New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to see his city embrace government-owned grocery stores. If elected, Mamdani will join a growing list of city leaders pushing for this model of grocery retail to help eaters manage rising food prices.
Mamdani proposes a network of city-owned grocery stores that do not pay rent or property taxes, which will allow them to keep food prices low. They are designed “to lower prices, not price gouging,” Mamdani explains in a video.
The stores, if developed, will make purchases at wholesale prices, have a centralized warehouse and distribution center, and will not be focused on profit margins.
Similar government supported grocery stores already exist, with stores in St. Paul, Kansas and Atlanta, Georgia. New ones are also currently under development in Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois.
Atlanta established their city-subsidized just last year – but its opening wasn’t straightforward, according to City Councilmember Marci Collier Overstreet. When she came into office in 2018, one of her first priorities was to open more grocery stores in her district. Overstreet thought this would be a “slam dunk,” she tells Food Tank.
But Overstreet faced continuous “doors slammed shut” as large grocery chains refused to even visit her district to consider opening a new store. Then she found Nourish + Bloom, a Black-owned autonomous market offering fresh foods. Invest Atlanta, the executive branch and economic development authority of the city, worked to subsidize a Nourish + Bloom market in Overstreet’s district. After the first location opened, the city added another small-scale market in a popularly attended church in the same district.
“People want to go to church and do their grocery shopping all at once,” Overstreet tells Food Tank.
Justin Myers and Christine C. Caruso, scholars of food systems and community health at Fresno State University and Wesleyan University, respectively, are excited by the growing trend of government-owned grocery stores, from Atlanta to New York.
These stores are “helping us reimagine what type of food system we want in terms of what types of ecological and labor conditions,” Myers tells Food Tank.
Myers and Caruso’s research shows that government-owned grocery stores are possible and the blueprints for public-owned models currently exist, including commissaries on military bases and state-owned liquor stores.
Caruso adds that “the government already does have a lot of infrastructure in place to purchase and distribute food, they do it all the time.” She notes that the Department of Defense “is still one of the largest food vendors in the country.”
Myers is hopeful that these public option grocery store initiatives continue to get people to think big and to connect food policy to housing and jobs policy. “The grocery store by itself, we know, doesn’t necessarily increase geographic and economic access…how could this be part of a broader restructuring of public, community, social relations and space?”
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Photo courtesy of Luca Bravo, Unsplash
