Billionaire Grocery Store Owner Predicts Soviet Bread Lines If Mamdani Is NY Mayor

Trigger warning: old meat juice.

John Catsimatidis getting wild on Fox News

Zohran Mamdani has been officially confirmed the winner of the New York City mayoral Democratic primary with a whopping 56 percent of the vote after the ranked-choice thing was factored in, and you know the anti-immigrant bigots are having a field day, squalling to denaturalize him for doing 9/11 before he was born.

After all that sweaty racism, it’s refreshing like a cup of warm pork juice when he gets attacked for his actual policies, because every single time it goes terribly wrong and ends up sounding like a plug.

BABY BASSINETS, THAT MONSTER!

And now we can’t stop eye-roll-laughing at this histrionic op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from John A. Catsimatidis, billionaire owner of 17 New York City Gristedes and D’Agostino’s supermarkets and a real estate and aviation company, two-time loser Republican candidate for mayor and right-wing AM radio station owner and host, going full RUSSIA FIDEL CASTRO at the suggestion of five city-run grocery stores.

IN RUSSIA!

As owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino’s—this city’s oldest and largest independent supermarket chains—I’ve spent my life keeping shelves stocked, workers employed and families fed. That’s what capitalism does. It works. It builds. It feeds. And it empowers.

Now comes Zohran Mamdani with a delusional notion in the name of radical socialism that would destroy everything we’ve built. His ‘public grocery’ proposal—a government-run alternative to private supermarkets—would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.

So dramatic and sweaty! What else would you expect from a guy who claimed in 2022 that Rudy Giuliani needed “stents” getting a pat on the back by a man Giuliani accused of assault, remember that?

He huffs on:

Mr. Mamdani wants to replace supermarkets with state-run food stores. That’s not progressive, it’s oppressive. He wants bureaucrats to decide what you eat, when you eat, and where you get it. He wants to rip away the livelihoods of hardworking grocers—many of them immigrants, like my parents. [...]

Under Mr. Mamdani’s vision, the corner bodega, the family-owned deli and the community supermarket would all disappear—replaced by government outposts that decide what’s available and when. That isn’t a vision of equity. It’s a blueprint for collapse.

It’s funny because people shop at Gristedes and D’Agostino’s exactly because they have no better option. The stores are known for being grimy, having ridiculous prices even by Manhattan standards, and a tendency to have a single register open at one time, operated by a surly, elderly woman who’s worked there for 20 years and hates everybody’s face.

“I’m convinced Gristedes is a money laundering operation. The places are dingy, empty, and massively overpriced. I don’t understand how they stay in business,” wondered a poster on the NYFood subreddit a year ago. “You might be on to something, mine has rotten meat in it,” chimed in another.

Click reviews of any of Gristedes or D’Agostino’s three-something-starred locations on Google Maps and you’ll be treated to a bounty of tales of rotten meat and vegetables, $9 boxes of Fruity Pebbles, and other disappointments. “Sometimes life gives you lemons and sometimes life gives you 5 dollar black beans and no lemons.”

Two weeks ago Catsimatidis threatened to close up his stores and move to Florida if Mamdani wins, and nary a tear was shed.

Grocery collapse is what’s been happening already, that’s the whole problem! Grocery redlining has left entire ZIP codes in New York without stable access to food, and more than 100 full-service grocery stores in New York City have closed in the past five years, mostly in lower-income neighborhoods. Lack of investment in areas considered a “demographic risk” are why there are food deserts in the city in the first place. Here’s a map from the New York Department of Planning:

And of course Mamdani does not want to take over and replace all supermarkets, much less Catsimatidis’s mediocre Manhattan ones. The entire point is to address food deserts where there are no competing businesses, leaving residents without easy access to fresh vegetables or meat. It’s a real issue for more than 3 million New Yorkers, and one capitalism has not solved yet, not even in the most densely populated city in the world. In the past, New York has tried tax incentives, and cheap real estate deals to keep grocery stores, but still, no takers. Grocery stores have high startup costs and thin margins, which is how Catsimatidis’s dingy stores have been managing to stave off competition for so long, and why they’ve been in trouble since Whole Foods, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s arrived.

Also, not all grocery stores are required to take WIC or SNAP, and Gristedes and D’Agostino’s do not. And they don’t even operate in all five boroughs, just Manhattan, but Catsimatidis is inflamed by the principle! Watch him ranting on the sidewalk on Monday looking like the Penguin, if you want.

When does Catsimatidis plan to open stores in East Harlem and the Bronx, then? Someone should ask!

And oh hey, somebody IS actually working to kill the food supply, and that’s the guy who’s sending ICE to every strawberry patch, dairy, slaughterhouse and chicken coop from coast to coast, leaving harvests to rot in the field. Trump said he was going to exempt farm and hospitality workers, but it did not last a day, and farms are still getting raided.

Anyway, subsidized grocery stores are not unheard of or the craziest idea in the world; other cities including St. Paul, Kansas, Madison, Wisconsin, Venice, Illinois, and Atlanta have or plan to open city-run grocery stores.

Mamdani has been laser-focused on affordability, and competitors Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and Republican loon Curtis Silwa have yet to come up with any ideas to address the grocery issue.

Farm subsidies and farmer bailouts, patriotic and not communism. Subsidized grocery stores, MARXIST COMMUNIST CASTRO!

Catsimatidis made his money starting with the Red Apple grocery store chain in the 1970s, then in 1986 he acquired 36 Gristedes locations and 11 affiliated Charles & Co. specialty-food emporiums, and in the ‘90s acquired Sloan’s supermarkets. He also owns gasoline refineries in Pennsylvania and Alabama, and gas stations in three states, and bought right-wing WABC AM talk radio in 2019, which airs shows from Catsimatidis himself along with rageaholics like Mark Levin, Bill O’Reilly, and Rudy Giuliani, at least until Roodles would not shut up with defamatory stolen-election claims and Catsimatidis had to take him off the air. He says he and Rudy are still friends, though.

Catsimatidis has had his own legal troubles. In 2024 Gristedes was fined $400,000 and entered a consent decree to clean up its act after illegally leaking refrigerants, which is funny because he’s bragged in the past that one of the ways he keeps his overhead low is by “contracting out as little work as possible, using his own electricians and carpenters and his own refrigeration company.” Gristedes has also been sued for systematically stealing from its workers, gender discrimination, and Catsimatidis personally for not paying his workers even after getting sued. A real peach!

Catsimatidis has been into politics, running for mayor as a Republican in 2009 and 2013 and attracting ire for saying that Black people were “racist” for supporting Barack Obama, and that taxation on the rich was the same as when “Hitler punished the Jews.” From 2016 on he’s endorsed Trump full-throatedly, and he loves Tom Homan (the photo in that last link is iconic). For mayor, Catsimatidis is endorsing Adams, of course.

Anyway, you get the picture. If that guy’s against it, whatever IT is, it’s probably a good idea. Grocery store socialism for everybody!

[WSJ gift link / AM NY]

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