MAMDANI’S GROCERY PLAN SPARKS BODEGA UPROAR

Mayor Zoron Mandani’s promise of city-owned grocery stores is already sparking a fierce showdown with the very people who keep New York fed. City Hall invited bodega owners to a roundtable, then peppered them with questions about profits, best-selling products, and business models — and the owners weren’t buying the message that government can swoop in and fix what the market has built. One said plainly that people who’ve never owned a business want to tell others what to pay workers, while another blasted the meeting as a setup that felt more like a bid to put them out of business than to help them survive. All of this comes as New York grapples with 11% of storefronts sitting empty six years after 2020, a stark sign of the city’s economic pain and business churn. Mandani’s pitch is simple and dramatic: bread will be cheaper, eggs will be cheaper, and grocery shopping won’t be such a brutal equation. But to many store owners, that “grand experiment” looks less like relief and more like a dangerous leap into socialism —