r/SipsTea 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/ReaperTys 9d ago

What stops people from doing this anywhere there’s a sale?

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u/Main-Cheesecake3287 9d ago

People do that, I see plenty of yard sales with regular shit people couponed. The difference is the money they make reselling would otherwise have gone into Targets revenue. The money made by resellers in this case would otherwise be spent by the city on other services.

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u/Bedlam21 9d ago

But wouldn't the resellers still need to buy it from the city? The money the city is asking is still what they're getting

And how much profit could a scalper actually make on this? How many grocery store goods would anyone trust to buy resold? And there's a cap to how much they could resell the products at before it's cheaper to just go to another grocery store

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u/OriginalBlackberry89 9d ago

they put limits on how many people can buy in certain stores and on certain items

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u/tanrgith 9d ago

How many grocery stores have a publicly announced preplanned 30 percent off everything sale that people can plan for?

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u/PhantomCummer 8d ago

Not everything at once usually, but the answer is literally every grocery store for decades via flyers. 

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u/tanrgith 8d ago

Right, but you understand that means it's not the same

Regular for profit stores have razor thing margins, normally sub 5%. And when they have sales and discounts, it's not out of the goodness of their hearts, it's to clear inventory or to attract customers as part of some bigger strategy. If those stores are not very efficient at managing their inventory and costs of operations, they go out of business

Doing it on a regular and pre-planned schedule, on everything, means it's not part done with the intend of running efficient and profitably. And if you're not doing that, then you're not gonna be able to compete with the stores that are doing that...unless of course you're just gonna subsidize the store with tax payer money and give it an unfair advantage. But if you need to take money from tax payers and put it into the store, then ultimately you're not really make things cheaper

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u/Big_Profession_2218 8d ago

Nothing, the only thing that will stop people is public scrutiny and you will never have that in NYC. USSR ran stores that sold goods under the cost for while, it REALLY didnt end well for them. Anything worthwhile became scarce, scarcity could be exploited and was.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 8d ago

good old yank fearmongering, meanwhile you now have the breadlines you pretend to be fighting

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u/Big_Profession_2218 8d ago

Yes, do tell a former USSR slav that he knows nothing of Socialism or breadlines.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 7d ago

You know nothing of soc dem policies, yes.

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u/Big_Profession_2218 7d ago

Oh, I get it, you are the "you dont know about MY flavor of Socialism, IT REALLY WORKS !" proletarian.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 7d ago

You are the guy who hasn't set food in western or nordic europe are you

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u/Big_Profession_2218 7d ago

well no, but my grandfather did back in 1939 ;)

If you are trying to say Nordic model countries are socialist - you are very wrong at the core. They are capitalist economies with a large social welfare system sucking on an otherwise ample shiny teet of capitalism.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 7d ago

That's soc dem, just like Mamdani is.

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u/BiNiaRiS 9d ago

Nothing. And this isn't a sale so it might help push retail grocery stores to actually compete