It would be amusing to see the city owned stores robbed blind. Tax payers would be on the hook for it, but I’d still like to see the business clueless city officials try to deal with what legitimate business owners have to suffer with.
If it ever gets to that point: They would "deal with it" by smugly smiling and pronouncing it a full success!
And anyone who disagreed would simply "vanish."
Regards,
My favorite government run business story is when the IRS decided to run a whorehouse that had been in business for two hundred years, the Mustang Ranch. (For back taxes owed.) They lost so much money they went out of business in months. A senator commented, “only the government would fail at a business that sells p*ssy and beer.”
You forget one thing, the city has the power of policing those stores to make them look good on paper.
They will have the upper hand because the city will pay for everything, including the cops that will be standing at every door and watching the videos. They also carry the right to detain and arrest the thieves, where they won't even respond to calls made by private stores in the exact same circumstance.