The specs for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s magical city-run grocery stores demand the moon, but shoppers will be lucky to find some overripe green cheese.
As with most city contracting, the Economic Development Corp.’s official Request For Proposals outlines an implausible wish-list that will deliver less than half what Mamdani promised at more than twice the price.
The city wants potential operators of the stores to submit specific financial plans for stocking, staffing and operating five supermarkets — when the city hasn’t built any of the five, nor chosen locations for three.
These imaginary stores must be managed under a business plan out of Alice in Wonderland: No deli counter allowed, but they must sell fruit, tuna, bean, chicken, egg and potato salads.
The operator should have a pre-existing “cost-effective” supply chain, but also source from “local suppliers and small businesses while keeping prices low.”
Staff will have to enforce who can shop: only those with a “library card-esque” customer ID card (which is nothing like a voter ID because . . . well, because).
The stores are eligible for a taxpayer-funded “Affordability Payment,” a subsidy to cover the cost of selling items for 30% below retail average, but management must have experience with employee profit-sharing.
Huh? If the store’s finances are backstopped by the city, there’s no “profit” to share.
Unless of course you are a socialist playing “store” with Monopoly money, which is what this experiment looks a lot like.
And EDC officials on Wednesday were stumpedby tons of other questions about the RFP.
None of this gibberish is news to anyone familiar with how the city burns cash on contractors every year.
During the migrant crisis, it handed out billions in no-bid contracts to insiders who wasted, lost or stole massive sums of money.
The leaders of contractors who run major homeless shelter networks routinely pay themselves enormous salaries while also hiring companies they own as sub-contractors.
The Department of Education, which spends more than $13 billion on vendors every year, is notoriously opaque about its processes, refusing to release details on hundreds of contracts. (No surprise that Kamar Samuels had signed offon a series of odiferous payments before rising to become DOE chancellor.)
Mamdani’s grocery store RFP takes city contracting to new heights of absurdity, but the way New York routinely does business is already insane.