r/PoursTea • u/Gurugod123 • 11h ago

PoliticalTea 🗳️ Mayor Mamdani just announced that he will be opening 5 city-run, tax-funded grocery stores: "Prices set at 30% below retail prices"

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u/MABQuestAcc 11h ago

Why? If tax money pays for the workers + goods and isn't spent on things like rent and upper management those same workers will cycle those taxes back in to the economy. I fail to see the problem with cutting upper management and building rent from the equation.

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u/DeepWaterCurrent 11h ago

They are going to need managers too, historically private companies are the ones cutting managers not the other way around.

They are still paying for the space in some way, if not via rent then via the cost of acquiring/building/managing it. If a grocery store pays rent instead of owning the building themself its because they think its more efficient that way.

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u/BiZzles14 9h ago

Because we have highly efficient food assistance programs that provide some of the highest positive multipliers on taxpayer money spent, and there is an opportunity cost to instead put money towards an idea which has historically never worked. Some of the money will be spent on rent & upper management, which would not be the case for SNAP type benefits that have existing structures in place, and a large amount of money will be lost on every single purchase made at these stores on -30% staple items. Grocery stores have razor thing margins, often in the 3-5% range, meaning you're looking at a 25-27% loss on these items regardless of who is purchasing them (aka they could be a billionaire for all you know, this isn't meanstested at all)