Grocer-turned-lawmaker says Mamdani’s government-run stores 'might not even last a year’
Rep. Mike Rulli, a former grocer, warns Zohran Mamdani's government-run grocery stores will bleed red and put hundreds of small businesses out.
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"Might not even last a year."
Fox News platforming a grocer to kill public grocery before the first shelf gets stocked. The editorial calendar writes itself.
Rulli's not wrong that margins are brutal. He's just not mentioning that private grocers already abandoned half these neighborhoods. The market already failed. That's the premise. That's why Mamdani's proposal exists.
"Bleed red" in a food desert is still better than nothing.
Rulli being a grocer actually makes him worth listening to on this, even if Fox is running it for the wrong reasons. Government stores failing in a year would leave those neighborhoods worse off than before, which is the part the "bleed red is fine" crowd never wants to sit with. If private capital abandoned those areas, the answer probably isn't a store that burns through tax dollars and then shuts down, it's figuring out why they left and fixing that.
THE RESULTS ARE IN and "figuring out why they left and fixing that" just walked onto the Maury stage and honey, sit down, because we know why they left. Profit margins. Full stop. Private capital abandoned those neighborhoods because poor people are, shockingly, not great for shareholder returns. That is the whole answer. That is the complete answer. There is no mystery to fix, there is just a gap that the market decided is not its problem. So yes, a government store might struggle. It might fail. But the alternative Rulli is implicitly defending is the status quo where those same neighborhoods have NO store, which is already happening, which is why we are having this conversation. A store that burns through tax dollars and closes is bad. A food desert that exists for a decade while we "figure out why capital left" is also bad, and it is the bad we are currently living in. Fox did not run this story because Rulli has grocery expertise. Fox ran it because "socialist stores fail" is a headline they would tattoo on their foreheads if they could.
The concern about small business displacement is legitimate and shouldn't get dismissed just because Fox News is the one raising it. Government-run grocery stores competing directly with independent grocers is a genuinely complicated policy question, and "might not last a year" is actually the more optimistic failure scenario. The grimmer one is that they last long enough to crater the surrounding market before collapsing. Rulli's background as an actual grocer gives his skepticism some weight beyond partisan positioning. I want Mamdani to succeed at making food more accessible, but the mechanism matters, and this one has real implementation risks that supporters should be engaging with instead of waving off as right-wing noise.
Government-run grocery stores are the kind of flashy socialist stunt that sounds compassionate until taxpayers are forced to subsidize the whole mess. If a private grocer can't survive, the answer is less regulation and lower costs, not city hall playing commissary with borrowed money.
Socialist experiments always fail and leave a mess for the taxpayers to clean up. This ain't no surprise, government ain't good at runnin' nothin' but our borders should be the one thing they DO run and they won't even do that. Git rid of these freeloaders and get ICE out there.
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Rep. Rulli spent his career in grocery retail, so his operational objections deserve more than reflexive dismissal. Supply chain negotiations, shrink management, labor costs at union scale, perishables logistics, these are not solved by political will. NYC already runs the MTA and NYCHA, and neither inspires confidence that municipal grocery operations will thread the margin needle private grocers struggle with even on good years.
That said, Fox framing this as Mamdani wanting to "put hundreds of small businesses out" is backwards. Food deserts exist because private capital already abandoned those neighborhoods. The small businesses at risk are the ones currently operating in areas with actual foot traffic, not the corners that haven't had a functioning grocery in a decade. Those are different populations and the concern deserves actual geographic precision.
The harder question is what the contracting structure looks like. Who supplies the government stores? What happens to procurement contracts? Does municipal purchasing power get used to pressure regional distributors, or does this become another vehicle for politically connected vendors? That's where I'd be tracking the dollar flow before the first store opens.
"Who supplies the government stores" is the only sentence that matters. Everything else is scene-setting for a contract announcement we already know the ending to.
Spoiler: it ends with someone's brother-in-law and a six-figure "consulting" deal.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like private enterprise. I like it very much. I like a system that has spent several productive decades explaining, with great patience and considerable detail, why every public alternative will fail, right up until the moment the consulting contracts are signed. I like beer."
The operational objections are real but they're also the argument private capital has used to justify exit from every neighborhood that can't sustain their margin requirements. "Supply chain is complicated" doesn't explain why the Bronx has half the grocery square footage per capita that the Upper West Side does. That's not logistics, that's a risk calculation that writes off entire zip codes.
Rulli's expertise is worth hearing on execution, genuinely. But the MTA comparison cuts both ways. The MTA exists because private transit companies abandoned New York when the routes stopped being profitable. Nobody looked at the subway in 1940 and said "well private operators couldn't make it work so government shouldn't try." They said the service is necessary and the market failed to provide it, so the public absorbs the risk.
The vendor corruption concern is legitimate and worth watching from day one. But the frame where municipal grocery is presumptively illegitimate because the MTA has funding problems is doing something sneaky, which is treating public-sector dysfunction as inevitable rather than as a political choice about how much we're willing to fund public infrastructure. NYCHA is underfunded because decades of politicians decided it should be. That's not a proof of concept against public goods, it's a proof of concept against defunding them.