Josefina Aguirre has worked the counter at Little Mexico, her family's meat market in Spanish Harlem, for thirty years. Her immigrant parents opened the shop in 1997. She runs it now with her two sisters, pays her mortgage from the register, covers her kid's tuition, and has outlasted COVID-19, rising rents, and a Costco down the road.
Two blocks away, New York City is about to spend $30 million building a government-run grocery store that will undercut her prices by 30%.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a self-described democratic socialist who somehow got elected to run the largest city in America — has committed $70 million in taxpayer money to open five municipal grocery stores, one in each borough. The stores will sit on city-owned property, pay no rent, owe no property taxes, and sell a core basket of groceries at prices 30% below typical New York City retail. The first location is planned for La Marqueta, an existing public market sitting almost on top of Little Mexico.
"When we heard Mamdani was opening a grocery store where people are gonna save 30%, it scares us because we don't have the money to compete," Aguirre told Fox News. "If I'm selling a whole chicken for $13, and he's giving it for $7, they're gonna buy the $7 chicken."
She's not wrong. And she's not alone.
The Multicultural Business Coalition — representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Jewish-owned businesses across New York City — filed two lawsuits, including a class-action in Manhattan's state supreme court, to permanently block the city from opening the stores. The MBC's 50 member chambers voted to sue and began raising $1 million to fund the legal fight. Their president, Ken Roldan, called the plan a "direct assault on minority business by a mayor who claims to be a champion of disenfranchised poor and working-class New Yorkers."
Rep. Mike Rulli, a Republican from Ohio whose family owns Rulli Brothers, a two-location grocery chain, broke down the math. The grocery industry operates on roughly 27% gross margins but nets only about 1.25% to 1.5% after expenses. Government stores selling 30% below market with zero rent and zero property tax aren't competing — they're executing. Rulli predicted the stores would "bleed red the entire time" and called the plan "the biggest mistake the mayor has made."
Mamdani's office did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Which tells you roughly how much interest the mayor has in hearing from the people his plan would bankrupt.
Aguirre survived a pandemic that shuttered businesses across the city. She survived a Costco moving into the neighborhood — a company with $242 billion in annual revenue. She made it through three decades of New York City rent increases. What she's not sure she can survive is a competitor that doesn't have to turn a profit because taxpayers cover the losses.
"This is what my parents left us," she said. "It'll be sad to see us leave."
Democrats spent years telling us they're the party of immigrants, the party of small business, the party of working families scraping by in expensive cities. Then a Democratic socialist mayor commits $70 million to build government stores designed to undercut the prices of the immigrant-owned bodegas and markets that actually feed those neighborhoods.
The MBC's lawsuit alleges the plan violates New York's civil rights laws and the state Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. Hundreds of small store owners — overwhelmingly immigrants and minorities — are named in the class action.
"I pay my mortgage from here. I pay for my kid's tuition. This is what I've been doing for over 30 years," Aguirre said. "Do I need to start over in a new career?"
Thirty years of six-day weeks. A store her parents built with nothing. Three sisters keeping it alive. And the guy who says he's fighting for people like her is the one trying to put her out of business.
Funny how "champion of the working class" keeps translating to "the working class should work somewhere else."