Mayor Mamdani says that his new municipal grocery stores will provide New Yorkers with big savings. The fine print suggests they may not.

by Will Boisvert

One of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s splashiest campaign promises is coming true: he’s opening five city-owned grocery stores that will offer big discounts on food to cash-strapped Gothamites.

Critics have asked whether starting government-subsidized stores is fair to competing private grocers, and whether it accomplishes much to sell New Yorkers cheaper food on one end by taxing them more on the other. But there’s a deeper question: will Mamdani-Mart really be cheaper? Maybe not.

The municipal stores will be cheaper—at least on a few items—according to the Mayor’s pitch at a press conference :

“This core set of goods will include all fresh produce, meat and seafood along with twenty essential items like cheese, milk and bread. Here’s how it will work. Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30 percent below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations nor sticker shock at the checkout line.”

Mamdani estimated the discount would save New Yorkers $90 per month on grocery bills, which does sound cheap.

But here’s the problem: the phrase “thirty percent below typical retail prices” is pretty murky because there’s not much that’s “typical” about retail grocery prices. And depending on how the city defines, surveys, and calculates that “typical retail prices” benchmark, Madani’s 30-percent discount might be no lower, and sometimes even higher, than what a shopper would pay at a private store.

Grocery prices depend on a myriad of distinctions and segmentations: fresh vs. frozen; name brand versus private-label store brand; convenience size vs. economy size; organic vs. rational. These different options come with wildly varying prices. Adding in sales and club memberships makes prices even harder to disentangle from variations, exceptions, gimmicks, and special deals. The seemingly straightforward benchmark of “typical retail prices” is in realty a complex and obscure target that might not bear much relation to what a given shopper actually pays.

Take the Key Food supermarket at 187^th and Broadway in Washington Heights, where I shop for corn flakes. How much do they cost? It depends. On a recent trip, an 18-ounce box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes sold for $7.19, or $6.40 per pound, but the 24-ounce giant size cost $7.99 per box, or $5.33 per pound. It’s the same product, but the bigger box has a 17 percent savings per corn flake over the smaller box. (Note: all the prices in this article were current as of late August, 2026. If they sound outlandishly high, you don’t live in Manhattan.)

But Key Foods goes cheaper still on corn flakes. Its private-label brand, Urban Meadow—not as good as luxury brand Kellogg’s, but palatable—sells for $4.29 per 18-ounce box, just $3.81 per pound. Urban Meadow is 40 percent cheaper than the 18-ounce box of Kellogg’s and 26 percent cheaper than the average of all three prices. Except when it’s on sale for $3.39 per box, $3.01 per pound: that happens every two or three weeks, which is when I stock up. (Will Mamdani-Mart have a house brand—Collectivist Warmth?—that beats that?)

So which of those many prices will set Mamdani-Mart’s “typical retail” benchmark? And how much savings will the 30 percent discount represent? If you average all four prices above and then deduct 30 percent, Urban Meadow’s weekly sales price would still beat the Mamdani-Mart price.

The corn flakes example shows how complicated and opaque the notion of typical retail prices is. It also undermines the Mayor’s premise that the city must open its own stores to bring affordable groceries to the masses. Affordability is not a new phenomenon discovered in DSA research labs. It has always been a subject of intense, even maniacal focus in the grocery sector and the larger food industry. If you want exquisite flavor, chic brands or dainty packaging, grocers happily sell that at premium prices. But if you can only afford meh-tasting store brands in bulk and very cheap, they grudgingly sell you that instead—before the next store does.

The whole Key Foods works that way. If you can’t afford Land ‘O’ Lakes butter at $6.99 per pound, or Hotel Bar or Breakstones at $5.99, you can get Urban Meadow butter at $3.99, a discount of 33 to 43 percent off the name brands. (Or you can wait for Hotel Bar or Breakstones to go on sale at $3.99, which one of them does every few weeks, and stock up.)

If you don’t want Eggland’s Best eggs at $5.39 per dozen, you can get Sunshine Farms’ 18-pack at $3.39 per dozen, a 37 percent discount, or Urban Meadow eggs at $1.79 per dozen, which is a 49 percent discount off the average of those three prices. You can spring for a 5-pound bag of Riceland Rice at $1.26 per pound or the 10-pound Urban Meadow rice bag at $0.60 per pound, less than half the price. Or if, like me, you want Riceland but cheaper, you can go to Dan’s Supermarket, a few blocks away, and schlep home a 20-pound bag for $14.99, $0.75 per pound—a 40 percent discount compared to the exact same rice at Key Food’s.

Let’s talk about fresh produce, the Holy Grail of food activists. (That’s why Mamdani led with it in his litany of discounted items.) Now, follow me here. Key Foods has a big fresh produce section, so I went there and wrote down some prices, like Pero green beans at $5.32 per pound and a special on Attitude baby spinach at $7.98 per pound. Then I did what most single men like me do when they are in the fresh produce section: I left and went to the frozen foods aisle. There I found Birdseye frozen chopped spinach, regularly priced at $4.14 per pound, 48 percent cheaper than the fresh stuff, but on sale that week for $2.40 per pound, beating out Urban Meadow chopped spinach at $2.99 per pound. Urban Meadow frozen green beans were running at $2.99 per pound, 44 percent cheaper than fresh. Over in canned foods, Green Giant green beans cost $2.97 per pound while Goya cost $2.09, cheaper still.

What I’m getting at, fresh-produce militants, is that your Holy Grail is a chalice of nonsense. Frozen and canned vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh, easier to store and prepare, and way cheaper. (They may not taste great, but neither do fresh vegetables, from what I hear; vegetables as a whole are just a face-saving pretext for eating the good-tasting stuff we slather them with—butter, salt, dressing, cheese, hamburger—to make them palatable.) To believe that we need Mamdani-Mart’s 30-percent discount to bring fresh vegetables to the food desert—a major selling point—is to misunderstand vegetables.

And then there’s Aldi, the ultimate free-market retort to Mamdani’s affordability socialism. The German-headquartered chain has spread through the United States like panzer divisions through Belgium selling super-discount groceries. Now, Aldi really sucks. It has a skimpy selection, mainly of so-so store brands, and the ambiance is a cross between church food pantry and Yukon trading post. Walking into Aldi you feel like you have reached the end of the line, one stop past selling your blood—exactly the mood that Americans are in these days.

Shoppers are flocking there partly out of despair, but also because Aldi is incredibly cheap. At the Aldi near Mamdani’s planned Harlem grocery store, milk was going for $4.10 per gallon, 25 percent off the $5.45 at Key Foods. Indeed, Aldi regularly beats the prices at low-cost behemoths WalMart and Kroger by 25 to 30 percent, reports Errol Schweizer at his excellent grocery substack, The Checkout. (And yeah, you can get your sacred almighty fresh produce there.)

Aldi achieves Mamdani-scale discounts not with government subsidies but with the usual grinding, dispiriting, capitalist cost-cutting. They offer just one or a few options per item, Schweizer notes, which hugely simplifies logistics; they use non-union labor; and they cut down on that labor by selling fresh produce in easy-to-handle bags rather than, Schweizer writes, hiring workers to display it unwrapped on altars where it is “misted, gently handled, layed out and rotated” as at fancier stores. (In other words, Aldi understands what vegetables are: things that you have to eat but will never want to eat.)

Given all these complexities, and the very low prices stores already on offer on the cheap end of the spectrum, the question of whether Mamdani-Mart will provide real savings hinges on how they assess the “typical retail” benchmark for the 30-percent discount. If the benchmark uses broad category averages, lumps together different package volumes, aggregates name brands with store brands, and overlooks Aldi, then the 30-percent discount would likely not be cheaper than the lowest prices at other stores.

But municipal stores might instead set many benchmarks for each variation and segmentation of a category: one for 12-pack eggs and another for 18-pack eggs; one for name brands and another for cheap private-label brands like Urban Meadow. The Harlem Mamdani-Mart could benchmark prices at the nearby Aldi, which are going to be near rock bottom. Then they could knock 30 percent off each separate benchmark to set the price.

Schweizer, who is consulting with the city on the municipal stores and strongly supports them, told me that the benchmarking procedure is still uncertain. (My email on this subject to the Mayor’s press office went unanswered.) Schweizer advocates the latter approach, and indeed it would deliver significant savings on Mamdani’s basket of core staples. (It would also hike the subsidy the stores need, something the budget-conscious Mamdani administration may balk at.)

How much savings this would yield is still a question. Aldi is already so cheap that shaving 30 percent off their prices might not add up to Mayor Mamdani’s estimate of $90 per month in savings. It also seems that the benchmark, which would set a single month-long price, will not factor in weekly sales at other stores—the “fluctuations” that the Mayor frowns upon—which are a major component of low-price offerings. Weekly sales can knock 50 percent off “typical prices,” so a benchmark that doesn’t take them into account will overstate what shoppers are paying elsewhere—and the savings they would reap at Mamdani-Mart.

Beyond the pricing procedure, there’s a still larger question: what problem would municipal grocery stores solve? Is there a gaping affordability hole that only Mamdani-Mart can fill?

I don’t think so. Given the wide spread between the high end of the grocery price spectrum and the Urban Meadow/Aldi low end, there is a good case to be made that grocers have wrung all the affordability there is to be had from their corner of the food system: if anybody could go lower, somebody would. The municipal stores might—or might not—cut a further 30 percent from a 23-staples basket, but only with taxpayer subsidies. (And note that there is no promise of savings on the majority of Mamdani-Mart’s items outside the core staples.)

This is not much of an affordability triumph. Imagine a shopper who switches from trolling Key Food or Aldi to relying exclusively on Mamdani-Mart. Maybe she will save 30 percent on the 23-staples core basket, depending on how the city benchmarks “typical retail prices.” But on her other purchases she might pay more than the Urban Meadow/Aldi floor, and she would miss out on Key Foods weekly specials that could save her 43 percent off butter or 50 percent off canned chicken breast. The result would likely be an affordability wash.

Of course, there is an affordability hole for people too poor to afford even the cheapest groceries, which governments fill by subsidizing food stamps, school lunches, food pantries and soup kitchens. Municipal grocery stores don’t add anything there, either. They could offer larger discounts, even a 100 percent discount, the ultimate in affordability; that would make them 23-staples food pantries. City Hall could take the millions it will spend subsidizing municipal stores and instead use the money to expand the food pantry system that it already spends millions to subsidize. That might be a better affordability initiative for people who need it most. Viewed against that paradigm, Mamdani-Marts look rather strange: they are like food pantries that, instead of giving food away for free, charge money for it—albeit 30 percent less than they would charge if they weren’t so concerned about affordability.

Which leads me to think that municipal grocery stores are more about ideology than affordability. Mayor Mamdani brands himself as a left-populist sewer socialist who builds apartments, fixes potholes, and generally takes care of business. Behind the drive for municipal grocery stores is the socialist conviction that the state can run the economy better than capitalism while making it more rational, efficient, fair and affordable. But the American grocery sector, with its thin profit margins, exacting efficiencies, vigorous competition and wide range of price points, is not a great showcase for that proposition. It’s not clear that New York’s socialist grocers, even with subsidies, will outdo private grocers in supplying affordable food.

Shoppers who crave the warmth of collectivism—and there are many of them in New York—will flock to Mamdani-Mart regardless. So will others who don’t want to squint at every price-tag, who suspect a con behind every sales come-on, and who will gratefully relax their price-vigilance and put their faith in a plain-dealer like the Mayor who promises to minimize their costs and earns no profit from cheating and gouging them. Still, bargain-hunters should heed the old admonition: You’d better shop around.