I researched it. Even Trump can’t run government-backed grocery stores | Opinion
Next week in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Pan-African immigrant cooperative market called the Little Africa Market will open in a section of the Twin Cities populated mostly with newcomers, an excited promoter told me in a phone call. It is the latest government-backed food market to open around the country.
When New York’s democratic socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani proposed opening one, I scoffed that inner-city government supermarkets would be as successful as inner-city government schools, but others disagreed. Food Tank, a think tank for food, called it a “bold fix” for food insecurity. The Food and Environmental Reporting Network called it a “novel solution” to food deserts.
I decided to do a rethink along with a little more reporting. It turns out that government-backed inner-city supermarkets are neither bold, novel nor worth scoffing at. They’re not a kooky socialist idea— they are one of the bipartisan establishment’s humdrum boring old stupid ideas that keeps getting recycled with a new face. They’re not some new fantasy way to waste money — they’re a deadly serious way cities, states, counties and even the federal government have been wasting money for years all over the country.
Readers in Kansas City know the drill because one such effort made national news recently for, among other things, its crime and financial problems exemplified by a produce display featuring a lone tomato. “Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close,” was the admirably direct headline.
People in Kansas City won’t be surprised because over on the Kansas side of the metropolitan area, another local government -backed grocery announced it is closing, too. And these projects weren’t just to sell milk, eggs and broccoli — they were supposed to be the cornerstone of the revitalization of entire neighborhoods, according to the then-mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, when its boondoggle was launched.
The idea that leftist mayors and other town-hall progressives are willing to fritter away millions on what is largely a pipe dream when much better-run free-market grocery operators can’t make a buck in these places isn’t much of a surprise, so just how bipartisan is this idea? Well, unexpectedly for me, I found that Donald Trump’s first administration sprinkled $25 million on these markets across the country in 2019 and 2020 funded by congressional Democrats’ largesse.
That store in St. Paul? Its launch was seeded with $200,000 from Trump’s Department of Agriculture.
Other places weren’t so lucky. In Michigan, North Flint’s Food Market is still unopened five years after breaking ground. Six years after receiving a Trump grant and even after landing millions in foundation grants. A new $1.5 million grant offers some hope.
The Marsh Community Market in St. Louis at least opened its doors after a Trump grant, but a couple years later, it closed. Turns out that despite being “women/nonbinary” managed, the “pay what you can” business model fell short.
The same thing happened in Winston-Salem where the Harvest Market opened with great fanfare and a ribbon-cutting, and then died amid “low sales.” Turns out Trump wasn’t so good at launching local healthy markets.
Don’t just take my word for it. Left-leaning Pro-Publica looked into the program and found the same results: stores that never opened and stores that got off the ground but quickly ran into trouble and often closed.
When all this failure is pointed out at the local level, backers argue that the local operations just need scale to compete with the big boys of the grocery world, after all, one of America’s biggest, cheapest grocers is actually run by the federal government — military commissaries.
Turns out that that the commissary experience just proves the point. They can’t get by without more than a $1.5 billion subsidy from the Pentagon every year. Oh and the supposed savings for soldiers shopping at the government store? Well, according to the Government Accountability Office, the commissary can’t actually put their finger on how much people save.
The fact is that running a grocery store is a brutal business with tiny profit margins. Sourcing good food on a mass scale is tricky, and consumers are more eager to spend on unhealthy foods than healthy ones.
Yeah, I’ve looked into this and done a little rethinking. I am going to stick with scoffing at this stupid, socialist idea. Government should stick to running shoddy schools. They can’t go bankrupt.
This story was originally published July 25, 2025 at 8:08 AM with the headline "I researched it. Even Trump can’t run government-backed grocery stores | Opinion."
