Kansas City’s store is teetering on collapse despite receiving millions in taxpayer funding
While socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani touts government-run grocery stores for the Big Apple, Kansas City, Mo.’s subsidized supermarket is struggling with empty shelves and mounting financial losses even after city officials poured in millions to keep it afloat.
KC Sun Fresh, which opened in 2018 inside a city-owned strip mall and was taken over by a nonprofit in 2022, is now on the brink of closure amid spiraling crime, plummeting sales, and empty shelves, according to the Washington Post. The store “lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week,” the Post reported. “Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.”
Mamdani—the frontrunner in New York City’s mayoral election following his upset Democratic primary win over former governor Andrew Cuomo—has campaigned on opening similar supermarkets in the city. While Kansas City merely subsidized KC Sun Fresh, though, New York City would own and operate the stories under Mamdani’s proposal.
The stores, Mamdani says, would help combat “out-of-control” prices by operating “without a profit motive” and passing savings on to consumers.
According to the Post, customers have become “increasingly afraid” to shop in the Kansas City store even with police presence “because of drug dealing, theft and vagrancy both inside and outside the store and the public library across the street.”
“Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet,” the Post‘s report reads. “Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.”
Mamdani’s far-left platform, which also includes rent freezes, free bus rides, and a $30 minimum wage, has drawn widespread backlash from Republicans and many Democrats. Neither House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries nor Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has officially endorsed Mamdani, whose allies are reportedly planning to primary incumbent Democrats, including Jeffries.
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