Mamdani’s Grocery Store Experiment Is Making Waves All Over Trump’s America

When the siren song of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for government grocery stores made it half-way across the country to Omaha, Mayor John Ewing was inspired to put words to music and lifted his voice in reply.“Down the road there’s a grocery store … with dignity for all, that’s our battle cry,” he sang as a small crowd cheered and clapped on a grassy field that may soon host a 50,000-square-foot Christian grocery store.Mr. Ewing’s ditty won’t be a hit, but perhaps the mayor was in a singing mood that morning because of the $1.5 million state grant embattled Republican Governor Jim Pillen’s administration had given the non-profit opening the store in the heart of the city’s black community. Convenient that it comes just as Mr. Pillen is set to face voters. Commenting on similar situations where Trump-supporting politicians had backed a newly muscular government approach once anathema to Republicans, traditional conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson said that “If you support socialism, apparently Donald Trump is your guy.” Mr. Pillen, too. If in Mr. Mamdani’s short time in office he has injected one idea into the national public policy discussion, it is what he calls the “urgent” need for government to get in the grocery business. “Mamdani has certainly given this sort of thing a level of national visibility that wasn’t there before he ran for New York City mayor,” University of Nebraska at Lincoln Professor Kevin Smith told The New York Sun, though he thinks the private-public partnership in Omaha is different than what Mamdani proposes.Indeed, what looks like evidence for Mr. Mamdani’s impact is literally all over the map — and it is coming at a furious pace.Last week President Trump’s USDA closed applications for a $20 million 2026 round of the Local and Regional Healthy Food Financing Partnerships Program set to back everything from Mamdani-style government grocers to co-ops and government-backed non-profit and private-public commercial setups.This month, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced $26 million through what he dubbed the Illinois Grocery Initiative: $21 million for new stores in food deserts, $4 million “Grocery Rescue” to reopen stores closed in the last year, and $750,000 for equipment upgrades.In Minnesota, Minneapolis set aside $200,000 in the 2026 budget to a city-owned grocery. Across the border in Wisconsin, Madison’s long-delayed Maurer’s Urban Market got an opening date of October 5 after years of delay and several million dollars in city support. In Atlanta, construction is underway for a second location of Azalea Fresh Market after over $8 million in government grants and loans for the first location.Maybe one reason Mr. Mamdani’s idea seems to have spread so swiftly is that it isn’t Mr. Mamdani’s idea at all. Most recently, it was Barack Obama’s and it has been around for a while. As part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” health campaign, his administration launched a planned $400 million program of public-private partnerships to put government-funded, but not government-run, grocery stores all over the country. So far, over 1,000 projects have been funded including during both Trump administrations where the program, passed by Congress as part of the Farm Bill, continues.The results of that effort are coming in from all over the country where stores are closing in disarray or bungled efforts never open at all. That’s perhaps why, in some unexpected quarters, there’s a note of skepticism appearing even as others rush to jump on Mamdani’s or Obama’s or whoever’s bandwagon this is.This year, Seattle’s Democratic Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson allocated $1.7 million to help independent grocers with security, repairs, technical assistance, and market studies, but dropped earlier talk of municipal supermarkets.In San Francisco, the city council dropped an all-too-typical West Coast plan for a new tax on vacant grocery store fronts intended to fund a city agency to reopen them. Their California counter-cultural idea instead? Deregulate – end the need for conditional use permits for grocery stores and find other red tape and fees to cut.“The tactics may change. The mission doesn’t,” said San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood. That’s true.There’s certainly reason to be skeptical. In 2024 when Pro-Publica published an analysis of data from 18 states the program funded under President Biden they found that nearly half the government-backed stores had already closed or never opened at all. Some didn’t last a year.Down Interstate 29, not too far from Omaha, in Kansas City, Missouri the latest fiasco looms. “The shelves at the Blue Parkway Sun Fresh grocery store have barely had food on them for months,” The Kansas City Star reported Tuesday.“You can’t get two of nothing,” shopper Phyliss Strozier told her local paper.The store is rumored to be closing soon and is owned by the same non-profit that closed another Sun Fresh after receiving nearly $20 million in government funds for that site. Such stories are common. Only a few weeks ago, seven Save A Lot stores operated by Yellow Banana in Chicago closed after $13.5 million in public subsidies were lavished on six of them. The stores failed just two years into a promised 10-year operating agreement with the city.Mr. Smith, the University of Nebraska professor, says that the impact of Mr. Mamdani and such grocery stores in Nebraska, “partly depends on how well this project does. If it succeeds it might encourage thinking about similar sorts of projects, if it fails it might encourage cogitation in the opposite direction.”Anyway he says dryly, all this socialism stuff won’t matter much to Nebraska in the long run. “I’m unaware of anything pointing to this motivating people to have a wholesale rethink about government.”

Mamdani’s Grocery Store Experiment Is Making Waves All Over Trump’s America

Mamdani’s Grocery Store Experiment Is Making Waves All Over Trump’s America

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