New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to open five city-run grocery stores has grocery industry executives—and other political foes—clutching their pearls. Critics call it a socialist fantasy. But publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail. We need more public grocery stores, not fewer.
The affordability crisis is crushing American families. Grocery prices have spiked 32 percent since 2019, with even sharper increases in meat, frozen foods, and snacks—categories that make up over 50 percent of Americans’ calories and are dominated by a handful of conglomerates. Market concentration has enabled food giants to raise prices, while actual consumption has flatlined since 2019.
The numbers are starker in New York, where 85 percent of New Yorkers are paying more for groceries than they did last year and 91 percent are concerned about inflation’s impact on their food bills.
Supermarket closures are another major issue. While several grocery chains have expanded, these openings are unevenly distributed, often bypassing the very neighborhoods that have lost supermarkets. In many working-class areas, closures have left residents relying on discount chains and liquor outlets instead. The lack of grocery stores isn’t something that can be fixed by the Robinson-Patman Act, enacted during the New Deal to prevent price discrimination by large retail buyers at the expense of smaller competitors. New York already has one of the least concentrated grocery markets in the country, and trust-busting won’t make new grocery stores open in low-income neighborhoods.
In New York, as nationally, the crisis of affordability is real and food apartheid is, too. Food consumption is deeply divided by race, class, and geography. This is a structural problem, and there’s a long history of ideas for structural solutions.
Some of the best visions for the future come from outside the United States. Bulgaria announced plans to roll out 1,500 rural grocery stores, buying local produce and reselling at cost to support both farmers and underserved rural consumers. From South Korea to the European Union, governments are strengthening public and local supply chains.
But we can look even closer to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military.
The Pentagon’s Grocery
Every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA). With 236 stores worldwide, DeCA is a retail behemoth, generating over $4.6 billion in annual revenue. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation. In 2023 alone, U.S. military families, veterans, and other eligible shoppers saved an estimated $1.6 billion on their grocery bills.
“We can look close to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”
The model is simple and effective. Commissaries are not profit centers; they are cost centers. By law, they operate on a cost-plus model, selling goods at what they pay for them, plus a 5 percent surcharge that covers the cost of store construction and modernization. DeCA leverages the immense, centralized buying power of the entire Department of Defense to negotiate rock-bottom prices from suppliers.
Furthermore, commissary workers are federal employees, often unionized, with stable pay and benefits. This removes labor costs from the individual stores’ balance sheets and ensures that the mission of providing affordable food isn’t compromised by the downward pressure on wages that defines the private retail industry. The result is a system that delivers low prices and high-quality service and is immensely popular with service members, demonstrating that a government-run, nonprofit grocery model can thrive at scale.
Scale for Victory
Skeptics will say it won’t work outside the military, pointing to small attempts like one in Baldwin, Florida, where a municipal grocery closed last year, or Chicago’s stalled plans, or other failed public-private partnerships. The scorn these failures attract is both wrong and right.
Wrong because the status quo is demonstrably bad. Where are these critics when Aldi or Lidl gain market share with cookie-cutter, vertically integrated discount models that displace diverse, unionized operators, or when dollar stores swamp neighborhoods with misleading prices and low-quality, ultra-processed foods?
Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains. They can anchor broader food justice efforts, creating demand for values-based purchasing that prioritizes worker dignity, environmental sustainability, and racial equity. (Mamdani’s commitment to minimum wage increases and safety nets are of a piece with public grocery policy.)
Critics are right, however, to note that grocery is a business of scale. Public groceries can succeed, but only with the scale and operational sophistication of proven models. Half-measures will inevitably fail.
Existing—and Successful—Models
There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.
Stock no more than 1,500 carefully selected products instead of 30,000. Buy in massive volumes. Employ union workers as municipal employees, removing labor costs from individual store budgets.
And make it joyful and dignified to work and shop there.
“Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains.”
There are already foundations on which to build. New York City’s Good Food Purchasing Program, for example, requires school food vendors to meet standards for nutrition, environmental impact, and fair labor. Such values-based procurement was inspired by private sector supply chain standards, which brought premium quality products to consumers. The Good Food Purchasing Program shows we can do this without the steep prices.
Why stop at lunch trays? Public grocery stores could bring high standards full circle, creating demand for ethical producers who are locked out of centralized supermarket, dollar store, or discounter supply chains, while offering best-in-market prices to consumers.
Public grocery stores could be the first step to scaling up and anchoring vertically integrated public food systems. Municipal processing and manufacturing could aggregate demand for local, sustainably grown products as the basis for shelf-stable goods—soups, frozen meals, snacks—normally dominated by a handful of conglomerates. This would lower the risk for values-based farmers while making good food the most affordable option, not the most expensive.
Starting up such an operation won’t be cheap, but doing it successfully will save New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars off their grocery bills every year. Our calculations, exclusive to Civil Eats and unpublished elsewhere, show that operating five full-service stores across all New York’s boroughs would require at least $20 million per year each, assuming good union labor rates and free rent.
Those costs can drop a little if a Costco-like warehouse model is adopted; however, the expense of running 20 such stores (and keeping them medium size) is north of $400 million per year.
That’s a small investment in addressing hunger in a city as big as New York, which already purchases more than $300 million worth of food for vital city programs. Other public services that New Yorkers benefit from require even higher funding.
For example, the New York City police department budget is over $10 billion a year. Our public grocery estimate is less than 4 percent of that. The fire department budget is over $2.6 billion and the department of sanitation’s is $2 billion. The city’s budget adds up to more than $112 billion a year. So, while $400 million is a substantial sum, it would be a rounding error, 0.36 percent of the annual budget.
“There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.”
Much of this budget would cover the overhead expenses and profit margins that customers typically pay for in the form of high retail prices, but New Yorkers will keep this money in their pockets. The budget also leaves plenty of room for growth if the concept is embraced by New Yorkers. There’s reason to think that stores with low prices and high ethics would work in the Big Apple. And if they can make it there, they can make it anywhere.
Food inflation is rife and set to get worse. As Trump’s tariffs, immigration crackdowns, federal nutrition program and local food supply chain cuts, defunding of food banks, and SNAP cuts worsen food apartheid, public groceries offer a proven, pragmatic policy solution.
The idea is certainly being taken seriously by grocery sector labor unions. Faye Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers 3000, argues that giant companies like Krogers and Albertsons are closing stores and “transforming themselves into companies that are more focused on collecting and selling customer data than they are on selling food.”
In the face of this, she told us by email, “We need a public option in the supermarket industry—stores that are focused on providing healthy food in our communities while providing jobs with good wages and benefits. The public sector already has large, efficient food supply chains through municipal education departments and through the U.S. military commissary system, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Publicly owned supermarkets should find the right way to piggyback on those systems.”
Beyond a Broken Model
The grocery industry will claim that public groceries hurt small businesses, ignoring the fact that the greatest threat to those businesses is the unchecked proliferation of chains like Dollar General and the predatory pricing power of giants like Walmart and Aldi. They will call it an inefficient government boondoggle, hoping no one notices the efficiency of the military commissary system.
The truth is that the ground has already shifted. Two-thirds of New York City voters now support the creation of public grocery stores, because anything that helps meet the crisis of affordability is going to be welcome.
They’re not alone. Thirteen states have begun to explore public grocery stores. Communities across the nation are tired of corporate price gouging, empty shelves, and a food system designed to extract maximum wealth rather than nourish them.
The solution lies in thinking upstream, in building public alternatives that operationalize the Right to Food, a concept supported by over 80 percent of Americans, adopted by Maine in 2021, and being explored by a range of other states, too.
The blueprint is clear. With the commissary as a template, take a page from Costco: pile the produce high, staff the floor with union labor, stock the shelves with good food, offer home delivery, and make it as beautiful as the New York Public Library, because the working class deserve nothing but the best.
If the private market cannot or will not deliver affordable, nutritious food to all its citizens—and it has proven that it won’t—then the public sector must.
The post Op-ed: Public Grocery Stores Already Exist and Work Well. We Need More. appeared first on Civil Eats.
