It's been more than 50 years since the New York Daily News reported that President Gerald Ford would veto any bailout for the city's endless red ink with the headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Ford never said exactly that, of course, but the headline created such a backlash that Ford backed down a few months later, putting his signature on $2.3 billion worth of emergency loans. That's about $14.3 billion in 2026 money — a very nice little bailout, indeed.
Today, New York City bodega owners know that nobody will bail them out when the city's Commie-Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani puts them out of business, which is why they just silently told him to drop dead.
Or at least that's the impression I got from a Monday morning New York Post exclusive detailing the showdown between Gracie Mansion and local retailers threatened by Mamdani's campaign promise to build and operate city-run grocery stores.
"Business owners gripe that city officials are only now seeking their input — and seemingly as an afterthought — after sparking alarms in April with a surprise plan to build a public grocery store in East Harlem at La Marqueta," the Post reported. "That store will cost a whopping $30 million to build – and threatens the livelihood of more than a dozen existing stores nearby."
All of that is to be expected. The city can throw Other People's Money at its socialist stores until it runs out, while typical grocers operate on razor-thin 2% profit margins. Considering the services they provide and the complexity of their operations, the real crime is how little money they make.
But I digress, as I usually do.
What I love about this story — and what makes it so newsworthy — is the sheer gall of the Mamdani administration.
“We met with bodega owners so they could help us plan and ensure that we take into account their challenges and their role as a part of the food ecosystem,” Julie Su, deputy mayor for "economic justice," told the Post in a statement. But what really happened was that bodega owners reported to City Hall last week at Su's invitation for a roundtable discussion, "only to get barraged with 'intrusive' questions about their businesses," according to the Post's source.
The questionnaire bodega owners were expected to fill out included questions like, “What items are sold the most at your stores?” and “Where is your profit margin the greatest?”
The correct answer to questions like those is, "Get stuffed." The polite answer is, "Try running a bodega and figure it out for yourself, or get stuffed."
Instead, an anonymous bodega owner who spoke to the Post said, "They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust."
"Tell us how to run you out of business with your hard-won institutional knowledge and your tax dollars" is pretty much the height of gall, I thought. But then I read the part where Su told the Post, "One of the questions we wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell. That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them."
Nope, that is the height of gall.
The only reason to shop at a city-run store — which, if they're like anything else the city runs, will be poorly managed and with customer service moving at Glacier Speed — is if they undercut the competition with subsidized prices. What Su wants to know is exactly where she has to set her prices to do just that.
Recommended: Is This Gavin Newsom's Biggest Lie Ever?
Need more ways to tell commies to drop dead?
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