The Mamdani grocery plan, which will put 30% discounts on everyday food staples at city-owned stores across New York, takes part of its inspiration from a place military families know well: the grocery store on base.
During his 2025 campaign for mayor, Zohran Mamdani sat down with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, where one of the hosts brought up the comparison herself. “I’m a former military brat and I vividly remember commissaries and BXs on military bases and those were subsidized,” she said.
Mamdani said that was exactly the point. “The reason we even came up with this is because of the successes of this model in Kansas, as well as what you said,” he responded.
For anyone who has never lived on a base, the commissary is the grocery store and the BX, or Base Exchange, is the department store for clothes, electronics and household goods. Both are run for service members, and the commissary in particular is built to save them money. It is operated by the Defense Department, sells groceries close to cost, and uses taxpayer money to cover the difference, which leaves military families paying roughly 20% to 25% less than they would at a regular supermarket. The system brings in more than $5.6 billion in sales a year.
Later in the conversation, the hosts returned to the military example as proof that government-supported grocery stores already work in America. “The commissaries at military bases, they’re pretty good,” one host said. “Examples do exist. All I’m saying is it’s possible.”
Now that Mamdani is mayor, the plan is moving from idea to construction. He has committed to opening five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, by the end of his first term, and the city has set aside $70 million to build them.
The first store will open in Hunts Point in the Bronx, inside The Peninsula, an affordable housing development built on the site of a former juvenile detention center. The 20,000 square foot store is expected to cost about $10 million and open by the end of 2027. The second will be built near La Marqueta, the historic public market in East Harlem, with a target opening of 2029.
In July, Mamdani laid out how the stores will work. A core basket of staple foods will be sold at 30% below market prices, and those prices will be locked in and updated on a set schedule instead of changing week to week. The city will set the pricing rules and oversee the program, but private grocery companies will handle the daily operations, including staffing, stocking and buying products.
That is where the Mamdani grocery plan breaks from the military model. Commissaries are owned and run by the government from top to bottom, while New York’s stores will be run by private operators under city rules. Commissaries also discount nearly everything on the shelves, while Mamdani’s 30% cut applies only to the core basket of staples. And commissary shopping is limited to service members, military retirees and other eligible shoppers, while New York’s stores are aimed at neighborhoods where families struggle to afford food.
City officials say grocery prices have climbed 33% nationwide since 2019, and the Bronx and East Harlem were chosen in part because of high food insecurity in both neighborhoods.
The plan still has plenty of critics. Groups representing bodegas and private supermarkets have opposed it from the start, arguing that taxpayer funded stores will undercut small businesses. Mamdani has said his administration has reached out to those owners and that the city stores will not sell the same items bodegas do. John Lowrey, a food supply chain expert at Northeastern University, warned that government stores selling below market prices near existing grocers could make it hard, if not impossible, for those businesses to compete. He noted that commissaries avoid that problem largely because of where they are located, tucked inside military bases.
Trump has repeatedly labeled Mamdani a communist, and his grocery stores are often held up as an example. The military comparison complicates that argument. The federal government has been running discount grocery stores for service members for generations, and Mamdani’s version actually hands more control to private companies than the Defense Department does.
