Valuetainment - April 16, 2026


“$6M To $30M” - Mamdani's ‘Free Grocery’ Plan BLOWS Budget BEFORE Opening

Topics
Mamdani's grocery plan
Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Doritos Lynn Gavin Newsom Mamdani Mandami Mondami Donnie
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Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

197.31

Word count

1,492

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Grocery stores in New York City are being built for those in need of a place to go to get some basic food. In order to meet the growing demand, the city is going to have to build at least 30 of them. But how many will they be able to provide to those who need it? And how will they compete with the competition from other major U.S. cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 As we're going through this topic with affordability and people are like, well, you know, nothing's going to happen. 0.98
00:00:35.100 You know, the red conservatives are still going to win. 0.83
00:00:37.480 Economy is going to be fine. 0.84
00:00:38.460 Mamdani beats everybody in New York City. 0.98
00:00:41.440 And he came out. 0.69
00:00:42.600 He's a socialist Islamist that came out and he won New York City financial capital of the world.
00:00:47.320 And then he said he's going to have grocery stores that he's going to build free, free for folks who are having a hard time and all this other stuff.
00:00:53.660 You know, eggs, the main essential stuff that they're going to do.
00:00:56.180 People still don't know exactly what the system is going to be.
00:00:58.280 And he said, for $60 million, we'll be able to build in five different boroughs and all this other stuff.
00:01:02.960 And they just launched their first.
00:01:04.500 And the first one is going to cost roughly $30 million.
00:01:07.160 Rob, if you want to pull up the video of him announcing this from Donnie with the new grocery store that's coming out.
00:01:15.260 Is that the one, Rob?
00:01:16.100 You just added a –
00:01:17.400 Right here.
00:01:18.040 Is that the one?
00:01:18.620 Go for it.
00:01:19.620 The first of your grocery stores will open next year.
00:01:23.820 Why is it taking so long?
00:01:25.100 I feel like a bodega opens every other week across New York City in every neighborhood.
00:01:30.400 Why take so long to start this issue?
00:01:33.040 I think for a few reasons.
00:01:34.140 The first is that we are talking about building something from the ground up.
00:01:37.780 We're talking about this city's first city-run grocery store in Manhattan that we need to both design, that we also need to construct.
00:01:45.840 We're also going to be constructing it using prevailing wages.
00:01:48.580 And it's also one part of a larger ecosystem, not just in terms of La Marqueta, but also here on this strip.
00:01:54.640 We've seen the MTA has just completed their work in this very area.
00:01:58.980 This requires a lot of interagency and intergovernmental coordination that we're going to be seeing.
00:02:05.220 The store that will be open next year in 2027 and the additional stores that will be open by the end of 2029 will not require this same scale of production.
00:02:15.000 The reason that we're announcing this is so that we can get started on this.
00:02:17.980 So there you go.
00:02:18.640 So 30 million, Tom, you look very excited about this.
00:02:21.620 Lynn, do you foresee this?
00:02:24.380 one, working successfully, and two, will other markets follow his lead?
00:02:30.420 I'm not particularly optimistic on it.
00:02:32.480 When you look at the major grocery stores worldwide,
00:02:34.760 at least the ones that are publicly traded, we have the financials on,
00:02:37.120 grocery stores run at low single-digit average profit margins.
00:02:40.860 No one goes in the grocery business to get rich.
00:02:43.100 You go into finance, you go into tech.
00:02:45.560 Running a grocery store is not the most lucrative thing.
00:02:48.240 These companies have refined their supply chains for years and decades.
00:02:52.400 They have all the incentive in the world to run those as efficiently as possible
00:02:55.540 because when you have multiple grocery stores in an area,
00:02:57.720 if you try to overcharge, your competitor is going to come in and say,
00:03:00.300 well, you're charging $7 for Doritos.
00:03:02.280 We're going to charge $6 for Doritos.
00:03:04.460 They're all under pressure.
00:03:06.600 It's, you know, all the food that goes to,
00:03:08.600 it's very logistically challenging to run a grocery store.
00:03:10.640 A lot of those obviously have quick turnover times in terms of their expiration.
00:03:14.880 You need a lot of employees, which is more expensive in this labor environment.
00:03:18.860 It's a very challenging business.
00:03:20.560 I'm not very optimistic that they're going to come in and just miraculously run this cheaper than all the commercial operators.
00:03:26.980 I think like most things today, you mentioned the cost overruns on like, you know, Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Arizona.
00:03:34.120 I think these are going to come in with cost overruns just like almost that even in the private sector that would happen, let alone, you know, them doing it.
00:03:41.500 You've foreseen seeing more of this stuff happening.
00:03:44.020 Well, I see New York continuing with their path, probably getting some of these stores online.
00:03:47.900 We'll see how long it takes.
00:03:48.920 As the data comes in, I'm not optimistic that a lot of others are going to want to copy that because unless they just run at massive losses and therefore subsidize food, it's not really fundamentally addressing the issue, in my opinion.
00:04:03.380 Tom, look, say what you will about SNAP.
00:04:07.380 The problem with SNAP is we didn't regulate who received it and the wrong people received it that didn't really need it.
00:04:14.340 SNAP is a subsidy so you can buy groceries.
00:04:16.400 It would be far cheaper to have a very tightly controlled fraud filtered SNAP program to let people who are in challenging economic situations have a subsidy and just going to Costco than it would be to do this.
00:04:34.240 This is this is going to be a disaster. Ladies and gentlemen, Mandami's rail.
00:04:40.160 There it is.
00:04:41.480 You've got Gavin Newsom standing under the bridge of a partially built rail
00:04:48.480 that looks like the price of oil last week, 128, 127, 131, 141.
00:04:55.020 It's just going up and up and up on overruns, and it's billions.
00:04:59.120 This is going to be Mondami's rail.
00:05:01.360 We're going to go back and look at this,
00:05:03.240 and somebody is going to put the real dollars out to build all these.
00:05:07.040 And as Lynn has correctly pointed out, government doesn't do this without overruns.
00:05:12.160 It's just going to happen.
00:05:13.680 You've got contractors take advantage of government.
00:05:15.940 There's all these things are going to happen.
00:05:18.040 This is going to be a disaster.
00:05:19.940 It's going to look back, and they're going to close it, and they're saying—
00:05:23.340 I can't wait for this.
00:05:24.220 I'm so glad they're doing this.
00:05:26.120 You know what I mean, Pat?
00:05:26.960 We have SNAP at the federal level.
00:05:28.880 We have SNAP.
00:05:29.740 We just need to put a tighter collar on SNAP so it doesn't get defrauded
00:05:34.340 so that the people that really need some economic
00:05:36.420 assistance maybe can get it
00:05:38.460 and they can go to Costco and they can
00:05:40.460 get food and live
00:05:42.060 but trying to do it this way, oh capitalism
00:05:44.580 didn't work and there's too many poor people
00:05:46.420 government will do it, oh yeah
00:05:48.660 you know what
00:05:50.220 it's all the memes on
00:05:52.080 Twitter where the guy flips out
00:05:54.600 the folding chair and says
00:05:56.020 here we go or the guy walks up with the popcorn
00:05:58.380 we have those memes everywhere, guess what
00:06:00.520 here they come
00:06:01.100 yeah i mean this is the the way that it goes is the journey that the middle class goes on when it
00:06:07.100 goes from being the middle class to you get inflation bad inflation then middle class becomes
00:06:11.120 the lower class then they get socialist because a lot of people don't understand what's actually
00:06:14.620 happening and then somebody comes along gives the nice sounding message of oh you're being ripped
00:06:18.740 off by you know greedy business owners uh don't worry i'm gonna come in i'm gonna make things free
00:06:23.280 and make things fair and you know a lot of people buy that because a lot of people don't understand
00:06:26.860 what's happening so i mean new york's small case study of that california in other ways
00:06:31.040 It's a case study of that, but yeah, I know we're talking about anticipating somebody crazy becoming the president because of that type of situation.
00:06:38.360 I think that's what this cost of living situation is going to facilitate potentially, right?
00:06:43.860 So that's the scary thing, and then people never end up understanding what's actually happening.
00:06:47.940 That's the unfortunate part.
00:06:49.140 You know, like 80% of the population will never understand why it's actually happening, why things are getting unaffordable, and, you know, the impact of things like this, which is going to make things more expensive.
00:06:58.780 Yeah, I mean, listen, though, I'm telling you right now, this is why I say the chances in my eyes, if this continues,
00:07:08.340 and AOC is a bigger chance of winning in 2028 if affordability becomes a top issue,
00:07:14.740 because she's going to hit this nonstop, and she has more credibility in this topic.
00:07:21.240 At least she's been honest with this for her career.
00:07:23.880 She is a socialist. Some would call her a communist. 0.57
00:07:26.400 I don't know if she's a full-blown communist.
00:07:27.960 I think she's a socialist through and through,
00:07:31.240 but this topic won't be going away.