City owned grocery stores don’t really solve the affordable food problem.
Grocery stores aren’t particularly profitable in the scheme of things. Neither are distributors, food processors, or farmers.
Each link takes a bit of profit of course, but for most non-luxury foods there’s just not a lot of profit along the line.
In order to solve it for real, you need to
a) make farming cheaper, especially for certain labour intensive foods
b) control the entire supply chain from farm to grocery store
However, this tends not to work well for any sort of non-commodity food item like say cookies or ice cream. There are just too many different preferences for that to work well. The government could produce 3 types of cookies really cheap, but if they tried to produce even 30 different types they’d just end up being worse than what we currently have and we currently have 300 types.
I would be OK with losing out on random novelty hotdog-flavored chips.
That being said, you could get around this problem by focusing on staples (rice, flour, vegetables, salt, etc.) since the vast majority of folks don’t really have a preference on this sort of thing, aside from allergies/gluten free.
We didn’t build a system to distribute food…
We built a system to maximize profits on selling food to people. Not even selling the most food, just making the most profit.
If that means 25% of people starve but profits go up 10%…
That’s not even a trolley problem for a corporation. That’s barely a choice.
Edit:
Mamdani’s solution is city owned grocery stores that pay employees fairly and a focus on providing healthy foods at affordable prices
While ideally states and other cities would do it, a progressive Fed could distribute funds to get it built up and self sustaining.
City owned grocery stores don’t really solve the affordable food problem.
Grocery stores aren’t particularly profitable in the scheme of things. Neither are distributors, food processors, or farmers.
Each link takes a bit of profit of course, but for most non-luxury foods there’s just not a lot of profit along the line.
In order to solve it for real, you need to a) make farming cheaper, especially for certain labour intensive foods b) control the entire supply chain from farm to grocery store
However, this tends not to work well for any sort of non-commodity food item like say cookies or ice cream. There are just too many different preferences for that to work well. The government could produce 3 types of cookies really cheap, but if they tried to produce even 30 different types they’d just end up being worse than what we currently have and we currently have 300 types.
I would be OK with losing out on random novelty hotdog-flavored chips.
That being said, you could get around this problem by focusing on staples (rice, flour, vegetables, salt, etc.) since the vast majority of folks don’t really have a preference on this sort of thing, aside from allergies/gluten free.