I am vexed by misrepresentations of Zohran Mamdani’s supermarket idea. It always boils down to “someone undeserving gets precious things from you that you don’t want to give, which gives them unearned advantages.” That’s how Reconstruction morphed into Jim Crow, and it has worked reliably ever since, even when dealing with class rather than race. For example, in 2005, Joe Biden whipped up out of nothing the phantasm of “bankruptcy abusers,” rather like Reagan’s “welfare queens,” except that Reagan was able to invoke race and class simultaneously. Point goes to Reagan.

Food deserts are real. There’s a vacant supermarket at the corner of Prospect and 17th Street in Santa Ana, CA, that no large-scale grocer has been able to make work. There used to be a Food4Less supermarket at the corner of Grand and 17th Street, catering to lower-income shoppers, that disappeared. Why didn’t the one on Prospect work, no matter whether it was a Ralph’s or an Albertsons or a Vons or one of their sub-brands?

What most people don’t realize is how low-margin the supermarket business is, maybe 1-1.5% profit. Managers sweat bullets over pennies. There is little room for error. So, under Zohran, the city would guarantee some of that margin, up to 1% in addition to what the market ordinarily puts in. The people wouldn’t get food for free or even at a discount, but they would get supermarkets that stayed in business at the same locations. The compensation structure of the store would remain the same. The owners might get an extra 0.5-1%, and life would be fine.

There will likely be ways to game this, but I think it’s close enough to the original business model to be effective. The city does not own the property or the stores, and it does not hire the staff. It does not control the pricing. The city simply gives the chain/owners enough to make it worth their while to stay open.