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[๐Ÿ”ฅ Hot off the Feed] Checkout Politics: New Yorkโ€™s Grocery Gamble

A socialist plan to cut grocery bills could cost New Yorkers more than they think.

๊ณ„์‚ฐ๋Œ€ ์œ„์˜ ์ •์น˜: ๋‰ด์š•์˜ ์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ ์‹คํ—˜

์‹๋น„๋ฅผ ๋‚ฎ์ถ”๊ฒ ๋‹ค๋Š” ์‚ฌํšŒ์ฃผ์˜์  ์‹คํ—˜, ์‹œ๋ฏผ๋“ค์—๊ฒ ๋” ํฐ ๋ถ€๋‹ด์ด ๋  ์ˆ˜๋„ ์žˆ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿ˜Ž ์ง€๊ธˆ ์ฃผ์ œ๋กœ ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค๊ณผ ์–˜๊ธฐํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹ถ๋‹ค๋ฉด?

๐Ÿ‘‰ ์Šคํ„ฐ๋”” ์‹ ์ฒญ ๋งํฌ : https://forms.gle/6a6ou68a2YyLvnaMA

๐Ÿ‘‰ ์Šคํ„ฐ๋”” ๋ฌธ์˜ : https://open.kakao.com/me/insightsalon

๐Ÿ“Œ Context is King

New York Cityโ€™s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is proposing to run city-owned grocery storesโ€”one in each boroughโ€”as a bold answer to rising food prices and persistent food deserts. He frames it as a โ€œpublic optionโ€ for groceries, promising affordability by removing profit margins and rent costs.

๋‰ด์š• ์‹œ์žฅ ๋ฏผ์ฃผ๋‹น ํ›„๋ณด ์กฐ๋ž€ ๋ง˜๋‹ค๋‹ˆ๋Š” ์‹œ๊ฐ€ ์ง์ ‘ ์šด์˜ํ•˜๋Š” โ€˜๊ณต์˜ ์Šˆํผ๋งˆ์ผ“โ€™์„ ์ œ์•ˆํ–ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‹ค์„ฏ ๊ฐœ ์ž์น˜๊ตฌ ๊ฐ๊ฐ์— ํ•œ ๊ณณ์”ฉ ์„ค์น˜ํ•˜๊ฒ ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ณ„ํš์œผ๋กœ, ์น˜์†Ÿ๋Š” ์‹๋น„์™€ โ€˜ํ‘ธ๋“œ ๋ฐ์ €ํŠธ(food desert, ์‹ ์„  ์‹ํ’ˆ ์ ‘๊ทผ์„ฑ ๋ถ€์กฑ ์ง€์—ญ)โ€™ ๋ฌธ์ œ ํ•ด๊ฒฐ์„ ๋ชฉํ‘œ๋กœ ํ•œ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋Š” ์ด ๊ตฌ์ƒ์„ โ€˜์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ ๋ถ„์•ผ์˜ ๊ณต๊ณต ์˜ต์…˜โ€™์ด๋ผ ๋ช…๋ช…ํ•˜๋ฉฐ, ๋งˆ์ง„๊ณผ ์ž„๋Œ€๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ์—†์•  ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์„ ๋‚ฎ์ถ”๊ฒ ๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ฃผ์žฅํ•œ๋‹ค.

Yet the economics are far from straightforward. Grocery stores operate on razor-thin marginsโ€”typically 1-2%. Removing profit and rent wonโ€™t magically yield meaningful savings. And putting stores on public land means giving up potential tax revenue. In short, the savings come not from efficiency, but from subsidiesโ€”paid by taxpayers.

ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ์ด ๊ตฌ์ƒ์ด ๊ฒฝ์ œ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋‹จ์ˆœํ•˜์ง€๋Š” ์•Š๋‹ค. ์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ์ ์˜ ํ‰๊ท  ์ˆœ์ด์ต๋ฅ ์€ 1~2%์— ๋ถˆ๊ณผํ•˜๋‹ค. ์ˆ˜์ต๊ณผ ์ž„๋Œ€๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ์—†์•ค๋‹ค๊ณ  ํ•ด์„œ ํฐ ์ ˆ๊ฐ์ด ์ƒ๊ธฐ์ง€๋Š” ์•Š๋Š”๋‹ค. ๊ฒŒ๋‹ค๊ฐ€ ๊ณต๊ณต ํ† ์ง€์— ๋งค์žฅ์„ ์„ค์น˜ํ•˜๋ฉด ์žฌ์‚ฐ์„ธ๋‚˜ ์ž„๋Œ€ ์ˆ˜์ž… ๋“ฑ ์„ธ์ˆ˜๋„ ํฌ๊ธฐํ•˜๊ฒŒ ๋œ๋‹ค. ์‹ค์งˆ์ ์ธ ํ• ์ธ์€ โ€˜ํšจ์œจโ€™์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ โ€˜์„ธ๊ธˆ์œผ๋กœ ๋ฉ”์šฐ๋Š” ๋ณด์กฐ๊ธˆโ€™์—์„œ ๋‚˜์˜จ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿงฉ IYKYK(If you know, you know)

1. Food Desert (ํ‘ธ๋“œ ๋ฐ์ €ํŠธ)
Areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food.
โ†’ ์‹ ์„ ํ•˜๊ณ  ๊ฑด๊ฐ•ํ•œ ์‹ํ’ˆ์„ ๊ตฌํ•˜๊ธฐ ์–ด๋ ค์šด ์ง€์—ญ. ๋„์‹œ ๋‚ด ์ €์†Œ๋“์ธต ๊ฑฐ์ฃผ์ง€์—์„œ ํ”ํžˆ ๋‚˜ํƒ€๋‚จ.

2. Public Option (๊ณต๊ณต ์˜ต์…˜)
A government-run alternative to private services, aimed at increasing access and lowering costs.
โ†’ ๋ฏผ๊ฐ„ ์„œ๋น„์Šค๋ฅผ ๋Œ€์ฒดํ•˜๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ๋ณด์™„ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•œ ์ •๋ถ€ ์ฃผ๋„์˜ ์„œ๋น„์Šค ๋ชจ๋ธ. ์˜๋ฃŒยท์ฃผํƒ ๋ถ„์•ผ ๋“ฑ์—์„œ ๋“ฑ์žฅ.

3. Retail Margin (์†Œ๋งค ๋งˆ์ง„)
The profit made by retailers after accounting for costs. Grocery margins are notoriously thin.
โ†’ ์†Œ๋งค์—…์ž๊ฐ€ ๋น„์šฉ์„ ์ œ์™ธํ•˜๊ณ  ๋‚จ๊ธฐ๋Š” ์ด์ต. ์‹ํ’ˆ ์†Œ๋งค์—…์€ ์ˆ˜์ต๋ฅ ์ด ๋งค์šฐ ๋‚ฎ์€ ํŽธ์ด๋‹ค.

๐Ÿง  In Focus

The appeal of Mamdaniโ€™s plan lies in its simplicity: take profit out of the grocery business, and prices drop. But that ignores the structural costs of running a storeโ€”labor, logistics, spoilageโ€”that donโ€™t vanish when profits do. Plus, any price advantage hinges on government subsidies and rent-free land use, not market efficiency.

๋ง˜๋‹ค๋‹ˆ์˜ ๊ณต์•ฝ์€ ๋‹จ์ˆœ๋ช…๋ฃŒํ•˜๋‹ค. โ€œ์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ์—์„œ ์ด์œค์„ ๋นผ๋ฉด ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์ด ๋‚ด๋ ค๊ฐ„๋‹ค.โ€ ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ์ธ๊ฑด๋น„, ๋ฌผ๋ฅ˜, ์œ ํ†ต ์†์‹ค ๊ฐ™์€ ๊ตฌ์กฐ์  ๋น„์šฉ์€ ์—ฌ์ „ํ•˜๋‹ค. ๋” ํฐ ๋ฌธ์ œ๋Š” ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ๋ ฅ ์ž์ฒด๊ฐ€ ์‹œ์žฅ ํšจ์œจ์ด ์•„๋‹Œ ์ •๋ถ€ ๋ณด์กฐ๊ธˆ๊ณผ ๋ฌด์ƒ ํ† ์ง€ ์ œ๊ณต์— ๊ธฐ๋Œ€๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ์ ์ด๋‹ค.

More critically, public stores could distort competition. Private grocersโ€”who pay rent and taxesโ€”would struggle to survive. Innovation and consumer choice may dwindle. And if the city-run stores underperform, taxpayers will foot the bill for inefficiency, just as they have for overbudget toilets and subway delays.

๋” ์‹ฌ๊ฐํ•œ ๊ฒƒ์€ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ ์งˆ์„œ์˜ ์™œ๊ณก์ด๋‹ค. ์ž„๋Œ€๋ฃŒ์™€ ์„ธ๊ธˆ์„ ๋ถ€๋‹ดํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฏผ๊ฐ„ ์—…์ฒด๋“ค์€ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ๋ ฅ์„ ์žƒ๊ฒŒ ๋˜๊ณ , ํ˜์‹ ๊ณผ ์†Œ๋น„์ž ์„ ํƒ๊ถŒ๋„ ์ค„์–ด๋“ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค. ๊ณต์˜ ๋งค์žฅ์ด ๋ถ€์‹คํ•˜๊ฒŒ ์šด์˜๋˜๋ฉด, ์˜ˆ์‚ฐ์„ ์ดˆ๊ณผํ•˜๋Š” ๊ณต์ค‘ํ™”์žฅ์‹ค์ด๋‚˜ ์ง€ํ•˜์ฒ  ์—ฐ์žฅ์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ ์„ธ๊ธˆ์ด ์†์‹ค์„ ๋– ์•ˆ๊ฒŒ ๋  ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ๋„ ํฌ๋‹ค.

๐Ÿ—ฃ How They Talk About It

๐Ÿ“Œ food desert (ํ‘ธ๋“œ ๋ฐ์ €ํŠธ)
โ€œThis initiative could bring fresh food to neighborhoods stuck in food deserts.โ€
โ€œ์ด ๊ตฌ์ƒ์€ ํ‘ธ๋“œ ๋ฐ์ €ํŠธ์— ๊ฐ‡ํžŒ ์ง€์—ญ์— ์‹ ์„ ํ•œ ์‹ํ’ˆ์„ ๊ณต๊ธ‰ํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์„ ๊ฒƒ์ด๋‹ค.โ€

๐Ÿ“Œ undercut the market (์‹œ์žฅ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์„ ๊นŽ๋‹ค)
โ€œPublic stores shouldnโ€™t undercut the market unless theyโ€™re more efficient.โ€
โ€œ๊ณต์˜ ์Šˆํผ๊ฐ€ ๋” ํšจ์œจ์ ์ด์ง€ ์•Š๋‹ค๋ฉด, ๋ฏผ๊ฐ„ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์„ ๊นŽ๋Š” ๊ฑด ์˜ณ์ง€ ์•Š๋‹ค.โ€

๐Ÿ“Œ subsidized competition (๋ณด์กฐ๊ธˆ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ)
โ€œThis sets up subsidized competition, which risks pushing out better-run private shops.โ€
โ€œ์ด๊ฑด ๋ณด์กฐ๊ธˆ์„ ๊ธฐ๋ฐ˜์œผ๋กœ ํ•œ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ์ด๋ฉฐ, ์ž˜ ์šด์˜๋˜๋Š” ๋ฏผ๊ฐ„ ๋งค์žฅ์„ ๋ชฐ์•„๋‚ผ ์ˆ˜๋„ ์žˆ๋‹ค.โ€

๐Ÿ“Œ too good to be cheap (์‹ผ ๊ฒŒ ๋น„์ง€๋–ก)
โ€œAffordable groceries sound niceโ€”until you remember New Yorkโ€™s $1m toilets.โ€
โ€œ์‹ผ ์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ์€ ์ข‹์•„ ๋ณด์ธ๋‹ค. ๋‰ด์š•์˜ 1์–ต์งœ๋ฆฌ ๊ณต์ค‘ํ™”์žฅ์‹ค์„ ์žŠ์ง€ ์•Š๋Š”๋‹ค๋ฉด ๋ง์ด๋‹ค.โ€

๐Ÿงญ Discourse Watch

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ United States
Public debate is split between affordability advocates and fiscal realists. Left-leaning circles support the plan as a structural response to corporate price-setting and food insecurity. Critics warn it risks mismanagement and erodes healthy competitionโ€”offering short-term relief at long-term cost.

๋ฏธ๊ตญ ๋‚ด ์—ฌ๋ก ์€ โ€˜์ƒํ™œ๋น„ ๋ถ€๋‹ด ์™„ํ™”โ€™๋ผ๋Š” ๋‹น์œ„์„ฑ๊ณผ โ€˜์„ธ๊ธˆ ๋‚ญ๋น„โ€™๋ผ๋Š” ์šฐ๋ ค ์‚ฌ์ด์—์„œ ๊ฐˆ๋ฆฐ๋‹ค. ์ง„๋ณด ์„ฑํ–ฅ์—์„œ๋Š” ๊ธฐ์—… ์ค‘์‹ฌ์˜ ์‹๋ฃŒํ’ˆ ์‹œ์žฅ ๊ตฌ์กฐ๋ฅผ ๋ฐ”๊พธ๋Š” ์‹œ๋„๋ผ๋ฉฐ ์ง€์ง€ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ, ๋ฐ˜๋Œ€ ์ธก์€ ์šด์˜ ์‹คํŒจ์™€ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ ํŒŒ๊ดด๋กœ ์ธํ•ด ์žฅ๊ธฐ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋” ํฐ ์‚ฌํšŒ์  ๋น„์šฉ์ด ๋“ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๊ฒฝ๊ณ ํ•œ๋‹ค.

๐ŸŽฌ Outro

What looks like a discount at the checkout might be a hidden cost on your tax return. Affordability through ownership isnโ€™t always efficientโ€”it might just be expensive in disguise.

๊ณ„์‚ฐ๋Œ€์—์„œ ํ• ์ธ์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ ๋ณด์ด๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด, ์„ธ๊ธˆ ์‹ ๊ณ ์„œ์—์„œ ๋น„์šฉ์œผ๋กœ ๋Œ์•„์˜ฌ ์ˆ˜๋„ ์žˆ๋‹ค. ์†Œ์œ ๋ฅผ ํ†ตํ•œ โ€˜์ €๋ ดํ•จโ€™์€ ๋ฐ˜๋“œ์‹œ ํšจ์œจ์ ์ด์ง€ ์•Š๋‹ค. ๋•Œ๋กœ๋Š” โ€˜์œ„์žฅ๋œ ๊ณ ๋น„์šฉโ€™์ผ ๋ฟ์ด๋‹ค.

๐Ÿ“… July 2015 โ€“ Modern Boston Public Market opens as the first indoor, yearโ€‘round publiclyโ€‘focused market in the U.S.
๐Ÿ“… 2015๋…„ 7์›” โ€“ ๋ฏธ๊ตญ ์ตœ์ดˆ์˜ ์‹ค๋‚ดยท์—ฐ์ค‘ ์šด์˜ ์ง€์—ญ ๊ณต๊ณต ์‹œ์žฅ์ธ ๋ณด์Šคํ„ด ํผ๋ธ”๋ฆญ ๋งˆ์ผ“ ๊ฐœ์žฅ

๐Ÿงพ Sources

  • "Should Cities Run Supermarkets?" (The Economist, 2025)

  • "Food Deserts in America: USDA Report" (USDA, 2024)

  • "NYC Public Toilet Budget Overruns" (NY Post, 2023)

  • "How Much Do Grocery Stores Really Make?" (Forbes, 2022)

  • "Trader Joeโ€™s and Bodega Culture in NYC" (The New Yorker, 2023)

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