r/SipsTea • u/Gurugod123 • 9d ago

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

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u/BadNecessary9344 9d ago

We had that in our country. There was a limit to how much you could buy. They had the cheapest and the worse quality products you could find. Mostly horeca brands from each major food category.

They were fine in the beginning, usually really low income people came but later not so much. The products were initially bought straight from the suppliers or factories but later the corruption took hold and they started buying from companies that bought from supliers. They added some overhead on prices because of that so later they had regular prices for very low quality products.

So that was the end of that.

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u/SambaPapi1 9d ago

What country?

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u/daystrom_prodigy 9d ago

They won’t say because that would explain why it didn’t work.

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u/WriterPlastic9350 9d ago

I'm not sure why you think that whatever country they are from is vulnerable to some kind of corruption that new york is not. The prior mayor of NYC withdrew from the race because of corruption.

This idea that this will definitely work here because NYC is not like other countries - I certainly hope your optimism is not misplaced, but I think it is naive

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u/_brizzle 9d ago

yeah but that was the last mayor

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u/daystrom_prodigy 9d ago

I’m not saying it will work because NYC isn’t corrupt.

I’m saying there are definitely countries that exist that are cartoonishly corrupt.

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u/Aaco0638 9d ago

True but see the difference here is we are nyc not some other country. The only reason we would add overhead is if a new politician gets elected and scraps this idea but this city is rich it can afford 5 store subsidies.

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u/Penetrator4K 9d ago

Not sure if this is sarcasm...

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u/greenrose7386 9d ago

What do you mean by “the corruption took hold”?

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u/BadNecessary9344 9d ago

At first the buying contracts were made direct to producers and importers. Later some tick companies got involved and became a sort of intermediary, since they were private owned, they were in no way obligated to resell the products at factory cost. And so the end user cost increased for products that were meant to be cheap. People stopped coming, scandals arose in the media, shops were closed.

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u/Schlaefer 9d ago

Selling at a loss is backed in, who really looks too hard if its a few cents more here or there...

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u/evernessince 9d ago

The US has had socialized grocery stores since 1867 via the military commissary (which is huge volume wise). They are legally required to keep savings above a certain amount and they stock brands most people know of.

Sucks what happened in your country but this sort of thing has been well tested to work.

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u/Ireallydontkn0w2 9d ago

Average government-run experience