A coalition of 50 immigrant-led business chambers has voted to take Mayor Zohran Mamdani to court over his plan to open five city-run supermarkets, a $70 million initiative small grocers say will drive them out of business.
The Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Jewish-owned businesses across New York City, told the New York Post that its board voted to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks to block the mayor's government-run grocery plan. The group also plans to raise $1 million for legal fees and public awareness, and intends to send a letter to the mayor's office in the coming days notifying City Hall of its intent to sue.
Frank Garcia, the coalition's chairman, said the mayor has refused to engage with the business owners his plan would affect most directly.
"The mayor doesn't seem to want to sit down with us."
Garcia declined to identify the specific legal theories the coalition will pursue but made clear the group is not backing down. He told the Post that Mamdani "won't be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in."
Mamdani announced new details of the supermarket initiative this week, including a 30% discount on basic staples, produce, meat, milk, cheese, and bread, at the city-run stores. The mayor held a press conference Monday touting the plan and insisting it would not harm existing businesses.
"We are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive."
But the mechanics of the plan tell a different story. The city-run stores will be built on municipal property and pay no rent. They will be exempt from property taxes. And they will offer prices 30% below what nearby private grocers charge, grocers who pay rent, pay taxes, and operate on razor-thin margins. Fox News reported that approximately 45 grocery stores already operate within a 35-minute walk of the proposed East Harlem location alone.
Radhames Rodriguez, president of the United Bodegas of America, put the threat in plain terms:
"Having items that sell for 30% less than our prices, means nobody will go to our stores."
Five bodegas sit within just a few blocks of the planned East Harlem store at La Marqueta. The first city-run supermarket is scheduled to open next year in the Bronx. Mamdani's office says the stores will not carry hot food, alcohol, cigarettes, or lottery tickets, a distinction the mayor apparently considers sufficient to avoid direct competition with bodegas that depend on those same categories for survival.
Sarah Kang, a manager at a CTown Supermarkets location near the proposed East Harlem site, described the calculation her customers will make. "A lot of people walk 20 to 30 minutes to get here," she told Fox News. "If they find a cheaper supermarket, I don't think they'll be willing to make that trip. It's going to affect small grocery stores. Definitely."
What makes the plan especially galling to small business owners is how the city approached them before the details went public. After Mamdani first announced the grocery initiative earlier this year, city officials met privately with small business leaders and asked for details about their best-selling items. The businessmen provided the information. Then the city announced it would open taxpayer-funded competitors selling those same staples at steep discounts.
The coalition Garcia leads was formed earlier this year specifically to create a unified front against the grocery plan. It now includes 50 chambers of commerce, a broad, multiethnic alliance of the very immigrant entrepreneurs New York's political class claims to champion. Garcia said conservative think tanks and politicians have offered funding and assistance, though he declined to name them, calling the lawsuit "a non-partisan initiative."
Mamdani's broader record suggests the grocery plan is not an isolated experiment but part of a pattern. The mayor, a self-described democratic socialist, has pursued an aggressive posture of political defiance across multiple fronts since taking office.
The $70 million price tag raises its own questions. The Washington Examiner reported that the second planned store location, known as "The Peninsula" in the Bronx, will cost $10 million, meaning the first two stores alone would consume more than half the total pilot budget. The first East Harlem location carries a $30 million price tag, according to Fox News.
And the history of government-run grocery stores offers little comfort. Kansas City's KC Sun Fresh grocery store burned through $29 million in taxpayer funds before closing in August 2025. A private operator eventually replaced it. Mamdani has acknowledged the experimental nature of the project. On a podcast appearance, he framed it as a test worth running.
"No matter how you think about the idea, I do think there should be room for reasonable policy experimentation in our cities and in our country, where we actually test out our idea. And if they work, they work. And if they don't, c'est la vie, then the idea was wrong."
That is an easy posture when the money being risked belongs to taxpayers, and the businesses being "experimented" on belong to immigrant families who built them from nothing.
Garcia's coalition has framed the fight in starker terms. He told the Washington Examiner: "They're using our tax dollars against our members, and we cannot compete." The coalition's $1 million fundraising target signals that these business owners are prepared for a sustained legal and political battle, not a press conference and a prayer.
The Associated Press reported that the city will provide storefronts and cover rental costs and property taxes while private operators handle day-to-day operations. Mamdani has pitched the stores as central to his affordability agenda, saying that "in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have to worry about being able to afford to feed their family."
Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, offered a colder assessment. "It is hard to see how subsidizing grocery stores, and groceries for everyone who shops there, is the most cost-effective way to increase affordability or reduce food insecurity for struggling New Yorkers," Rein said.
The critique cuts to the core of the plan's design. The 30% discounts are not targeted at low-income residents. They are available to anyone who walks through the door, including wealthier New Yorkers who do not need the subsidy. The stores are not food banks. They are government-run retailers using public money to undercut private businesses on price, while those private businesses absorb every cost the city-run stores avoid.
Mamdani's ideological commitments extend well beyond grocery policy. He floated directing the NYPD to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over an International Criminal Court warrant, a proposal he was eventually forced to abandon after conceding the city lacked legal authority to carry it out. The Washington Free Beacon reported on his "tax the rich" agenda, including a pied-à-terre tax targeting wealthy non-residents, a policy that risks driving out major employers and donors who contribute hundreds of millions to New York institutions.
The DSA's Anti-War Working Group, according to Just The News, obtained internal planning documents detailing demands for the Mamdani administration, including divesting city pension funds from Israeli bonds. The group explicitly strategized to "pressure him to staff with people whose values are aligned", a window into the ideological infrastructure behind City Hall's policy direction.
The mayor's office did not immediately respond to the Post's request for comment on the planned lawsuit.
The small business owners lining up against Mamdani's grocery plan are not corporate lobbyists or chain-store executives. They are immigrant entrepreneurs, bodega owners, independent grocers, and family-run shops that anchor neighborhoods across all five boroughs. They already contend with shoplifting, rising rents, climbing taxes, and limited access to capital. Now their own city government proposes to open rent-free, tax-exempt competitors next door and sell the same staples at prices no private store can match.
The National Supermarket Association, which represents thousands of grocery stores and bodegas, has joined the chorus of opposition. The groups argue that the city is plowing ahead with government-run supermarkets regardless of the impact on existing stores in the lower-income neighborhoods these businesses already serve.
Joel Martinez, a supermarket manager on 128th Street near the East Harlem site, kept his assessment brief: "It will affect smaller businesses that are closer."
When a socialist mayor spends $70 million in taxpayer money to undercut the immigrant-owned businesses that feed his city's neighborhoods, the people who built those businesses from the ground up have every right to fight back, and every reason to wonder whose idea of progress leaves them behind.
