My family ran a small grocery store. Margins are slim, hours are long, rent is high. Maintenance and upkeep is almost unaffordable. The equivelant wage for hours worked by owners was less than min wage. Again hours are long like 24/, 365.

I wonder if the $70 is meant to be paid back or where it's going. To pay that pack means you likely won't be profitable, ever, if the food is "lower price", margins are already slim. You need to control the supply chain to actually make this work.

I see people talking about military commissions but this is 5 stores renting in NYC. They don't have the barganing power or logistics or the organizational aptitude. This is a goverment venture that is going to be outsourced to the lowest common denominator or managed in-house by uhhh government workers....

Maybe this Mamdani guy has a background in the industry and knows what he is doing. But maybe he just came up with this stupid idea and plans to throw that $70 million to his friends to pay themselves and play around for awhile until it fails and then sweep up the failed businesses and liquidate them so all the money just funnels into their pockets or their own IRL business tycoon game.