New York City’s new socialist mayor has a plan to open five city-owned grocery stores offering food at roughly 30 percent below retail prices. There’s just one catch to access those discounted goods: shoppers will need to prove they live in New York City.
Mamdani described the requirement himself, saying the city is “looking to make sure that we target New Yorkers,” calling it “sort of a library card-esque thing.” A government-issued card. Required to buy government-subsidized food.
This from a mayor whose political career has been built, in part, on the argument that requiring identification to vote is discriminatory, racist, and an impossible burden on low-income residents.
The contradiction was not lost on observers. Elon Musk posted a pointed reaction online: “Oh, the irony is too much.”
As originally reported, the grocery ID requirement exposes a tension at the heart of the Democratic Party’s long-standing position on identification. Americans already present ID to buy alcohol, purchase cigarettes, buy Sudafed, board a plane, rent a car, open a bank account, collect SNAP benefits, access Medicaid, pick up a prescription, sign a lease, and get married. No major Democratic figure has labeled any of those requirements discriminatory.
But requiring the same basic documentation to cast a ballot has been called “Jim Crow 2.0” by prominent Democrats, including President Biden.
The throughline is straightforward. ID requirements draw fierce opposition when they apply to elections. They draw no opposition at all when they protect a government benefit the same politicians control.
The grocery store plan also carries echoes of a well-documented historical precedent. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez launched a government grocery network called Mercal in 2003, promising subsidized food for working people. Within a few years, the system was riddled with corruption, black-market reselling, and chronic shortages. Eventually, the Venezuelan government had to assign citizens specific shopping days based on national ID numbers and required mothers to bring infants to the store before they could purchase diapers.
Mamdani’s program is smaller in scope, and New York City has a robust private grocery market as a backstop, for now. But the underlying economics do not change based on geography. Artificial price floors create unlimited demand for a limited supply. That gap has to close somewhere, and history is consistent about how it closes.
The ID requirement arrives first. It is already here, baked into the program’s design from day one.
If the Venezuelan model holds, the supply problems follow later. The question is not whether a city-run subsidized grocery network will encounter serious dysfunction. It is how long before it does, and how deep the problems run when they arrive.
For now, New Yorkers can look forward to cheaper groceries, as long as they remember to bring their card.