What socialism promises and what it delivers are two different things, and New York City’s small-market owners are now finding out firsthand. “I’m scared to be put out of business, because I’m here 25 years,” and I can’t compete, store owner Elvis Arias told CBS New York.1
Elvis has stood behind the counter at the America Deli Mini Market in East Harlem, New York City for twenty-five years. When socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani came to the neighborhood to unveil a city-owned supermarket a block away, at the old La Marqueta market, he set up outside Arias’s storefront and never bothered to go inside to greet him.
There was no debate or vote on Elvis’ block—just a plan, announced on his sidewalk, by a man who does not want to hear from anyone because he already claims to know what people want. Ken Roldan, who leads the Multicultural Business Coalition, says he tried to arrange a meeting about Mamdani’s plan—“but to no avail,” he told CBS.2
So, the grocers stopped asking and started filing lawsuits.
The State as Your Competitor
The Multicultural Business Coalition—about fifty ethnic chambers of commerce speaking for as many as a thousand minority-owned bodegas and supermarkets—filed two lawsuits in New York State Supreme Court.3 One is a class action invoking state civil rights law and the equal protection clause of the New York Constitution.4 The other says the city has no legal authority to build the stores at all.5
Read these claims again. Immigrant shopkeepers are in court arguing that a democratic socialist mayor has exceeded the powers the law gives him and that no one cared about the ensuing damage.
“There is no extant evidence that the respondents have undertaken any studies and/or serious analysis before its current arbitrary site selection,” the suit says, alleging the city never examined the effect on family stores run by legal immigrant Hispanic, Arab and Asian New Yorkers.6
The lack of due diligence is telling. Socialist Mamdani did not bother to conduct a market study because the market is what he aims to replace. Mamdani’s campaign promised “a network of city-owned grocery stores aimed at maintaining low prices rather than generating profit.” Public ownership was never about affordability. Socialism takes over businesses; affordability was the pretext.
Prices by Decree
Seventy million dollars in taxpayer capital funds for five stores, $30 million for East Harlem alone, with no rent or property taxes, and all losses absorbed by taxpayers. A core basket of produce, meat, and seafood, plus twenty-odd categories of staples, priced 30 percent below retail for every shopper, regardless of income, at prices the city sets and revises on its own schedule rather than the market’s.7
Subsidized government grocery stores will compete against 13,000 bodegas operating on margins of one to three percent. “You cannot expect hard-working small business owners to compete with a supermarket that isn’t going to pay rent, won’t have to pay an electric bill and won’t have to buy their products at full price,” coalition counsel Mark Jaffe said. “No one will be subsidizing them.”
Note the competition: it’s not Amazon or Walmart; it’s the City of New York, with a $124.7 billion budget, that has entered the produce business to compete against mom-and-pop shop owners who have one cash register.
The mayor’s defense is scale: 8.5 million people and more than a thousand grocery stores, so five city-run stores cannot break the market. He is “confident both in the legality of this” and “in the importance of delivering it.”8 Using an average like this is a central planner’s oldest comfort. The subsidy does not spread across the 8.5 million people. It lands squarely on the shoulders of the mom-and-pop stores that Mamdani will put out of business with taxpayer money.
City Hall knows this. During the site tour, an economic development official floated the possibility of grants to reassure worried store owners, but the agency later retreated to abatements and zoning benefits. First, the state undercuts the small businessman, then it offers relief from itself. That is not a safety net; that is forced dependency masquerading as charity.
The Market La Guardia Built for Immigrants
La Marqueta is not a neutral address. Former mayor Fiorello La Guardia opened it in 1936 as the Park Avenue Retail Market, one of ten city markets built to turn immigrant pushcart peddlers into merchants with roofs and leases. A Republican mayor used public funds to make immigrants owners. Now, a socialist mayor is using the same building to make the city their competitor.
Mamdani’s socialist plan is a multi-step economic chain reaction that begins with subsidized underpricing, leads to the eradication of competition and culminates in monopoly pricing and supply distortions, and this is where the discount ends.
Milk starts out at four dollars and drops to $2.80 in the city store. Let enough bodegas close, and a gallon rises to six dollars, and the same 30 percent off yields $4.20—more than the price before the socialist mayor arrived to save everyone money.9
“The Puerto Ricans were the bodega pioneers,” says Jairo Guzman of the New York State Mexican Chamber of Commerce, tracing the trade through Dominican, Arab, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican hands. Sixty years of immigrant capital, built without a subsidy, are now suing the man who pretends to represent the working man. Roldan says it most clearly: “Mamdani says that he’s the champion of the disenfranchised and the working-class New Yorkers, of which this strategy demonstrates that he is not.”10
Mamdani stood ten feet from a glass door that Elvis kept open for twenty-five years. Opening it required no feasibility study, no site selection, no $70 million—only the honesty to hear an opinion from the other side. He stayed outside and called the result affordability.
So a judge will now settle what New York City’s socialist mayor would not address. And if the state wins, East Harlem gets exactly what it was promised: thirty percent off, on shelves the city owns, in the only store left in business. Welcome to Caracas, Venezuela!
Photo Credit: © Simon– stock.adobe.com
Footnotes
- https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-city-run-grocery-store-lawsuit/
- https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-city-run-grocery-store-lawsuit/
- https://www.latintimes.com/bodega-coalition-sues-mamdani-over-city-run-grocery-store-plan-598826
- https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-owned-grocery-plan-sued-lawsuit-explained
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/zohran-mamdani-lawsuit-city-owned-grocery-stores
- https://nypost.com/2026/08/24/business/immigrant-grocers-sue-mamdani-compare-nyc-plan-for-government-owned-supermarkets-to-walmart/
- https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-unveils-30–discount—including-all-produce–all-
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/zohran-mamdani-lawsuit-city-owned-grocery-stores
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Mercal
- https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-city-run-grocery-store-lawsuit/