This has been tried before and they always fail:
- Â It takes skill to run a grocery and government bureaucrats do not have the skill set.
- Â Government “free” groceries never have the range of products that real groceries have.
- Â Labor costs go through the roof because these are government employees.
- Â Thievery is a huge problem that is never addressed because what politicians want to be considered to be treating constituents as thieves, especially if they are thieves?
- Â Cleanliness is a constant problem, because government employees, by and large, will only do the bare minimum of work, and because maintenance and repair of freezers and other machinery is never done in a timely manner, or at all.
- Â Â Supply chains break down, because governments always delay payment, as opposed to real groceries that want to stay in business.
- Â Â Federal welfare programs allow the poor to shop where they will, and they have no incentive to be concerned about price as opposed to quality, range of products and a better shopping experience.
government run? think DMV-
groceries are very tight ships, a marvel of production and extremely complex to run.
this will be an unmitigated disaster.. Good!!
It’s really a matter as to *how quickly* the doom spiral will set in. Probably within mere months.
Any person who has ever dealt with a government agency be it licensees, permits etc, has never said, oh we need more of this! I’m convinced those on unemployment fill the jobs of these places bc they can’t get hired in private sector
Remember that when it fails, it will be because of “wreckers” or sabotage. I see less than zero chance they acknowledge it was a bad idea.
Again, look at the employment history and family history of Zohran Mamdani and Cea Weaver. These are two people who have never in their lives learned to appreciate the skills and the labor of others. What’s disgusting is that a New York electorate which should know better (and did know better 15 years ago) put this pair of arrogant and clueless tyros in charge of a gargantuan local government. Two scenarios: the New York electorate learns the hard way or the New York electorate does not learn.
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Public agencies, if they’re properly nurtured (seldom true in this country) are implements you erect to perform functions the private sector cannot. Retail trade in foodstuffs is about the last sector the government should enter as a service provider. The second to last is rental housing. (Both grocery merchants and landlords face enough in the way of compliance costs from health and safety inspectorates, the operations of commercial law, the operations of labor law, the operations of tax law, and the operations of banal landlord-tenant law, and the operations of tort law).
government run? think DMV-
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Any place I have lived since about 1985, the DMV has been a model of courtesy and efficiency compared to what it was where I grew up. Mr. Sailer noted the irony: we’ve never had a campaign of ‘DMV reform’ but we have had serial campaigns of ‘school reform’. The DMV got a lot better and the schools did not.
I’m convinced those on unemployment fill the jobs of these places bc they can’t get hired in private sector
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About 13% of the workforce is employed in the public sector and recruitment in government employment can be quite cumbersome. You do have zero-marginal-product employees in public bureaucracies and bloody clots in public bureaucracies, but that’s because of slovenly management and supervision or institutionalized stupidity. (See educational bureaucracies public and private for the latter).
When there is a government subsidized product, it drives the unsubsidized product out of the marketplace.
Transit system in NYC stinks (often literally) but private transport can’t compete on price, so…
Also, government regulators don’t regulate government owned the same they do private owned. Look at NYC public housing. No private landlord would be allowed such conditions.
https://ace.mu.nu/
Mass transit systems nearly everywhere are natural monopolies or they are social services. Private alternatives compete with them quite successfully, but they are offering substitutes for mass transit. The problem in New York City is two fold: one is that for a dozen years the city has been in the hands of politicians hostile to the order maintenance function of the state. The other has been that public agencies and government corporations are commonly sandboxes for the employees, a phenomenon intensified by the wholly inappropriate presence of collective bargaining in the public sector. Get rid of collective bargaining, get rid of insuperable barriers to firing underperforming government employees, get rid of DEI, and make it so that recruitment and promotion in the public sector will be regulated by timely and impersonal competitive examinations. The regular attention of outside auditors might help as well.