay for these! Grocery prices are out of control. The cost of eggs and milk has skyrocketed. Yeah. Some stores are even using dynamic pricing, jacking up the cost over the course of a day, depending on what they can get away with. It doesn't need to be this way.

I'm Zahram Mandani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores.

It's like a public option for produce. redirects city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores. Oh! Whose mission is lower prices, not price catching. So they're gonna take money from private businesses and they're gonna redirect it to city-run businesses. Which needed government subsidies to open in the first place since our fees to do business here are already way too high. And since these city-run locations don't have to pay rent, they're gonna have a massive advantage, which could very well mean if you shop at Target

or at Whole Foods and you enjoy that, if these stores succeed, those go out of business.

You said this store opened in 2029 and that the first of your grocery stores will open next year. Why is it taking so long? I feel like a bodega opens every other week across New York City.

Yeah, private industry.

Why take so long to start?

Great question.

I think for a few reasons. The first is that we are talking about building something from the ground up. We're talking about this city's first city run grocery store in Manhattan that we need to both design, that we also need to construct.

We're also going to be constructing it using prevailing wages. And it's also one part of a larger ecosystem.

But this is the problem. You don't have to construct anything. Look, here on Avenue C in the East Village, there's what used to be a grocery store. Why don't you just set up a grocery store in this place? You don't have to build anything. It's already there. It's already shut down.

It's ready for a new tenant. But this isn't really about city run grocery stores. It's about government control over you.

Not just in terms of La Marqueta, but also here on this strip, we've seen the MTA has just completed their work in this very area.

This requires a lot of interagency and intergovernmental coordination. Oh, let's grow the government. The store that will be open next year in 2027 and the additional stores that will be open by the end of 2029 will not require this same scale of production. The reason that we're

announcing this is so that we can get started.

Oh, okay. So we want to open these stores and pass the savings along to everybody who's going to use them, but we're going to do it in the most expensive way possible, which is just going to result in people who live here paying more money for something they can't all use. Everybody can get to the grocery store of their choice. You want to go to Target, you want to go to Whole Foods, you want to go to Gristini's, go ahead, you're gonna have to go to one of the five locations the mayor picks.

And the first one in Harlem might not be near where you live. Look at this. This is a problem. Apparently, it's gonna cost $70 million to open all these stores. Aldi could open 46 stores for that price.

I'm just saying.

Zoran Bandani moving ahead with his plan to open government run grocery stores. Announcing the first of five sites will be up and running next year. Fox Business Correspondent.

Great.

And not everyone can go. Live from our New York City newsroom.

They're not everywhere.

A lot of people saying it takes a year to open a grocery store.

And a lot of money too, John. This first store is going to cost $30 million. That's nearly half of the $70 million budget that Mayor Mondani has proposed for all five city run groups.

The budget's gonna go up for these stores. They are gonna get more expensive as time goes on, and this is not gonna be affordable for anybody.

We are building a brand new store on city owned land currently sitting empty in East Harlem.

It's not sitting empty. It hasn't been built yet. How is it sitting empty if it's not built?

Nearly 40% of households received public assistance or SNAP in the past year.

OK.

Because it's on city owned land, they will not have to pay rent on the property. Mamdani pointed out that grocery prices in the city have increased since the pandemic, but he failed to point out how city-run grocers in other cities have failed to actually help residents.

Similar efforts in places like Kansas City have struggled to stay afloat despite millions in taxpayer dollars. SunFresh Market permanently closed this August after suffering from high crime, empty shelves, and unsustainable losses.

So they had unsustainable losses and unsustainable crime. I guess these really were free grocery stores for some people. The other problem is if you've got a grocery store and it's already closed down, why are you going to try to open another one there? And if one doesn't exist there already,

if the free market hasn't come in and put one there already, why is one going to succeed if the idea has no merit and nobody's actually risking anything? The city isn't risking anything by wasting everybody's money building something that might not work. They do that all the time. That's how they operate.

So despite over $17 million in taxpayer investments since 2016, the project failed to provide a stable food source. But it's full steam ahead for city owned grocery stores here in the Big Apple. Mom Donnie promised on steam ahead for city owned grocery stores here in the Big Apple. Mom Donnie promised on the campaign trail, the grocery stores will be available in each borough.

He's not going to be able to do that

by the end of his term, John.

Well, at a year to open every one of them, and he wants to open that many, I'm not quite sure if he can do that.

It's gonna run into massive cost overruns. But just before we continue, there's something most people do not realize. If you're on Medicare, the Medicare market is rigged by incentives and not in your favor. It's a total scam. And most of the agents you see on TV

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Now some will insist that city-owned businesses do not work, that government cannot keep up with corporations. My answer to them is simple.

I look forward to the competition the first

With their money against borough by the end of the mayor's term But city involvement in grocery stores is nothing new New York has been in the grocery business for a hundred years Nevin Cohen is the director of the CUNY urban food policy Institute. It's operated public markets around the city.

It's supported green carts or push carts that sell produce in certain neighborhoods.

In fact, the city currently oversees six public markets where vendors rent space below market rates. One is La Marqueta in East Harlem, where the first city-run supermarket will find a home. A community, the city says, approximately 38% of households receive SNAP benefits.

One important thing to make sure that this is successful is working with the community to find out what people want to buy, what they need to buy at a lower cost.

The concept is...

Well, that's what a private grocery store has plenty of experience doing. But you see, the government's got to come come in and they gotta work with people to find out what they actually wanna buy and then they gotta tax us all to go out and buy it and get it and hopefully they don't run out and have empty shelves everywhere. But these people seem to think the city's gonna be great at this.

Winning over some locals.

That's actually great because most of these supermarkets around here, they don't supply

good food. But critics argue the mayor's plan will hurt small businesses like Bodega.

Of course, they're going to hurt us more than what they're going to help. But they got owners are not ripping people off. We're not charging excessively for anything. What we need is help from you, Mayor. Not competition.

Right. So the problem is everybody's going to pay taxes, right right higher taxes so that these city run stores can get off the ground They're not gonna pay rent and then they're gonna come in and they're gonna sell things at cost So they're gonna be selling below what the bodegas are selling at you see it's gonna put these guys out of business There's no way to compete with them if they succeed and if they fail They're just gonna keep asking for more and more money to get more things into the store.

And if they start off just selling a few things like stable goods, right? So that it's not too unfair. Eventually that will be expanded. Eventually they will expand the amount of money they require from the general public and from businesses

so that they can put everybody out of business and be the only grocery stores in town. But why don't these work?

They really didn't think about the fact that they're gonna have to pay city wages, have to pay retirement, sick leave, maternity leave, so many things that the municipalities have got. And just look at the shoplifting, you know you're gonna have it.

That's another loss, you can't do anything about it. No. You gotta replace those groceries nowhere to sell. Yeah. Other city owned grocery stores have met the same fate as Erie markets. Municipalities aren't designed to run a grocery store. It's pretty obvious, folks, that if you're going to run a grocery store, that's what you need to be coming from. Yeah. Somebody that ran grocery stores.

Cities don't know how to run grocery.

Yeah, don't come from the campaign trail.

City run grocery stores. It's a challenging enterprise. The grocery business is challenging. You know, grocery stores are already operating on tight profit margins, 2 to 3 percent. So even striving for break-even will only pass along so much savings to consumers. And large corporate retail chains benefit from economies of scale that can be near impossible for these city-run grocery stores.

Which means that these grocery stores, once the mayor opens them up, he says they're going to do things at cost but what is that cost? Are we supposed to believe that the city is going to get a better deal on its groceries than say a Costco, right? Because Costco is buying nationally but the mayor's only trying to buy here locally

so the cost that gets passed on to New Yorkers might not necessarily be this magical break-even number that we're led to believe private businesses will never give us. What's probably going to happen is the city's going to buy a bunch of food. They're going to put it on the shelf and they're going to go down the street to all the other

places in the neighborhood and just undercut them. Because if they don't do that and the city-run store has higher prices than the local stores, this whole idea goes out the window which means they're not actually benefiting from passing anything along at cost.

Zohran Mamdani is advocating for city-owned grocery stores to make food more affordable. How? And the idea is gaining traction. A March 2025 survey of 854 likely New York City voters found that two thirds support the creation

of municipal grocery stores. But they don't understand

what it means.

These stores will operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent and we'll pass on those savings to you.

How? However, critics of Mamdani, like John Katsimatidis, CEO of New York-based supermarket chain Gristidis and Agostino and supporter of President Trump, don't think it will work.

Katsimatidis, who is threatening to close the chain if Mamdani is elected New York City mayor, says there are so many variables involved in running a grocery store in a city.

Almost every grocery store works on a profit margin of 1%, 2%. So everything else is the same. If everything else is the same, if you cut our rent, if you cut our electric costs, then we could sell for the same prices

that Mr. Zoran wants to sell for. The only differential is if we're making 2% and he doesn't want to make it, that's not going to change the prices of the product. People are union workers. They deserve to work.

They deserve to get paid. They deserve to be treated with respect. And Mr. Zoran, I don't think he knows anything about that. He has a great smile and a great gift of talking, but no clue about what the real world is all about. Wow.

Do you not need the support of a billionaire businessman like John Castamatidis?

So they had a meeting. He's not gonna close his grocery stores. Crastides is obviously staying open. But the problem is the writing is now on the wall, one way or the other. Private businesses are gonna have trouble competing with somebody who's got an unfair advantage. And you mark my words,

the city is not gonna open these grocery stores to charge higher prices than private businesses. They have to open and they have to show initially that all these private grocers are scamming people, they're stealing from you, the prices are lower here at the City Run Grocery Store because we don't care about profit.

That has to be the case, even if their input costs are higher. Yet, many New Yorkers for some reason believe socialism is gonna lift people out of poverty.

Three stores, do you think that that's

a model that could work?

Yes. And why? I think there's too many hungry people and too many potatoes here that are $5 a pound.

Yeah, you've got to lower the prices. Is there anything else about Zoran that gets you excited about him?

I'm excited that he gets young people excited and I'm excited to see people standing in line, hopefully, to vote for something new.

And last thing, the number one comment I get on some of my videos is that socialism doesn't work. It's been tried many times. Why do you think it'll work?

This isn't socialism he's talking about social democracy.

You know, social democracy. So these people who obviously can afford life in New York, they think that socialism isn't socialism if people are voting for it. Yeah, go tell that to the people in Venezuela who voted for it. That's how it starts. People vote for other people's money. A machine comes in to take that money away and spend it on free stuff for the people who voted for it and socialism happens.

Government should work to encourage people to thrive and be successful, everybody. It shouldn't be a matter of, it should be equality not supremacy. It should be a matter of bringing everybody up and not just having a few people with entirely too much money.

Too much money. Okay, so these people, they think that other people shouldn't make too much money. Meanwhile, there's probably people looking at them saying that they make too much money. And the problem for everybody in New York is that socialism is coming for everybody's money. That's right. And the most amazing thing to me is you have all of these people who voted for all this free stuff and the tagline was free stuff who's going to pay for it? The rich. They're going to pay for it. But rich what does that actually mean? We heard initially that it was just going to be millionaires and billionaires who were going to pay taxes and then the mayor comes out of the gate and says he wants to raise property taxes across the board

and there are all of these middle-income homeowners who said, hey, wait a second, you want to raise my property tax? I'm not rich enough for that. But the problem is, yes, you are. If you own something that somebody else doesn't own, you are rich enough. That thing you own, it should be taken from you because communism doesn't believe in private property, doesn't believe in private enterprise.

The mayor says he wants to come out and he wants to see the private market try to compete with his city-run grocery stores that have a massive unfair advantage and have unlimited amounts of everybody else's money, including the owners of those grocery stores.

This is gonna be very interesting. This is gonna be very interesting. What do you think's gonna happen?