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Why Mamdani’s City-Owned Grocery Stores Are an Idea Whose Time Has Come
Rather than accepting that small rural towns and historically marginalized communities go without proper access to affordable and quality food in the pursuit of corporate profit, public ownership reframes the conversation by directly addressing market failure.
Aug 08, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was powered by a focus on affordability. One of his more innovative proposals to help address the city’s growing cost of living crisis is to open a city-owned grocery store in each borough that expands access to good-quality food for residents at an affordable price.
Contrary to the public outcry from critics, city-owned grocery stores are not a novel or radical idea in the United States. The United States military already operates a network of publicly owned grocery stores; rural communities in Kansas have successfully experimented with municipally owned supermarkets; and big cities are exploring their potential and charting plans.
City-owned grocery stores are a promising solution for communities who suffer from the hunger and food insecurity that comes from living in food deserts, urban or rural neighborhoods with limited access to healthy and affordable groceries.
Food deserts exist in part because of misaligned profit motives for private sector grocery companies. Large corporate retailers like Kroger and Whole Foods do not bother to invest in certain communities because, despite demand, low-income neighborhoods lack the infrastructure and purchasing power to sustain their for-profit business. Instead, retailers concentrate or relocate their grocery stores to areas where they can expect a higher rate of return, like wealthier suburban neighborhoods.
That profit incentive creates a harmful cycle that perpetuates a phenomenon known as “supermarket redlining” that leaves thousands of communities underserved.
The real return on investment is improved health outcomes, stronger neighborhoods, greater accountability to your constituents, and the elimination of food deserts for the more than 53 million people who currently live in them.
New York City is home to more than two dozen neighborhoods that are classified as food deserts. These localities are predominantly Black and Hispanic and rely on both bodegas and dollar stores for their grocery needs, creating “food swamps” where unhealthy food options vastly outnumber nutritious ones.
Mamdani’s proposal seeks to fill the void left by the market. He is offering city-owned grocery stores as a public option to low-income residents in neighborhoods that the private sector has abandoned. If elected, Mamdani has pledged to allocate $60 million to support his grocery pilot program with a focus on expanding accessibility and guaranteeing affordability rather than turning a profit. Complaints about profitability are overblown given that public sector grocery stores can manage costs with the elimination of price markups via property tax, rent, and licensing fee exemptions.
The projected savings for consumers from this program has resonated with New Yorkers. Food prices in the Big Apple have increased by more than 25% since 2019. The same cannot be said for workers’ wages, which have stagnated and failed to keep up with grocery costs.
Mamdani’s detractors point to several challenges of running an effective city-owned grocery store. For example, local governments may lack operational expertise or find it difficult to purchase food from wholesalers at a competitive price. But these challenges are not insurmountable.
The Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University provides one-on-one support to new grocery stores—from initial feasibility studies and market research to employee training and operational management—through a statewide healthy food initiative.
“The grocery industry was once thought of as a multigenerational industry where the business was passed down from parents to their kids,” the program’s director Rial Carver told Inequality.org in a recent interview. But with the increased market concentration by a handful of dominant corporate players, “there are grocers [now] entering the business without generational knowledge. The need for technical assistance is great, and we do anything we can to support them.”
State and local governments and institutions can spearhead or partake in programs that assist municipal grocery stores with market expertise, technical support, and state initiatives like Colorado’s Community Food Access Program that help retailers access food at lower prices.
Military commissaries are an excellent example of how storefront collaboration can keep prices competitive. By having their network of stores share suppliers, they are able to maintain prices 25-30% lower than retail stores.
In North Dakota, three grocery stores along with two other entities came together in 2021 to form the Rural Access Distribution (RAD), a purchasing cooperative. One of the goals of the cooperative is for the businesses to collectively purchase food in bulk in order to reap the benefits of wholesale prices. “There is also a restaurant [and] a school district that has bought into the purchasing co-op,” added Carver. “They see the benefits of buying into that wholesaler. It can serve other business types too.”
Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores can adopt a similar strategy with other New York grocers, forming or joining a consortium, to pool their resources together to purchase food in high volume to access cheaper wholesale prices.
The St. Paul Supermarket, a grocery store owned and operated by the city of St. Paul in Kansas, is a successful example of a city-owned shop. After the retirement of Joe and Sue Renfro, the city government decided to purchase it. The grocery store is now in its 12th year of operation as a city-owned enterprise. The secret, according to the city, is broad community support and an effective leadership team, plus a commitment from the city to continue to provide financial support.
Public groceries do not have to be uniform. They can take on different organizational structures depending on the desires of community stakeholders, the level of support from residents, and local governments. Models range from worker-owned cooperatives and nonprofits to public-private partnerships where operations are outsourced.
For example, the city of Atlanta is planning to open two municipally-owned grocery stores in partnership with the organic food market Savi Provisions later this year to tackle food insecurity. The stores will be more than just a place to shop for groceries; they will also be a community and cultural hub with workshops and classes.
Rather than accepting that small rural towns and historically marginalized communities go without proper access to affordable and quality food in the pursuit of corporate profit, public ownership reframes the conversation by directly addressing market failure. City-owned grocery stores also have the potential to generate new debates on the high levels of market concentration in the industry and revive the enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act to reverse price discrimination of wholesalers towards smaller and municipal grocers.
It is possible that Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores may run at an economic loss in the first few years, but public options are not designed to make a profit. They are designed to provide adequate access to groceries at an affordable price to customers.
The real return on investment is improved health outcomes, stronger neighborhoods, greater accountability to your constituents, and the elimination of food deserts for the more than 53 million people who currently live in them. City-owned grocery stores are a step towards transforming food access and full-service groceries from a privilege into a community right.
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Why Mamdani Is Right About City-Run Grocery Stores
Public grocery stores would not eliminate hunger. But they could function as stabilizing infrastructure in food systems that are currently brittle and uneven.
Jul 01, 2025
Amira Santiago leaves her apartment by 8:45 am most mornings, pushing a folding cart through cracked sidewalks and traffic haze to reach the food pantry on time. She lives in East New York, in a ZIP code where grocery stores have vanished, corner delis double as pharmacies, and fresh food is scarce. What ends up in her cart depends entirely on what’s on the shelf. Usually it’s canned goods, powdered milk, maybe some onions or carrots. Today it’s dry cereal, pasta, and an overripe cantaloupe. Her son Malik skipped breakfast again. There’s nothing left in the fridge she can turn into a meal.
This is not an outlier. It is the consequence of systems that stopped functioning long ago. And it helps explain why a political upset in New York City on June 24, 2025 carries meaning far beyond the five boroughs.
That day, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblymember from Queens, defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor. The result was historic, but more importantly, it made visible a shifting political consensus. Voters rejected the narrative that government must limit its ambitions. They chose a candidate who insists that public institutions should do more than regulate; they should provide. Mamdani's platform spoke directly to people like Amira, whose daily struggles reflect the withdrawal of basic public functions from everyday life.
Mamdani’s proposal reflects the reality that food access cannot be left entirely to private enterprise.
Central to Mamdani’s platform is a proposal to launch a city-run grocery system. The plan is straightforward. Five municipally owned grocery stores, one in each borough, would operate without a profit motive. They would serve areas where the private sector has pulled out or never invested in the first place. The stores would source food wholesale, hire union labor, and reinvest in the neighborhoods they serve. These would not be pilot programs tied to foundation grants or nonprofits operating under precarious contracts. They would be permanent public institutions.
Opponents were quick to ridicule the idea. Billionaire grocer John Catsimatidis warned of industry disruption. Mayor Eric Adams dismissed the proposal outright. Think tanks called it inefficient and unnecessary. The comparison to “Soviet-style” provisioning spread quickly, suggesting central planning and bureaucratic waste. Others raised concerns about the city outcompeting small independent grocers or failing to ensure supply chain efficiency, leading to chronic understocking and quality control issues. But these objections rarely addressed the basic premise: Millions of New Yorkers, like Amira Santiago, already live in neighborhoods where food is hard to find, overpriced, and nutritionally inadequate.
Across the city, more than 3 million residents live in low-access food areas. In Brownsville, Mott Haven, East Flatbush, and parts of Staten Island, residents rely on corner stores and fast-food chains that carry little or no fresh produce. These conditions are not the result of natural market forces. They reflect decades of public and private disinvestment, often concentrated in communities of color. Grocery redlining—the practice by which supermarket chains avoid low-income neighborhoods based on demographic risk factors—has left entire ZIP codes without stable access to food. In the past five years alone, more than 100 full-service grocery stores in New York City have closed, primarily in lower-income neighborhoods.
The result is predictable. People pay more for less. They commute longer distances for basic goods. They ration meals. Children go to school without breakfast. Public health data shows elevated rates of diabetes, hypertension, and diet-related illness in these same neighborhoods. Hunger is not simply a function of poverty. It is shaped by the spatial and logistical architecture of access—or its absence.
Nationally, the picture is no better. As of 2023, 18 million households in the United States reported experiencing food insecurity at one point. Since the pandemic, grocery prices have risen nearly 30%, while SNAP benefits have failed to keep pace. In 2015, 44 U.S. counties had no grocery store at all. On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, families routinely drive 80 miles round-trip for produce. In rural Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Appalachia, the nearest full-service store might be a two-hour round trip. These are not temporary disruptions. They are ongoing crises that have been normalized.
Mamdani’s proposal reflects the reality that food access cannot be left entirely to private enterprise. When profitability becomes the determining factor for whether people can eat, large segments of the country are left behind. In neighborhoods where chains cannot turn reliable margins, stores close. Where customer data indicates low discretionary spending or high SNAP usage, suppliers scale back. The grocery industry, like any other, is designed to maximize return. It is doing what it was built to do. But the outcome is a landscape filled with price inflation, scarcity, and abandonment.
Public grocery stores would not eliminate hunger. But they could function as stabilizing infrastructure in food systems that are currently brittle and uneven. They could provide consistent access to affordable food, especially in neighborhoods where no alternatives exist. They could also serve as community hubs, offering services like SNAP enrollment, health screenings, nutrition classes, or childcare coordination. Their purpose would not be to replace private markets, but to serve where those markets have withdrawn or refused to invest.
Mamdani’s victory sends a message that voters are ready for governments that solve real problems.
The concept is far from unprecedented. Military commissaries already provide subsidized food to service members across the country. State-run liquor stores operate in Pennsylvania, Utah, and New Hampshire, generating revenue while serving a public function. In St. Paul, Kansas, a town of fewer than 600 residents, the only grocery store is city-owned and locally operated. In Alaska, the federal Bypass Mail program subsidizes food shipments to rural villages. These are not theoretical constructs. They are functioning examples of public provisioning.
Of course, the success of any public grocery system will depend on implementation. Poorly managed public programs can erode trust and fuel political backlash. Mamdani’s plan will require serious design: transparent procurement, equitable site selection, accessible transportation connections, competitive wages, and meaningful community oversight. But the risks of a poorly run store must be weighed against the ongoing costs of inaction. In New York, nearly 1 in 4 children live in food-insecure households. The absence of public response is not neutral. It is itself a decision, with measurable health and economic consequences.
What Mamdani’s campaign has done is shift the boundaries of political imagination. Cities like Chicago and Atlanta are now exploring public grocery models. Federal tools such as the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and the Community Economic Development Grant program could support them. Philanthropic institutions, once focused exclusively on nutrition education, are beginning to fund food infrastructure. Local governments have the capacity to act. What they have often lacked is the political permission to do so.
That permission now exists. Mamdani’s victory sends a message that voters are ready for governments that solve real problems. The campaign drew on a deep well of frustration among New Yorkers who have watched their neighborhoods lose not just grocery stores, but clinics, schools, and public transportation. It articulated a basic expectation: that cities should function, that infrastructure should be visible, and that the state should be present where the market disappears.
In the months ahead, other cities will watch closely. If New York moves forward, it may offer a blueprint for how public institutions can reenter the business of meeting essential needs. If it hesitates, the message will still resonate. A candidate won by promising groceries—not charity, not deregulation, but a public store with stocked shelves and affordable prices.
There is a lesson in that. Governance is not only about writing checks or issuing permits. It is also about provision. People trust institutions when those institutions show up with something tangible. In that sense, a bag of groceries might be more than food. It might be the start of a new civic contract.
If Mamdani’s proposal succeeds, it will not be because it was visionary. It will be because it was honest about what people are living through—and offered a way out.
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With Corporate Media, Harris Can't Win on Corporate Price Gouging
To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. News outlets continue to do their audiences a disservice on this key economic issue.
Sep 25, 2024
Debates over whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s economic proposals constitute Communist price controls or merely technocratic consumer protections are obscuring a more insidious thread within corporate media. In coverage of Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal, it’s taken for granted that price inflation, especially in the grocery sector, is an organic and unavoidable result of market forces, and thus any sort of intervention is misguided at best, and economy-wrecking at worst.
In this rare instance where a presidential hopeful has a policy that is both economically sound and popular, corporate media have fixated on Harris’s proposal as supposedly misguided. To dismiss any deeper discussion of economic phenomena like elevated price levels, and legislation that may correct them, media rely on an appeal to “basic economics.” If the reader were only willing to crack open an Econ 101 textbook, it would apparently be plain to see that the inflation consumers experienced during the pandemic can be explained by abstract and divinely influenced factors, and thus a policy response is simply inappropriate.
Comrade Kamala?
For all the hubbub about Harris’s proposal, the actual implications of anti-price-gouging legislation are fairly unglamorous. Far from price controls, law professor Zephyr Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) noted that anti-price-gouging laws
allow price increases, so long as it is due to increased costs, but forbid profit increases so that companies can’t take advantage of the fear, anxiety, confusion and panic that attends emergencies.
Teachout situated this legislation alongside rules against price-fixing, predatory pricing and fraud, laws which allow an effective market economy to proliferate. As such, states as politically divergent as Louisiana and New York have anti-price-gouging legislation on the books, not just for declared states of emergency, but for market “abnormalities.”
But none of that matters when the media can run with Donald Trump’s accusation of “SOVIET-style price controls.” Plenty of unscrupulous outlets have had no problem framing a consumer protection measure as the first step down the road to socialist economic ruin (Washington Times, 8/16/24; Washington Examiner, 8/20/24; New York Post, 8/25/24; Fox Business, 9/3/24). Even a Washington Post piece (8/19/24) by columnist (and former G.W. Bush speechwriter) Marc Thiessen described Harris’s so-called “price controls” as “doubling down on socialism.”
What’s perhaps more concerning is centrist or purportedly liberal opinion pages’ acceptance of Harris’s proposal as outright price controls. Catherine Rampell, writing in the Washington Post (8/15/24), claimed anti-price-gouging legislation is “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food…. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding.” Rampell didn’t go as far as to call Harris a Communist outright, but coyly concluded: “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘Communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”
Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie mounted a similar attack in the Wall Street Journal (8/22/24), ripping Harris for proposing “national price controls” and thus subscribing to a “fantasy economic theory.” Opinion writers in the Atlantic (8/16/24), the New York Times (8/19/24), LA Times (8/20/24), USA Today (8/21/24), the Hill (8/23/24) and Forbes (9/3/24) all uncritically regurgitated the idea that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls. By accepting this simplistic and inaccurate framing, these political taste-makers are fueling the right-wing idea that Harris represents a vanguard of Communism.
To explicitly or implicitly accept that Harris’s proposal amounts to price controls, or even socialism, is inaccurate and dangerous. Additionally, many of the breathless crusades against Harris made use of various cliches to encourage the reader to not think deeper about how prices work, or what policy solutions might exist to benefit the consumer.
Just supply and demand
“According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied.” This is the wisdom offered by Josh Barro in the Atlantic (8/16/24), who added that “in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.” He chose not to elaborate beyond the 101 level.
The Wall Street Journal (8/20/24) sought the guidance of Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who is indeed the author of the most widely used economics textbook in US colleges. He conceded that price intervention could be warranted in markets with monopolistic conditions. However, the Journal gently explained to readers, “the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much.” Mankiw elaborated: “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”
Rampell’s opinion piece in the Washington Post (8/15/24) claimed that, under Harris’s proposal, “supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.” Rampell apparently believes (or wants readers to believe) that grocery prices are currently set by nothing more than supply and demand.
The problem is that the grocery and food processing industries are not competitive markets. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian (7/14/21) and Food and Water Watch showed the extent to which food production in the United States is controlled by a limited group of corporations:
A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…. A few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.
While there is no strict definition for an oligopolistic market, this level of market concentration enables firms to set prices as they wish. Reporting by Time (1/14/22) listed Pepsi, Kroger, Kellogg’s and Tyson as examples of food production companies who boasted on the record about their ability to increase prices beyond higher costs during the pandemic.
Noncompetitive market conditions are also present farther down the supply chain. Nationally, the grocery industry is not quite as concentrated as food production (the pending Kroger/Albertsons merger notwithstanding). However, unlike a food retailer, consumers have little geographical or logistical flexibility to shop around for prices.
The USDA Economic Research Service has found that between 1990 and 2019, retail food industry concentration has increased, and the industry is at a level of “high concentration” in most counties. Consumers in rural and small non-metro counties are most vulnerable to noncompetitive market conditions.
The Federal Trade Commission pointed the finger at large grocers in a 2024 report. According to the FTC, grocery retailers’ revenue increases outstripped costs during the pandemic, resulting in increased profits, which “casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs.” The report also accused “some larger retailers and wholesalers” of using their market position to gain better terms with suppliers, causing smaller competitors to suffer.
Unchecked capitalism is good, actually
If one still wishes to critique Harris’s proposal, taking into account that the food processing and retail industries are not necessarily competitive, the next best argument is that free-market fundamentalism is good, and Harris is a villain for getting in the way of it.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter (and mutual fund director) Roger Lowenstein took this tack in a New York Times guest essay (8/27/24). He claimed Harris’s anti-price-gouging proposal and Donald Trump’s newly proposed tariff amount to “equal violence to free-market principles.” (The only violence under capitalism that seems to concern Lowenstein, apparently, is that done toward free enterprise.)
Lowenstein critiqued Harris for threatening to crack down on innocent, opportunistic business owners he likened to Henry Ford (an antisemite and a union-buster), Steve Jobs (a price-fixing antitrust-violator, according to the Times—5/2/14) and Warren Buffett (an alleged monopolist)–intending such comparisons as compliments, not criticisms. Harris and Trump, he wrote, are acting
as if production derived from central commands rather than from thousands of businesses and millions of individuals acting to earn a living and maximize profits.
If this policy proposal is truly tantamount to state socialism, in the eyes of Lowenstein, perhaps he lives his life constantly lamenting the speed limits, safety regulations and agricultural subsidies that surround him. Either that, or he is jumping at the opportunity to pontificate on free market utopia, complete with oligarchs and an absent government, with little regard to the actual policy he purports to critique.
A problem you shouldn’t solve
Depending on which articles you choose to read, inflation is alternately a key political problem for the Harris campaign, or a nonconcern. “Perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest political vulnerability is the run-up in prices that occurred during the Biden administration,” reported the New York Times (9/10/24). The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) also acknowledged that Biden-era inflation is “a real political issue for Ms. Harris.”
Pieces from both of these publications have also claimed the opposite: Inflation is already down, and thus Harris has no reason to announce anti-inflation measures. Lowenstein (New York Times, 8/27/24) claimed that the problem of high food prices “no longer exists,” and Rampell (Washington Post, 8/15/24) gloated that the battle against inflation has “already been won,” because price levels have increased only 1% in the last year. The very same Post editorial (8/16/24) that acknowledged inflation as a liability for Harris chided her for her anti-price-gouging proposal, claiming “many stores are currently slashing prices.”
It is true that the inflation rate for groceries has declined. However, this does not mean that Harris’s proposals are now useless. This critique misses two key points.
First, there are certain to be supply shocks, and resultant increases in the price level, in the future. COVID-19 was an unprecedented crisis in its breadth; it affected large swathes of the economy simultaneously. However, supply shocks happen in specific industries all the time, and as climate change heats up, there is no telling what widespread crises could envelop the global economy. As such, there is no reason not to create anti-price-gouging powers so that Harris may be ready to address the next crisis as it happens.
Second, the price level of food has stayed high, even as producer profit margins have increased. As Teachout (Washington Monthly, 9/9/24) explained, anti-price-gouging legislation is tailored specifically to limit these excess profits, not higher prices. While food prices will inevitably react to higher inflation rates, the issue Harris seeks to address is the bad-faith corporations who take advantage of a crisis to reap profits.
Between January 2019 and July 2024, food prices for consumers increased by 29%. Meanwhile, profits for the American food processing industry have more than doubled, from a 5% net profit margin in 2019 to 12% in early 2024. Concerning retailers, the FTC found that
consumers are still facing the negative impact of the pandemic’s price hikes, as the Commission’s report finds that some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today.
In other words, Harris’s proposal would certainly apply in today’s economy. While the price level has steadied for consumers, it has declined for grocers. This is price gouging, and this is what Harris seeks to end.
Gimmicks and pandering
Once the media simultaneously conceded that inflation is over, and continued to claim inflation is a political problem, a new angle was needed to find Harris’s motivation for proposing such a controversial policy. What was settled on was an appeal to the uneducated electorate.
Barro’s headline in the Atlantic (8/16/24) read “Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb But Politically Smart.” He claimed that the anti-price-gouging plan “likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics,” but will appeal to the voters, who “in their infinite wisdom” presumably know nothing about the economic realities governing their lives.
The Washington Post editorial board (8/16/24) wrote that Harris, “instead of delivering a substantial plan…squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” Steven Kamin, writing in the Hill (8/23/24), rued “what this pandering says about the chances of a serious discussion of difficult issues with the American voter.”
Denouncing Harris’s policies as pandering to the uneducated median voter, media are able to acknowledge the political salience of inflation while still ridiculing Harris for trying to fix it. By using loaded terms like “populist,” pundits can dismiss the policy without looking at its merits, never mind the fact that the proposal has the support of experts. As Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/19/24) pointed out in relation to Harris’s proposal, “just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”
If a publication wishes to put the kibosh on a political idea, it is much easier to dismiss it out of hand than to legitimately grapple with the people and ideas that may defend it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to assume the role of the adult in the room, and belittle a popular and beneficial policy as nothing more than red meat for the non–Ivy League masses.
Inflation and economic policy are complicated. Media coverage isn’t helping.
Perhaps the second easiest way to dismiss a popular policy is to simply obfuscate the policy and the relevant issues. The economics behind Kamala Harris’s proposed agenda are “complicated,” we are told by the New York Times (8/15/24). This story certainly did its best to continue complicating the economic facts behind the proposal. Times reporters Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek wrote that
the Harris campaign announcement on Wednesday cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not respond on Thursday to questions about the evidence Ms. Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.
Generally, when the word “but” is used, the following clause will refute or contradict the prior. However, the Times chose not to engage with Harris’s concrete example and instead moved on to critiquing the vagueness of her campaign proposal. The Times did the reader a disservice by not mentioning that the meat industry has in fact been consolidating, to the detriment of competitive market conditions and thus to the consumer’s wallet. Four beef processing companies in the United States control 85% of the market, and they have been accused of price-fixing and engaging in monopsonistic practices (Counter, 1/5/22). However to the Times, the more salient detail is the lack of immediate specificity of a campaign promise.
Another way to obfuscate the facts of an issue is to only look at one side of the story. A talking point espoused by commentators like Rampell is that the grocery industry is operating at such thin margins that any decrease in prices would bankrupt them (Washington Post, 8/15/24). Rampell wrote:
Profit margins for supermarkets are notoriously thin. Despite Harris’s (and [Elizabeth] Warren’s) accusations about “excessive corporate profits,” those margins remained relatively meager even when prices surged. The grocery industry’s net profit margins peaked at 3% in 2020, falling to 1.6% last year.
This critique is predicated on Harris’s policies constituting price controls. Because Harris is proposing anti-price-gouging legislation, the policy would only take effect when corporations profiteer under the cover of rising inflation. If they are truly so unprofitable, they have nothing to fear from this legislation.
The other problem with this point is that it’s not really true. The numbers Rampell relied on come from a study by the Food Marketing Institute (which prefers to be called “FMI, the Food Industry Association”), a trade group for grocery retailers. The FTC, in contrast, found that
food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs.
Yale economist Ernie Tedeschi (Wall Street Journal, 8/20/24) also “points out that margins at food and beverage retailers have remained elevated relative to before the pandemic, while margins at other retailers, such as clothing and general merchandise stores, haven’t.” In other words, if you look at sources outside of the grocery industry, it turns out the picture for grocers is a little rosier.
British economist Joan Robinson once wrote that the purpose of studying economics is primarily to avoid being deceived by economists. It takes only a casual perusal of corporate media to see that, today, she is more right than ever.
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