A lot of produce goes bad as well. They regularly throw out a lot of it (unfortunately much of it into bins, but I guess there’s a food safety issue with giving it to homeless people).
Grocery stores in my country are operating on a 2-5% profit margin. All companies’ annual reports are public and shareholders can’t take dividends unless there’s profit AND there’s no tax on profit, only on dividends, so there’s little incentive to hide profits. And no, grocery prices aren’t cheap here either, they’re up a lot in the last 6 years and change.
If Mamdani could cut costs 30%, either the stores aren’t turning a profit (which they don’t need to since they’re being run for the benefit of New Yorkers), or Americans have it much worse in terms of price gouging. I suspect it might be the latter if there aren’t as many competing chains in the US. Here we’ve got 3-4 even in many small towns, 6-7 in the cities, and of course small independent ones in some places. And one of them is a co-op. But I’d still expect NYC in particular to have healthy competition, it’s such a huge market and so dense, room for a lot of competing stores.
Where the markup is criminal IMO is nonperishable goods. Fucking regular pens with a 300% markup in office supply stores, etc. Stuff they don’t have to throw out after a few days.
A lot of produce goes bad as well. They regularly throw out a lot of it (unfortunately much of it into bins, but I guess there’s a food safety issue with giving it to homeless people).
Grocery stores in my country are operating on a 2-5% profit margin. All companies’ annual reports are public and shareholders can’t take dividends unless there’s profit AND there’s no tax on profit, only on dividends, so there’s little incentive to hide profits. And no, grocery prices aren’t cheap here either, they’re up a lot in the last 6 years and change.
If Mamdani could cut costs 30%, either the stores aren’t turning a profit (which they don’t need to since they’re being run for the benefit of New Yorkers), or Americans have it much worse in terms of price gouging. I suspect it might be the latter if there aren’t as many competing chains in the US. Here we’ve got 3-4 even in many small towns, 6-7 in the cities, and of course small independent ones in some places. And one of them is a co-op. But I’d still expect NYC in particular to have healthy competition, it’s such a huge market and so dense, room for a lot of competing stores.
Where the markup is criminal IMO is nonperishable goods. Fucking regular pens with a 300% markup in office supply stores, etc. Stuff they don’t have to throw out after a few days.