Oh, the absurdity: Government-run grocery stores are laughable

When politicians start promising cheaper milk and lettuce, it’s time to check your wallet—and your common sense.

In both Seattle and New York, mayoral candidates have decided that the next great government experiment should be running grocery stores. In New York, Zohran Mamdani wants to open city-owned supermarkets. In Seattle, both incumbent Bruce Harrell and challenger Katie Wilson say City Hall should step in to “save” grocery access after recent closures.

It’s the latest example of politicians diagnosing the problem correctly—food affordability and access—but prescribing exactly the wrong cure.

The grocery business is brutally competitive. Margins hover below two percent. Every price tag depends on global logistics, scale, and constant adaptation. Private grocers like Kroger, Safeway, and Grocery Outlet succeed not because they’re greedy, but because they’re efficient. They are constantly trying to innovate to compete against the giants such as Wal-Mart, Costco and even Amazon.

And yet, some Seattle politicians actually believe City Hall—an organization that can’t fix potholes or build housing on time—can somehow stock shelves better than companies that have done it for a century.

Kansas City already tried the “government grocery store.” It lost nearly $900,000 in a single year. It turns out, when the government says it can “save money by not making a profit,” taxpayers are the ones who foot the bill.

Here’s the real kicker: the same politicians now wringing their hands about grocery store closures helped cause them.

When Fred Meyer announced it was leaving Lake City, Seattle leaders blamed “corporate greed.” But these are the same voices—both in Olympia and in Congress—who fought to block the Albertsons–Kroger merger, a deal that could have created efficiencies, stabilized struggling stores, and preserved jobs.

The Federal Trade Commission, cheered on by Washington’s political class, stepped in to stop the merger. Now, the very same politicians who celebrated that decision are shocked that stores are closing.

This is what happens when ideology outruns economics. By preventing private grocers from combining resources to compete, policymakers made grocery operations less sustainable—and now claim government intervention is the only solution. It’s the equivalent of cutting the power line and then selling flashlights.

Both Harrell and Wilson now want the city to get into the grocery business—either through public-private partnerships, city-owned land, or direct operation. They argue that food access is too important to leave to the private market.

But the reason food access is shrinking is because of policies that punish success and discourage investment: rising taxes, increasing crime, minimum wage mandates, and endless permitting headaches.

No city-run grocery will survive in that environment, either. Subsidizing a broken system doesn’t fix it—it just hides the damage for a while, at taxpayer expense.

The bottom line is this: some elected officials now believe they can do a better job running grocery stores than the people who’ve done it for generations. But when politicians who blocked grocery mergers now promise to “save” grocery stores by running them themselves, it’s not leadership—it’s irony in bulk.

Government doesn’t need to run grocery stores. It just needs to stop breaking the ones we already have.