Ep. 184 News by the Numbers

Thirty percent.

That's how cheap New York Mayor Comrade Bumdani says the new city run grocery stores will be.

In order to stop the entire state of New Jersey driving over the bridge to get 30 percent off groceries, he also announced the stores will be checking I.D. to make sure you are a real New Yorker.

Of course, we all know requiring ID is very racist and no married woman will be able to buy groceries, which seems cruel.

So the problem with Mamdani's cheap eats is groceries as an industry sport about 2% profit margins, as in they make two cents on the dollar.

So if you're selling 30% below, then a couple of interesting things happen.

First, the taxpayer is losing at least $0.28 on the dollar, which quickly adds up to millions.

And that's assuming that city-run groceries can operate with the same efficiency as a real grown-up grocery store like Aldi or Walmart.

Second, if shoppers are getting 30% off, they're not going to regular grocery stores, meaning regular grocery stores will lose masses of customers driving the marginal ones out of business.

Then third, taxpayers get sick of losing tens or hundreds of millions and push to reduce the subsidies.

Without subsidies and locked into those 30% discounts, the only way for these stores to survive is cut back on quality.

So instead of a giant money hole, you get a slightly smaller money hole full of rotting food.

This is exactly what's happened in other blue cities that have tried the city groceries thing, like Chicago or St. Louis, where the stores ended up with no customers because the food was rotten, so the city eventually shut them down with tens of millions of losses per store.

From smoke clears, you get a couple years of cheap bananas, an exodus of real grocery stores, and now New Yorkers have to take two trains and a bus to get a roast that is not rot.