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A group of New York City businesses filed two lawsuits against Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday, alleging that the city-run supermarket initiative would cause unfair competition. The five city-run stores, set to open between 2027 and 2029, are expected to require $70 million in taxpayer dollars to get off the ground, according to Mamdani’s office.
The lawsuits, filed by the Multicultural Business Coalition, claimed that the policymakers behind Mamdani’s five planned stores didn’t consider local needs or meaningfully address affordability issues. Taking community needs and requests into consideration was something that the local, privately owned small grocery stores and bodegas had been doing for decades, the group argued. Though the small business owners said they appreciated the attempt to alleviate food insecurity, they believed that this was not the best way to do so.
What do the lawsuits say? The first lawsuit, obtained by Fox Business, alleged that the hundreds of independent grocers in the coalition would be irreparably harmed by the city-run grocery stores. The members of the coalition are part of immigrant and cultural groups historically discriminated against and who run grocery stores barely making profits, the lawsuit said. Many minority members would not be able to compete with the municipal grocery stores offering food items well below the market price, the lawsuit said. City-run grocery stores would also further exclude immigrant and minority business owners from opportunities, the lawsuit concluded. The filing noted that New York officials long refused to allow Walmart to open Manhattan stores for that very reason.
The second lawsuit, obtained by The New York Post, accused the city and its mayor of failing to perform a proper review before revealing its plans. The plan would eliminate an untold amount of opportunity for minority businesses and small businesses at large, the lawsuit said. The city failed to study the discriminatory effects of the municipal stores on the family-owned bodegas and grocery stores owned by Hispanics, Arabs, and Asians, the lawsuit added.
How has Mayor Mamdani responded to the lawsuits? When asked about the lawsuits during an unrelated Monday news conference, Mamdani stood behind the grocery store initiative, saying he was confident in both the necessity and legality of the project. He also said his office had already identified more than 50 regulatory changes that could be made to assist the minority-owned private businesses, including the elimination of red tape currently required for certain licensing to sell their products.
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