Now it might be that New Yorkers' tax dollars will offer the wretched of East Harlem relief at the checkout counter. Existing grocers in the neighborhood are calling attention.Best case scenario, the mayor can point to his constituents "benefitting" from the lower sticker prices at Gastronom No. 1, while those exploitive capitalists lose business, and people in Chappaqua and Scarsdale and East Otto pick up the tab.
Mayor Mamdani's plan to open a city-run grocery store is facing pushback from East Harlem grocers, who say the area is already saturated.
— Amanda Macias (@amanda_m_macias) May 5, 2026
About 45 grocery stores are within a 35-minute walk of the proposed site. pic.twitter.com/X2E33bEjM8
Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.And over time, it's likely that Gastronom No. 1 will become even more a drain on those taxpayers.
The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.Whose tax bill, though? Isn't New York already shedding population and tax base?
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