New York City's plan to open five government-run grocery stores with $70 million in taxpayer money drew a sharp rebuke from one of the city's longest-running grocery executives, who says the scheme amounts to the government competing against its own citizens.
John Catsimatidis, CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain, told Fox News Digital that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plan to plant a city-run store in each of the five boroughs will not solve food insecurity. It will, he warned, undercut the bodegas and supermarkets already operating on razor-thin margins in those same neighborhoods, businesses that pay their own rent, their own property taxes, and absorb every cost the city piles on top.
The structural advantage Mamdani's administration is handing to the operators of these new stores is the core of Catsimatidis's complaint. The city has pledged to cover property taxes and rental costs for each location. Private operators will be selected through an application process, but they will compete for customers against existing grocers who enjoy no such subsidy. The stores will offer a 30 percent discount on what the administration calls a "core basket of everyday groceries," including meat, seafood, and fresh produce.
Catsimatidis put the math in plain terms. Average grocery store profit margins run between 1 and 3 percent. Strip away rent and real estate taxes, and a store operator can drop prices by roughly 20 percent across the board without losing a dime.
"The people that are going to run those five stores are not going to pay any [real estate taxes]. Not going to pay any rent. If I don't pay any rent or real estate taxes, I can bring down the cost of a product 20% across the board."
That gap is not a minor edge. For a bodega owner already scraping by, a government-backed competitor offering 30 percent discounts on staples a few blocks away is an existential threat, not because the new store is more efficient, but because the city is absorbing costs the private owner still has to pay.
Catsimatidis framed the stakes bluntly:
"The fact is the people [Mamdani] is going to hurt are the current bodegas or the current supermarkets in those neighborhoods. So it becomes a problem of 'for whom do the bells toll?'"
The grocery executive also tied the plan to a broader pattern of city policy making life harder for private businesses. Manhattan's congestion pricing took effect in January 2025, and Catsimatidis said it has driven up delivery costs for every store inside the pricing zone. Vendors shipping from New Jersey, Nassau County, Suffolk County, and the outer boroughs now tack on 10 to 15 percent surcharges for deliveries into the city.
"If I want stuff delivered to us from vendors in New Jersey, and all these companies are in New Jersey, Nassau, Suffolk County, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx, and I say to them, 'I want you to deliver to [New York City],' they're going to charge me 10% more, or 15% more."
Walk the streets of Manhattan, Catsimatidis said, and the damage is visible. "Half the stores are empty, which is horrible." He called the five-store plan a public-relations exercise that will not meaningfully reach the city's hungry residents.
"The big picture is that five stores in five boroughs is only good for public relations, and it's not really going to help the hungry."
Rather than build a parallel government grocery system, Catsimatidis proposed a tax-credit model that would spread relief across the private sector citywide. If the city wants lower egg prices, he said, give every grocer a credit against property taxes tied to the discount, not just the five handpicked operators running the city's stores.
"If you want me to lower the price of eggs, well maybe I'll lower the price of the eggs by a dollar a dozen. But maybe [the city] will give me a dollar a dozen credit toward my real estate taxes."
His broader point: if the goal is affordability, the policy should reach all five boroughs, not five storefronts.
"If you want to lower the prices for all Americans, all New Yorkers, well let's do it right and lower it in all five boroughs."
New York already has a program built on that logic. The FRESH initiative, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, offers tax incentives and zoning incentives to encourage new supermarkets or expansions in neighborhoods the city deems underserved. Nevin Cohen, director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, confirmed the program's existence and scope in his own comments to Fox News Digital.
Nobody in this debate disputes that New York has a food-access problem. Cohen told Fox News Digital that 1.4 million New Yorkers are food insecure, meaning they are unsure whether they have enough money to put food on the table. Twenty percent of the city's residents depend on SNAP benefits or other federal food subsidies.
"The problem is that many people can't afford food for their families. 1.4 million New Yorkers are [food insecure], which means that they're unsure whether they have enough money to put food on the table. Twenty percent of New Yorkers depend on SNAP benefits or federal food subsidies to put food on the table for the family."
Those numbers are real. The question is whether the right answer is five government-subsidized stores, or a policy that strengthens the thousands of private grocers already embedded in every neighborhood across the city.
The mayor announced the plan in July 2026, setting a $70 million capital budget. The first store is targeted for Hunts Point in the Bronx, with a late 2027 opening. Mamdani's administration has said all five stores should be operational before his term ends in 2030. The city is currently accepting applications from private operators to manage the locations.
Mamdani framed the initiative around kitchen-table anxiety. "Every week, New Yorkers walk into a grocery store hoping the prices haven't gone up again," the mayor said. "A trip to the grocery store shouldn't spell dread for New Yorkers."
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani's administration for comment on Catsimatidis's criticisms. The article did not indicate whether the administration responded.
Catsimatidis did not hold back about where he thinks this approach leads. He also pointed to online retailers and out-of-city businesses that already undercut brick-and-mortar New York stores by shipping products in without bearing the city's overhead.
"The businesses that are doing business outside New York City are just shipping [products] in by mail, they can afford to be cheaper. And you know what happens? They put the stores and the businesses inside New York City out of business."
Adding a government-subsidized competitor on top of that pressure, he argued, pushes the model further from a free market and closer to something Americans should recognize, and reject.
"You're competing against your own citizens, and that's only done in socialist countries. Look at socialist countries, nobody's breaking down the walls to get in, but they're all breaking down the walls to get into the United States of America."
When a city's answer to high grocery prices is to spend $70 million building stores that don't pay rent or taxes, while the bodega owner next door pays both, the problem isn't food insecurity. The problem is a government that treats its own taxpayers as the competition.