Radio host Glenn Beck comments on NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani launching public grocery stores that will undercut retail prices by 30% in each of the city’s five boroughs:

GLENN BECK: Anybody who supports the grocery stores up in New York should know that 50 chambers of commerce voted this week to sue the City of New York. Fifty chambers of commerce-not 50 CEOs, but 50 chambers. The chambers representing Asian-, African-, Caribbean-, Hispanic-, Middle Eastern- and Jewish-owned business groups have all organized together in a nonprofit called the Multicultural Business Coalition. Their chairman is Frank Garcia. He told the New York Post that the board has authorized a lawsuit in the coming weeks, and they’re raising $ 1 million to pay for it. A letter is going to City Hall notifying the mayor that he’s about to be sued. Garcia’s explanation was two sentences: The mayor won’t sit down with him, and the mayor, he said, isn’t going to be able to bully the lawyers they’re bringing in. What are they suing over? Seventy million dollars of city money to open five government grocery stores-one per borough. This week, the mayor put the numbers on it: 30% off the core basket, all fresh produce, all meat, all seafood, plus about 20 staples like milk, cheese and bread. His phrase was, No exceptions, no gimmicks. Okay, I want you to think now as a person who owns a small store or a bodega. Do the arithmetic that every bodega owner in Queens did the second they heard that. A grocery store is one of the thinnest-margin businesses in America: a 1% to 2% net margin. You come with your cart and you’re paying $ 100. The man behind the counter clears $ 1.50. The store clears $ 1.50. We went to the store. I think we spent about $ 350. They’re making less than $ 5 off me. That’s incredible. Why? Because he has to pay the rent. He has to pay the property taxes through that rent. He pays Con Edison. You have to have refrigeration, insurance and the guy who stocks the cooler at 5 in the morning, whom you’re now paying $ 20 an hour. The city store is not paying any rent. It’s sitting on city property. It doesn’t pay property tax. It can’t go out of business, because losing money is not failure for a government store. It’s a budget line. One analysis this week projected that the city loses about 28 cents on every dollar those stores will ring up. Twenty-eight cents in losses. The competition is not between two grocers. It’s between a grocer and the grocer’s tax collector. Here’s the part where it’s worth being fair, because it’s true: The mayor is not lying about the problem. Food in poor neighborhoods does cost more. A corner store in Brownsville really does charge more for a gallon of milk than the Whole Foods in Tribeca. Why? Because Whole Foods is buying in bulk. The corner store buys in smaller volumes. It has to absorb more theft. It has to pay more per square foot, more for security and all of these things. There are blocks in New York City where the nearest full grocery store is a bus ride away. Those are real. I can look at that, you can look at that and the socialists can look at that and say, I want to fix that. I think that makes you a good man for wanting to fix it. The trouble isn’t the heart. The trouble happens in the head. It’s what happens next. A price is not a decision somebody makes. A price is a piece of information. The whole economy-every farmer, every truck, every port, every shortage and surplus on Earth-is compressed into one number that tells the grocer what that stock is worth, what to put on the shelves and what a shopper wants to buy. All of those things. When government sets the number by decree, it hasn’t changed the information. It has only stopped broadcasting it. The shortage is still there, but now nobody can see it. We’ve been here before. I can’t believe I’m going to take you to-hang with me for a second, because this is really important-the winter of 362. Let me take you to Antioch. The Roman emperor there was Julian. He was in town, and he was, by every account-including those of his enemies-a genuinely austere man. He slept little. He ate plainly. He had contempt for luxury. He found out that Antioch was short on grain and prices were climbing. He looked at the merchants and said, You’re just price gouging. He did the obvious, decent thing, right? He fixed the price of grain by decree. You want to see how this doesn’t work? Let’s go back to 362. You can fill in everything from 362 to today and show that it’s the same story. What happened? The grain vanished. Why? Not because the merchants were wicked, but because, at the emperor’s price, it was worth more everywhere else in the Mediterranean than it was in Antioch. Julian went further. He bought grain out of Egypt. He brought it in with his own money, shipped it in and sold it in the city at his price. What happened? People started buying all of it, carrying it out of the gates and reselling it at the real price. What happened? The city got hungrier-hungrier than it was before he arrived. You have two choices. You can either stop that madness, or you can get the guns and say, You are going to do this. Then you have to start building walls around your city. Antioch responded to it the way cities do. They wrote songs about him-mocking little verses about his philosopher’s beard, sung in the streets. Julian, the emperor of Rome, sat down and wrote a pamphlet answering them. He called it The Beard-Hater. He nailed it up in the public square. In it, he explained at length that his policy had been sound, and that the people of Antioch were greedy and soft and had failed him. Then he left. That pamphlet still exists. You can read it. Just go online. It’s an amazing thing. Sixteen hundred years later, the oldest detailed record we have of a government capping the price of food is also a government blaming the citizens for what the cap is doing. Which brings me to the chairman of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, a Mamdani ally, who was asked about the bodegas this week. What he said was: If one publicly owned grocery store is bringing prices down enough to put a man out of business, then maybe he shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place. Wait. You can lose 28 cents on every dollar. That’s not a business. That’s not business. That’s communism. Follow the sequence. The bodega on the corner loses 10% of its traffic and has to close. The halal butcher two doors down loses foot traffic. The bodega closes. Now Mamdani Mart is the only food on the block, which means the discount is no longer competing with anything. It’s just an expense. Expenses get cut in the next budget crunch, under the next mayor or during the next fiscal emergency. The subsidy gets trimmed, the shelves thin out and the neighborhood that had four imperfect stores now has only one bad one.
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