New York City's bodega owners walked into City Hall expecting answers about the Mamdani administration's plan to open taxpayer-funded supermarkets across the five boroughs. Instead, they got a questionnaire asking them to hand over their profit margins and best-selling products, the kind of proprietary data no small business shares with a competitor, let alone one backed by the city treasury.
They refused.
The roundtable meeting, held last Monday at the invitation of Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, was supposed to calm an industry already alarmed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani's push to build government-owned grocery stores offering "rock-bottom prices" on essentials. As the New York Post reported, it did the opposite, deepening suspicion among the owners of the city's roughly 13,000 bodegas that the administration is gathering competitive intelligence while refusing to answer their questions in return.
A bodega representative who attended the meeting and declined to be identified told the Post:
"They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don't answer our questions and that's why there is distrust."
Before the meeting, Su sent invitees a pre-meeting questionnaire. Among the questions: "What items are sold the most at your stores?" and "Where is your profit margin the greatest?" and "What is the main thing people come into your store for? What else do they buy while there?"
These are not idle curiosities. For small grocers scraping by on margins of 2 to 3 percent, this is the kind of information that separates survival from closure. An unnamed food policy expert described the city's approach bluntly: "It seems like a clumsy, one-sided fishing expedition."
Another source who does business with the city put it more plainly: "I would be put off if my local government asked me questions about my profits and margins. It's none of their business."
The city also asked roundtable invitees not to share details from the meeting with the NYC Groceries Interagency Taskforce, a request that raises its own questions about transparency within the administration's own bureaucracy.
The administration's plan, announced in April, calls for at least one government-run supermarket in each of New York City's five boroughs. The first is set to open in Hunts Point in the Bronx next year. A second, at the La Marqueta site in East Harlem, carries a $30 million price tag and threatens the livelihood of more than a dozen existing stores nearby.
These stores would be subsidized with taxpayer money to undercut private competitors on price, a model that has drawn alarm far beyond the bodega community. Fox News reported that Gristedes supermarket chain owner John Catsimatidis warned he would "close, or sell, or move or franchise the Gristedes locations" if the city "goes socialist." Rep. Michael Rulli, R-Ohio, called the concept "a bullet into the heart of the U.S. grocery industry, if this caught on."
Mamdani has framed the stores as a "partnership" with existing owners. The owners themselves do not appear to see it that way.
The administration's damage-control effort has produced a trail of soft assurances and bureaucratic hedging. At a City Council hearing in June, interim NYC Economic Development Corporation CEO Jeanny Pak told City Council Speaker Julie Menin that the agency had "reached out to the industry" and would "continue to do that." She added that the public stores would not carry everything bodegas sell and that the city was "hoping that we can direct traffic to the bodega owners."
"We will find ways to support them," Pak said, without specifying what those ways would be.
One possible concession under discussion: leaving deli counters, sandwiches, sliced meats and cheeses, chicken cutlets, salads, out of the government stores. Cathy Nonas, a former senior food policy adviser for the city's Department of Health and now executive director of the nonprofit Meals for Good, described it as "a plan on the table." But the mayor's office would not confirm it, saying only that "decisions on the exact types of food products offered will vary by store and have not been finalized at this point."
In other words, the city wants bodega owners to reveal their most sensitive business data while keeping its own plans deliberately vague. That is not a partnership. It is an asymmetric demand dressed up as consultation.
Nonas, to her credit, acknowledged the historical basis for bodega owners' distrust. She told the Post that the city "wants to make sure that those who have served the community are still thriving after the public markets open," but added a telling caveat:
"I understand why this group would be skeptical that anyone cares about them, because the bodegas have never had a city [administration] that has been particularly concerned with their needs and problems."
She noted that bodegas "are often the one market that exists in a poor area until it's gentrified and then all of a sudden their rent goes up." These are businesses that have survived precisely because government left them alone. Now the same government wants to open subsidized stores next door, and asks for their trade secrets first.
The broader business community has taken notice. The Multicultural Business Coalition, a newer group, intends to raise $1 million to fight the mayor's proposal. The National Supermarket Association, representing 450 independent stores in the city, has been meeting with the administration since May, though the results of those conversations remain unclear. The pattern across Mamdani's tenure has been consistent: business leaders have repeatedly sounded alarms over policies they say punish the private sector.
Avi Kaner, former co-owner of the Morton Williams grocery chain in Manhattan, offered a measured but pointed assessment. He told the Post that the questionnaire's questions were not inherently unreasonable, but that the city had the process backward.
"I think they are premature. The city should first provide transparency."
The grocery store fight does not exist in isolation. It fits neatly into a governing style that has alienated business owners, investors, and even members of Mamdani's own party. His rent freeze policies have already driven capital out of the city, Google co-founder Sergey Brin sold a New York City real estate stake at a significant loss as investors reassessed the market.
The administration's budget negotiations have followed a similar arc. Mamdani struck a $126 billion deal with the City Council only after caving on his resistance to NYPD expansion, a capitulation that undercut his own priorities.
And his political instincts have not always served the coalition he needs. The mayor has backed socialist challengers against fellow Democrats, drawing fire from party leaders who see his ideological ambitions as a liability for the broader ticket.
Deputy Mayor Su framed the roundtable in cooperative terms. "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," she said. She added: "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."
But seriousness about not undercutting private businesses would start with not building a taxpayer-subsidized competitor in the first place. Asking store owners which products to avoid selling is not a safeguard, it is an admission that the government store will, by design, take sales away from the people it claims to protect.
The administration has not disclosed the precise funding mechanism for the subsidized stores. It has not confirmed what products they will carry. It has not explained why roundtable invitees were told not to share meeting details with the city's own interagency taskforce. It has not offered enforceable protections for the businesses it acknowledges will be affected.
What it has done is ask small business owners, many of them immigrants, many of them operating in low-income neighborhoods where they are the only food option, to open their books to a government that plans to compete with them using public money.
The bodega owners said no. The grocery chains are preparing to leave or fight. The economists and policy experts are raising red flags. And the administration's response has been to schedule more meetings, issue more vague assurances, and ask for more data it has no business requesting.
When the government decides it can run your industry better than you can, the first thing it needs is your playbook. The bodega owners of New York were wise enough not to hand it over.
