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Valuetainment

“$6M To $30M” - Mamdani's ‘Free Grocery’ Plan BLOWS Budget BEFORE Opening

Valuetainment

Valuetainment Episodes

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4.81.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A socialist backed plan for free New York City grocery stores sounds compassionate, but will it work. Lyn Alden joins Patrick Bet David to break down razor thin grocery margins, government inefficiency and why SNAP reform would cost less.

Transcript

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0:00.0

As we're going through this topic with affordability, and people are like, well, you know, and nothing's going to happen. You know, the red conservatives are still going to win. Economy is going to be fine. Mamdani beats everybody in New York City. And he came out. He's a socialist, Islamist, that came out, and he won New York City financial capital the world. And then he said he's going to have grocery stores that he's going to build free, free for folks who are having a hard time and all this other stuff, you know, eggs, the main essential stuff that they're going to do. People still don't know exactly what the system's going to be. And he said for 60 million we'll be able to build in five different boroughs and all this other stuff. And they just launched their first. And the first one's going to cost roughly 3030 million, Rob. If you want to pull up the one, the video of him announcing this of Domani with the new grocery

0:44.2

store that's coming out, is that the one, Rob?

0:46.0

You just had it a, is that the one?

0:48.5

Go for it.

0:49.5

At the first of your grocery stores will open next year, why is it taking so long? I feel like a bodega

0:56.0

opens every other week across New York City and every neighborhood. Why take so long to start this

1:02.5

session? Well, I think for a few reasons. The first is that we are talking about building something

1:06.7

from the ground up. We're talking about this city's first city-run grocery store in Manhattan

1:12.7

that we need to both design, that we also need to construct. We're also going to be constructing

1:16.7

it using prevailing wages. And it's also one part of a larger ecosystem, not just in terms of

1:22.1

La Marquetta, but also here on this strip, we've seen the MTA has just completed their work in this very area.

1:28.9

This requires a lot of interagency and intergovernmental coordination that we're going to be seeing.

1:35.3

The store that will be open next year in 27 and the additional stores that will be opened by the end of 2029 will not require this same scale of production. The reason that we're announcing this

1:46.1

is so that we can get started on this. So there you go. So 30 million time, you look very excited

1:50.7

about this. Lynn, do you foresee this? One, working successfully and two, will other markets

1:58.8

follow his lead? I'm not particularly optimistic on it.

2:02.4

When you look at the major grocery stores worldwide, at least the ones that are publicly traded,

2:05.8

we have the financials on, grocery stores run at low single-digit average profit margins.

2:10.8

No one goes in the grocery business to get rich.

2:13.0

You go into finance, you go into tech, you know, running a grocery store is not the most lucrative thing.

2:18.1

These companies have refined their supply chains for years and decades. They have all the

2:23.0

incentive in the world to run those as efficiently as possible because when you have multiple

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