Bill Maher tore into New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's proposal for city-run grocery stores selling goods at 30% below market rate, calling it an idea that has never worked, and the numbers back him up.
On his Friday HBO broadcast of Real Time, Maher laid out the mayor's plan in blunt terms and asked a question New York taxpayers should be asking themselves: who exactly is paying for this? The host framed Mamdani's proposal not as healthy market competition, but as a government-subsidized scheme designed to undercut private businesses that play by the rules.
Maher's critique lands at a moment when the grocery store initiative, Mamdani's flagship domestic policy, is drawing fire from economists, business owners, and fiscal watchdogs who say the math doesn't add up, the planning is shoddy, and the whole venture is destined to repeat the failures of similar experiments across the country.
Maher didn't hold back. With former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sitting across from him as a guest, the host walked through the proposal and then turned the mayor's own rhetoric against him. Maher said on air:
"He's opening these city-run stores, grocery stores. I don't think they have one yet, but that's the plan, that will sell meat and bread and other items, I assume, for 30% below market rate. His quote was, the Mayor said, I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win. Well, it's not competition if you're undercutting legitimate businessmen by 30%. I wonder who's going to win. But who's subsidizing that, who's paying for that? I guess richer people, and that's the plan."
He then turned to Cuomo with a pointed follow-up: "But do you think it's workable? It never has before." The source does not include Cuomo's response.
Maher's framing cuts to the core problem. Competition means two businesses operating under the same rules. When one side can absorb unlimited losses because taxpayers cover the tab, the other side, the bodega owner, the independent grocer, the family-run supermarket, doesn't stand a chance. Calling that "competition" is like calling a rigged fight a fair bout.
The grocery industry operates on razor-thin margins, roughly 2% profit on every dollar of sales. Mamdani's plan to sell goods at 30% below market rate means the city would lose at least 28 cents on every dollar, a gap that taxpayers would have to fill indefinitely. E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, offered a broader indictment of the approach in comments reported by Fox News:
"The hallmark of socialism is it breaks things, then uses the detritus as an excuse to break more things."
Mamdani announced the city-run grocery stores at a July 27 press conference, promising 30% discounts on what he called "essential" products. But the economics of grocery retail leave almost no room for subsidized discounting on that scale, not without turning each store into a permanent drain on the city budget.
That budget drain is already looking worse than advertised. Mamdani initially claimed the entire five-borough plan would cost $70 million. But the Manhattan store alone is already slated to cost at least $30 million, the Washington Free Beacon reported, roughly three times what industry experts say it costs to build a supermarket from scratch. Anthony Pena, president of the National Supermarket Association, put it plainly:
"Even a high end, gourmet store in the middle of Manhattan wouldn't cost that much to build."
If one store eats nearly half the budget for the whole program, the $70 million figure is fiction. Critics warn the real cost could balloon past $100 million, a trajectory familiar to anyone who has watched government spending projections meet reality.
Mamdani has framed the initiative as a response to "food deserts", neighborhoods where residents lack access to affordable groceries. But the proposed Manhattan location in East Harlem already has five grocery stores within a two-block radius. That fact alone undercuts the mayor's stated rationale. This isn't filling a gap. It's inserting a government-subsidized competitor into a neighborhood already served by private businesses.
Those private businesses are not taking it quietly. Frank Garcia, chairman of the Multicultural Business Coalition, told the New York Post that the mayor's office has ignored repeated attempts at communication:
"We have not heard anything from the mayor. We've reached out, we've sent letters, we have not heard anything at all."
A coalition of business owners has raised over $1 million to fight the initiative and is prepared to sue. Ibrahim Alqushi, a bodega owner, dismissed the mayor's assurances with two words: "Not an experiment." For small-business owners who built their livelihoods in these neighborhoods, Mamdani's plan isn't a policy paper. It's a direct threat to their survival.
The mayor's own budget chief, Sherif Soliman, admitted under questioning that no studies have been conducted on the plan's impact on local small businesses. Asked about the concern, Soliman offered only: "We are attuned to those issues." Being "attuned" is not the same as doing the work. The city is preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars to compete against its own taxpaying businesses, and nobody in the administration bothered to study whether it would put them under.
The financial problems go deeper than cost overruns. Mamdani claimed he could fund his grocery store plan by redirecting $140 million in city subsidies that he said were flowing to corporate grocery chains. He framed it as a simple reallocation, stop subsidizing big corporations and start feeding the people directly.
One problem: the $140 million figure represents private investment by grocery stores, not government spending. Mamdani apparently misread the city's Economic Development Corporation website. The Washington Examiner reported that the actual city program in question, the FRESH initiative, which offers tax breaks to grocers who open in underserved areas, has cost taxpayers approximately $3.3 million per year, or about $20 million over six years. Not $140 million.
Mamdani's own words expose the error. He pledged: "We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging." But the "city funds" he planned to redirect largely don't exist. The entire funding premise of his signature policy is built on a misreading of a website.
The grocery store debacle is hardly Mamdani's only policy stumble. A New York judge recently blocked his pied-à-terre tax after homeowners sued over a botched rollout, another ambitious initiative that collapsed under legal scrutiny.
Maher's pointed question, "do you think it's workable? It never has before", finds support in the historical record. Kansas City launched a government-run grocery store that was plagued with empty shelves and crime before closing after burning through $18 million. Chicago spent $26 million across seven government-backed stores before pulling the plug. Both experiments ended the same way: taxpayers holding the bill for spoiled food and shuttered storefronts.
Fernando Mateo of the United Bodegas of America offered the sharpest critique in comments to Newsmax, calling the plan what it is:
"He is there to create a socialist communist atmosphere, something that looks from the pages of Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and Russia."
Mateo added: "Everything he says is fake. It's not true. He's not going to be able to deliver to the people what he's saying." Five government stores attempting to serve a city of more than 8 million people is, by any measure, inadequate to the stated goal, even if the stores managed to stay open and solvent, which history suggests they would not.
The grocery store fight is part of a broader pattern. Mamdani's free-transit rhetoric has already backfired as fare evasion has surged, costing the city tens of millions in lost revenue. Grand promises followed by fiscal wreckage is becoming a signature of this administration.
Mamdani's troubles extend well beyond grocery aisles. A Staten Island crowd booed him off stage at an NYPD celebration in under a minute, a moment that captured the depth of public frustration with his leadership. A Gold Star family blocked him from speaking at a fallen soldier's funeral in Queens.
These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a mayor whose ideological ambitions consistently outpace his competence, whose numbers don't survive contact with basic arithmetic, and whose administration can't be bothered to study the consequences of its own plans before spending other people's money.
Maher got the core of this right. When the government sells groceries at a 30% loss and calls it "competition," it isn't competing. It's crowding out the people who actually know how to run a store, and sending the bill to everyone else. That's not a new idea. It's an old one, and it has never worked.
