New York City told a federal court this week that it should be allowed to open grocery stores that sell milk, eggs, chicken and produce 30% below market prices, because families are hungry. The independent supermarkets and bodegas suing to stop it say the same stores will put them out of business.
Both sides are describing the same neighborhoods. The first of the five city-owned stores is planned for Hunts Point in the Bronx, with a second at La Marqueta in East Harlem. The National Supermarket Association, which says it represents 450 independent stores across the city, claims about 20 existing grocers sit near the Hunts Point site and 26 near East Harlem’s.
The city’s lawyers argued that the judge should refuse to block the plan, in part because the plaintiffs cannot show the kind of irreparable harm an injunction requires, Courthouse News reported. In a filing reported by Law360, the city said the program is needed to fight hunger as New Yorkers face high inflation and cuts to federal nutrition assistance. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he is “fully confident in both the legality and the importance of our initiative.”
The federal suit, filed Sept. 9 by the association along with City Fresh Market in Harlem and C-Town Supermarket in the Bronx, calls the discounts predatory pricing, backed by $70 million in taxpayer money no private competitor can match. A second suit, in state court, comes from the Multicultural Business Coalition, which describes itself as 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Jewish business owners. Its general counsel, Mark Jaffe, said of the corner stores: “They cannot possibly compete because no one will be subsidizing them.”
That argument deserves a hearing, because the owners it describes are often immigrants, including African and Caribbean ones, who built the stores that feed Black and brown New York when chains would not. Neither suit’s reporting says how many of the affected stores are Black-owned, and the city has not published a count either. That is the number the judge, and the public, should be shown.
But the plaintiffs’ case rests on a premise this paper does not accept: that a grocery shopper in Hunts Point should keep paying full price so the market stays as it is. The city says the stores could cut an average household’s grocery bill by about $90 a month. Federal food aid is being cut at the same moment. A public option that lowers prices is what a city does when private grocers will not, and the city can answer the small owners with something other than a courtroom: leases, wholesale access, or a slot as operators. It has already said it is seeking “qualified grocers or firms” to run one or more stores.
Mamdani has also said the city already runs two similar markets, in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Bronx store is due to open in 2027, and all five by the end of his term. A ruling on the injunction decides whether that schedule holds.
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