Grocery aisles are today what sewers were in the early twentieth century: a major component of daily life run in an unfathomably dysfunctional manner. And just as the project of expanding and improving public sewers was derided until they became indispensable, municipal groceries will seem obvious once they are built and the difference they make can be felt.
Municipal grocery stores, "paying fair wages and reinvesting profits locally": what could possibly go wrong? One of the beautiful things about how our government is divided up is that it allows for experimentation. Let's encourage New York City to try opening - and operating - municipally-owned grocery stores and see how it works. The author points to two small Kansas communities where this sort of venture may, or may not, have worked. Good luck with that in the big city. The author may have missed a major point when he says "that the cost to launch a city-owned grocery store is comparable to the subsidies the city already hands out to private retailers — subsidies that do little to nothing to prevent closures." It's not the cost of launching that causes the problems, it is the cost of operation. The reinvestment of profits seems like wishful thinking. Massive tax-payer subsidies seem more likely.
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