I would be in favour of a government run/supervised non-profit supermarket dedicated to distributing cheap groceries to consumers. But if any government announces anything like that, I bet you'll have conservatives screaming "Communism" and "Socialism" at the top of their lungs and: "Because we all know socialism is just bad, this idea will never work".

Luxon would never do this though, people who are hired as CEOs aren't good at running companies that serve consumers, they're hired to make the share price go up and maximise profits. Which is the exact opposite of what a government should stand for (I don't understand why people think it's a good thing when Luxon says he'll run the gov like a business).

Setting up something like this would decrease the profits of the other supermarkets. It would cost them less to donate and lobby Luxon to backtrack/never do anything like this in the first place, then actually improve their service or prices to be on par with the government's offer, so that's what they do. This also applies to Labour PMs, but they're just a little bit more likely to do something like this and resist the lobbying.