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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. Today it's issue 25, City-Run Grocery Stores. It's one of mayoral front runners around Mamdani's big campaign promises to establish a network of city-owned low-cost grocery stores, one in each borough to combat rising prices and in particular food deserts.

These grocery stores would exist as a public resource under a Mamdani administration, not as a profit-seeking business. Critics say the plan is fiscally irresponsible. That's their side. Joining us now is Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at the Atlantic, to talk about what Mamdani's grocery store proposal could look like in practice, how other cities have tried similar experiments. She's looked at that in depth, and what the skepticism around it tells us about food access and affordability in New York. Hi Yasmin, welcome back to WNYC.

Yasmin Tayag: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can you first explain the proposal in more detail? I think people hear this as a bumper sticker and then most of the coverage goes on to other things. City-run grocery stores, how would they work?

Yasmin Tayag: It's funny you describe it as a bumper sticker because that's all the detail we have from Mamdani. His proposal is to build a network of city-owned affordable grocery stores. He wants to start with a pilot of five grocery stores, one in each of the boroughs. His argument for this is that the city could cover the store's rent and other property related taxes and operating costs, and the stores won't seek a profit and thus allow the grocery store to sell food at cost to New Yorkers. A much cheaper grocery store. He's hoping that this will combat price gouging by the current grocery stores that we have.

Brian Lehrer: How would they obtain food differently from commercial grocery stores, if they would? How would they figure out how to price it? Because they're going to have to buy the food. You estimate it's a $60 million experiment in your--

Yasmin Tayag: That's his estimate.

Brian Lehrer: That's his number. Okay.

Yasmin Tayag: Yes. I've seen other experts put that estimate closer to 400 million, big difference. To get back to your question about how the city would source this food, this is one of the major issues with this proposal. The hardest part for a city-owned grocery, it would be to compete with the big box groceries like Walmart, Costco for low prices from suppliers.

The publicly owned grocery stores would likely be getting their supply from the same places as big box grocery stores. If they're not buying at scale, then it will be tougher to negotiate cheaper prices.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip of Mamdani on News 12, the Long island cable channel, talking a little bit about this.

Mamdani: A network of municipal run grocery stores, one in each borough, so five in total would cost the city $60 million. The city is already set to spend more than $140 million subsidizing corporate supermarket chains without any guarantee of affordability from that subsidy. This is less than half of what we're already set to spend.

Brian Lehrer: The city government subsidizes corporate grocery chains. Can you confirm that?

Yasmin Tayag: Yes. There are a lot of tax subsidies for grocery stores. Some involve tax incentives to open in underserved areas. These can look like rent subsidies, property subsidies. As for the 140 million number that Mamdani quotes, I don't quite know how he calculated that, but I think it is true that the city does spend millions subsidizing grocery stores.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Listeners, we can take comments and questions on this. First, if anybody has an opinion, you can call in. If anybody has experience with publicly run grocery stores, and we're going to give you a few examples of ones that do exist, or if anybody has a question for Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at the Atlantic, 212-433-WNYC call or text. 212-433-9692.

Mostly the reason we invited Yasmin on for this is that she wrote about places elsewhere in the country where it's been tried and we're going to get into some of that. Plot twist first, New York already has a few publicly owned grocery stores, I see. Yet Mamdani's proposal would eliminate rent-- What are these public grocery stores that already exist?

Yasmin Tayag: They're not quite public groceries in the way that Zoran is pitching, but we have public grocery spaces. I'm thinking of the Essex Street Market, which is a city-owned space in which individual grocers set up stalls at lower rent. These have existed since the 1930s. The other type of publicly supported grocery stores, we can call them, are the military commissaries. This is a point that's brought up by a lot of advocates for Mamdani's grocery plan.

Groceries run by the military and thus supported by the government, sell groceries to military families and veterans at prices that are 18 to 25% cheaper than private markets. The closest one to us is probably Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Those have been around for a long time and are can be taken as evidence that a government supported grocery store can run quite well and bring down costs.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know why there are military commissaries in a place like Brooklyn? Is the assumption that military salaries are so low because these are for current enlisted people, I understand. Is that right? Is it that military salaries are so low that the government has decided that they need subsidized grocery stores? They can't just go to, pick the grocery store chain of your choice, and shop like other people?

Yasmin Tayag: I don't actually know the reason why they exist, but they've been around for a very long time.

Brian Lehrer: Now in your article, you found that mostly smaller towns or cities, places like St. Paul, is it St. Paul, Minnesota, or is there a St. Paul, Kansas as well?

Yasmin Tayag: It's a St. Paul, Kansas.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Baldwin, Florida, another place I never heard of. I know Baldwin, Long island, but I don't know Baldwin, Florida, have already tried this. Give us an example of how it works in one of those places.

Yasmin Tayag: The precedents we have for publicly owned grocery stores, like you said, they've mostly existed in rural areas, places with a little over 1000 people. The motivation to have publicly grocery owned stores in these places has largely been a lack of grocery stores. In St. Paul, Kansas, which has its own publicly owned grocery stores, they had not had a supermarket since 1985, before they opened their publicly owned store in 2008.

In these places, without the publicly owned store, people either have to subsist on dollar stores, convenience store food, or drive to the nearest big city where there's a big box store like a Walmart or Albertsons, which is not feasible for many of the people in these communities, especially because a lot of them are older and just don't have the means to get around. In these places the outcomes have been mixed.

Baldwin, Florida they lost their only grocery store in 2018. They opened their own store. That ended up closing because it was just really hard to run, it was hard to operate, it was hard to keep costs down. Baldwin, Florida, Erie, Kansas, I believe, also struggled to keep their store open. There's--

Brian Lehrer: Come on, everybody knows Erie is where Buffalo is anyway. Go ahead.

Yasmin Tayag: Our only Erie is the Erie canal. The St. Paul supermarket is the bright light here. Theirs has been open since 2013 and currently shows no signs of closing. The reasons that it has succeeded is, have been largely chalked up to, what my sources told me is community buy in. The people who lived in that city wanted to keep this supermarket alive because it obviously kept the population fed, but it also provided jobs.

It also recruited people to come to this town, which otherwise is at risk of disappearing. One of my sources told me that that St. Paul supermarket acted as a retention strategy, but also a recruitment strategy for newcomers.

Brian Lehrer: Is there anything for a gigantic city like New York to learn from these small towns, whether the publicly run grocery store there succeeded or failed? Because you're giving us examples of each, places like St. Paul, Kansas or Baldwin, Florida. Can you extrapolate from those experiences at all to what might happen with having one in each borough in New York City?

Yasmin Tayag: I think a few things. One of the biggest things that came out of all of these examples I listed is that grocery stores are really hard to run. They're hard to operate, they're hard to supply, they're hard to keep stocked. My concern with Mamdani's proposal is it takes real expertise to run a grocery store, much less one that has the ambition of having very low prices. I think the community buy in aspect is really important from what we Learned from the St. Paul supermarket.

People have to want to go there. They have to want it to exist. At least going by one of the more recent surveys I've seen, most New Yorkers do support this idea. I think the other big thing that the city would take from these examples is that buying a supply of low-cost groceries is hard. Again, like I said they're competing with big box stores for the supply. If they can't buy at scale, they're unlikely to get as low a price as those bigger chains.

Brian Lehrer: If this is polling well in the city, as you indicate, I wonder if one of the reasons is that New York's poverty rate, which is twice the national average, leaves us with the stats that I think you have, and I've seen stats like this elsewhere, one in three New Yorkers relied on food pantries sometime between 2020 and 2023.

Now, those were the pandemic years, the early years of those, but there's still a lot of relying on food pantries and soup kitchens. They say that's going to get worse with the cutbacks coming in SNAP benefits from the federal government. Does that help explain why this proposal seems to be resonating in the polls?

Yasmin Tayag: I certainly would think so. The fact that the cost of food in New York City has gone up over 50% since 2012, and the rate that those costs have risen is far greater than the rate that people's incomes have increased. It's becoming harder and harder to buy food, and this is particularly hitting the poorest New Yorkers. The latest data from our comptrollers shows that 1 out of 9 households are considered food insecure.

I think the highest percentage of food insecure households are is in the Bronx where it's close to 20%, if not more. With the coming SNAP cuts, which are going to affect some 300,000 households and the added impact of tariffs on our groceries, plus inflation, people are worried about the cost of food. I can understand why they would embrace any change.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few skeptics calling in. We'll get to one or two of those. Peter, you will be second. Peter, in Midtown, we see you. First, we're going to take Annette in Brooklyn because she's got experience, it looks like, with the military grocery stores publicly subsidized by the federal government that we referenced before and weren't quite sure why they're there. Annette, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Annette: Yes. Hi, Brian. Good morning, everyone. I called in to mention that I do live in Brooklyn. I live in the Prospect Heights area. I'm also retired army military. I served for 22 years. I drive to Fort Hamilton to do major grocery shopping because it's a sizable difference in price. The pricing, and I'm talking in excess of $5 to $10 difference in the grocery prices, meaning that there is really no need to revamp. It already exists.

The government, and in this case would be city government, being able to subsidize groceries, the system already exists, is all about mirroring what's already being done. Why the military subsidized groceries? Because of the pay. There is a difference in pay in military pay in comparison to civilians, maybe now is probably comparable. I just wanted to make that point that there is a sizable difference in the prices of food.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that context, Annette. We really appreciate it. Now to Peter in Midtown. You're on WNYC. Hi Peter.

Peter: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was actually doing some quick homework while I was on hold about the history of the commissaries, by the way. The one thing that really popped out to me while I was looking is that it is a benefit for military people. It is not something that should be applied to the general population. We can all support our troops and the people that serve. I think that's fair.

I was actually calling because I know a couple that runs a smaller grocery store. It's called the Food Universe on the Upper East Side, 96 and Lexington Avenue. This is a Korean couple, immigrant couple. It's a family-run business. They know their neighborhood. They have the nicest staff. They're tireless workers. I have been in there at eight o' clock in the morning and seen them there late at night. They work long hours.

In my conversations with the owners, they struggle as it is with making a living. They are dealing with so many different issues and it is exasperating for them. They are being pushed out or affected by large chains and by Amazon. This to me is a striking reason why the idea of city-run grocery stores is so abhorrent to anybody who cares about small business owners just trying to make an honest living.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a follow-up question, and maybe the couple that you know that owns this grocery store has addressed it or maybe not. I think the Mamdani proposal is to locate them, since there's only going to be one in each borough, in places where there are so called food deserts. That may not be the case almost by definition where the people you know own a grocery store, so a grocery store exists there. Are they concerned that this would actually compete with them as opposed to serving an underserved other part of the city?

Peter: I have not asked on this, but I will just say this from my own beliefs is that we are talking about slippery slope politics here. You have one grocery store that is city-owned and it opens up the way for others. Eventually we will all be paying for this in higher taxes, and just like the free bus rides, how do you have free bus and then not end up ever clawing back in a system where people need to get on the bus and pay?

Brian Lehrer: Peter, thank you for your call. The slippery slope argument is a hypothetical. Yasmin, is this consistent with what your reporting has indicated? I know your reporting was mostly what's happened in other smaller places, but do you know enough to say that a lot of grocery store owners in New York City are expressing this concern? Whether it's the slippery slope concern that, "Aha, put one in each borough at first and soon they'll be all over and we're all going to go out of business," or even that the one would actually compete if their grocery stores are not in the same neighborhood.

Yasmin Tayag: I would say Peter's arguments align with the main criticisms of Zohran's grocery plan, which is these government owned stores are going to compete with small businesses bodegas, run them out of business. It's unfair of Mamdani to point to grocery stores for price gouging when they're not actually making all that much money in the first place. That part that is true.

The profit margins for a grocery store are famously very slim. It's like 1% to 3%. I think there's two issues. One, the slippery slope argument, sure, if half the grocery stores in New York City someday become publicly owned, will it squash small businesses? Probably. I think it's important to be realistic about what Mamdani can do in four years. He's setting up five. They are going to be in food deserts.

We're not talking the Upper east side. We're talking deep Queens, Coney Island. Those are like the biggest food deserts in the metro area. Are they really going to squash local bodegas? I don't think so. To Peter's point, I understand, of course, it makes sense that there are grocery stores that are really struggling, but I think their biggest competition is the big box stores like Amazon, the Costco on the Upper east side. I don't think it's going to be the one grocery store that is set up far away from that area.

Brian Lehrer: I want to acknowledge, as we start to run out of time, that we're getting a number of calls and texts from people who are members of the Park Slope Coop, Park Slope Food Coop in particular, with a few different points of view on this. Let me go to a couple of these briefly, Russell in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Russell. Can you do it about 30 seconds?

Russell: Sure. I'd say that I'm a member of the coop for a long time. Prices are extremely high. Even with free labor, margins are extremely thin [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know food coops, it's run basically by volunteers. You could tell me if there are any paid employees, but largely members volunteer their time and it's a nonprofit.

Russell: It's a nonprofit. There are paid workers who are actually expertise in sourcing groceries. It is not a simple business, the city's efficiency to do this. We have a number of produce buyers and all sorts of things. Even despite the fact that there is no labor cost for the coop, or it's very minimal, the prices are still extraordinarily high.

Unless we're going to completely subsidize all the food, which is again going to be a policy position, but these are thin at best. Even when margins are not a topic of concern, prices are still high because food inflation is really high.

Brian Lehrer: The difference is the Park Slope Food Coop has to support itself. This by definition would be subsidized by tax dollars. Are you concerned that there would be competition for the food coop, that it would hurt the Park Slope Food Coop, or are you just using that as an example of how hard it is to maintain affordability?

Russell: I'm just using that as an example of how unprofitable these adventures can be. If five stores, I understand it's perhaps a start, but unless you have scale through, and your guests are saying you need community buy in, the coop is very populated, but if people don't want to go there, it's going to be a failure.

Brian Lehrer: That's not going to work. Russell, thank you very much. One more from a Park Slope Food Coop member, John in Astoria, who I think is going to say it could be used as a model for these. John, is that right? We have 30 seconds for you.

John: Yes. I have to disagree with the previous Parks folk Food Coop member. Prices are high, but relative to regular grocery stores are cheaper for the same product, a lot cheaper. I think the coop keeps its markup to 26% and still runs very effectively. Yes, it needs expertise. One advantage I believe would be that the real estate tax would not be there for a city-owned grocery store and it does need community buy in. You could use a somewhat model similar to the coop where if you volunteered labor, you would even get more of a discount.

Brian Lehrer: Members of the Park Slope Food Coop disagreeing with each other. I'm shocked. John, thank you very much.

Yasmin Tayag: [inaudible 00:25:51] more drama there.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. More drama on the weekend over the vegetable aisle. We're going to leave it there. That's issue 25 in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series around the proposal from Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for a city-run grocery store in each borough to make food more affordable for people who can't afford it now. My guest has been Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at the Atlantic. You can read her piece, New York is Hungry for a big Grocery Experiment. Thanks a lot for coming on.

Yasmin Tayag: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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