I'm a fan of govt experimentation, but I don't think this is a very good idea. The problem isn't that grocery stores are greedy. The problem is that food got expensive. The Producer Price Index for all foods—avg price paid to domestic producers for food—jumped 30% between 2021 and 2023. Since then, grocery prices have continued to climb, in part due to increases in wages and housing costs. Without strong evidence that NYC bodegas and groceries stores are colluding to protect double-digit net profit margins, the reasonable assumption is that these businesses are operating with <3% margins after rent, labor, and utilities. So, a plan to sell some food with a 30% discount seems like a plan to create very long lines to buy a very small number of subsidized groceries. We'll see how that goes. But I don't think literal bread lines are the image that a socialist mayor wants to cultivate. As Keynes said in 1926, "the important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already ... but to do those things which at present are not done at all." Bodegas are something we're doing already. Large grocers like Trader Joes are really really good at managing supply chains and keeping prices down, whatever you may think of their other policies. I do not trust a busy municipal govt trying to do 1,001 things to be better at groceries than grocers. But I guess we'll find out.