Follow Up on that City-Supported Grocery Store in Kansas City: Attention Zohran Mamdani

Beege Welborn wrote about this last week while I was on vacation. Kansas City, Mo. has helped to fund a grocery store in a part of town considered a food desert. But it hasn't been going very well lately. The store, at this point, is basically empty despite millions of dollars of city support.

The same store was looking grim in April but activists pressured the city to pour more money into this failed business.

The fundamental problem at this location isn't just a lack of shoppers, it's crime.

Despite that, the crime persists. And something else that persists is the smell. All of the stories about this store mention it. City Manager Mario Vasquez put out a statement saying they were working on finding out what is causing it.

Obviously if there are bad smells you probably have rotting food somewhere which is not a great sign. Will any of this penetrate the progressive bubble where likely future Mayor of NYC Zohran Mamdani lives? Mamdani ran on creating city-run grocery stores in NYC. So far it seems no one has asked him about the failing store in Kansas City. Maybe someone will get around to it eventually.

Here's a local report on the store. It looks like something you'd see behind the iron curtain many decades ago or in socialist countries like Venezuela more recently.

CLICK ABOVE ARTICLE LINK FOR THE VIDEO

Also from ZERO HEDGE

One of the dozen or so socialist policy proposals from NYC Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is the creation of government-funded grocery stores.

While the Democratic Party increasingly embraces socialist and Marxist-leaning policies, such as the seizure of private property, this idea of government-funded grocery stores appears disconnected from both fundamental economic realities and historical precedent.

Nowhere is this more evident than in East Kansas City, where a nonprofit operates a grocery store on government land that has become a symbol of failure, plagued by the smell of rot and empty shelves.

Local media outlet KSHB 41 Kansas City toured Sun Fresh Market at 3110 Wabash Ave (31st & Prospect) on the city's Eastside. The store opened in 2018 as part of a multi-million dollar public-private revitalization of the Linwood Shopping Center. Operated by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit focused on urban development, the store has since become a massive reminder that while socialism may sound great on paper, in practice, it can be an absolute disaster.

KSHB 41's Alyssa Jackson reported that her news team received a tip from a viewer about empty shelves throughout the dairy section, meat department, bakery aisle, and deli counter.

"There was a time this store was on life support," said Pat Clarke, a community advocate, adding, "I could tell you today right now it's damn near dead."

Jackson said that when she first walked into the grocery store, she was immediately hit by a rotten smell.

In a separate investigative report, FOX Business Network's Kelly Saberi spoke with one patron who said, "There's no meat. There's no vegetables. There's no nothing. Are you going to take care of the community that's surrounded around you? If not, sell the store to someone that can be more responsible."

Mamdani and his obsession with socialism and Marxism come as he has barely held a real job, couldn't make it as a rapper, and has been deeply involved with the Democratic Party's dark money-funded NGOs.

History has shown that these government-run grocery stores always fail.

This is Cuba.

People required to show their food ration coupon book to buy food in state-run grocery stores. https://t.co/CldJ30RyqL pic.twitter.com/cw4hdcqshe — Songpinganq (@songpinganq) August 19, 2024

Jason Curtis Anderson from One City Rising comments on this:

This idea from Zohran Mamdani isn't just unserious—it's a case study in how today's activist-socialists live in a completely inverted reality.
Government-run grocery stores have been tried before, from Birmingham, Alabama, to Baltimore, and they've all failed spectacularly. They became political patronage machines, hemorrhaged taxpayer dollars, and in the end, they left neighborhoods with less access to food, not more. What's worse, the Mamdani proposal doesn't even pretend to address the actual reasons private grocers avoid certain areas: crime, regulatory red tape, and the high cost of doing business in New York. Instead, it assumes that if we just let the state take over, all of those problems magically disappear.
But this is the pattern we keep seeing with young, edgy socialists who think they know better.
They reject everything in the past that has actually worked for humanity—capitalism, enforcing laws, protecting property rights—and declare that these pillars of modern civilization have never worked at all. In their worldview, markets don't feed people, laws don't keep neighborhoods safe, and private property is a historical mistake. So they pivot to 'fresh ideas' like defunding the police, abolishing private ownership, and now, city-run supermarkets.

Democrats should be reminded which way the Berlin Wall fell...

I notice the wine and beer wall decorations are in good shape. Floors are remarkably clean though.

(But no one is the Kansas City mayor’s office is trying to ARREST THE CRIMINALS outside? ARREST the criminals inside who are stealing the merchandise and food?

A “lack of food on shelves” is NOT caused by having too few customers (theoretically, those missing customers being the ones frightened away by the local crime outside the store. )

A “lack of food on shelves” is caused by not ordering new product, not getting that product to the store, and not moving the products from the back warehouse top the shelves.
Now, that said, not being able to order replacement product may be due to the store not having money (rather than the store not being run so nobody is knowledgeable enough to track inventory and order new stock), but that has to be addressed by eliminating crime.

There is a sucker born every minute. I heard that 60% of GenZ think socialism is a fine thing. They vote for Democrats.

They don't understand. "Why can't the government put more money in the store to buck it up and make it work right?"

These people are a twisted form of a Cargo Cult

Melanesians in the South Pacific saw the Americans bring planes, goods, money, and food to the island in WWII, and when the Americans left, all those things left with them, and the islanders were back to where they started. They thought that if they built a native facsimile of a air traffic control tower out of sticks and leaves next to a rectangular clearing in the jungle that it would bring the planes back along with the goods, money, food, and prosperity with them.

In their minds, that is all that it took. A tower built of twigs and sticks and a clearing, and the planes with all their booty would appear.

These people in this Kansas City "food desert" are doing the same thing. They think that if the city opens the door to this supermarket, turns on the lights, and gets people to staff the cash registers, that the food will appear on the shelves, and they will be able to buy food.

The Cargo Cult Melanesians didn't understand that there were people working at factories being paid money to build airplanes, farmers that grew the foodstuffs that were shipped on those planes, pilots who had been trained to fly them and millions of Americans working at all manner of jobs to pay taxes to pay for all of it.

They have the exact same mindset in this Kansas City ghetto. If the store can be made to look like a real store and get staffed with people paid by the government, and stocked with food to be supplied by the government, then all that is good with a grocery store will follow and they can buy food in their "food desert".

It is sad, but there it is.

They don't understand that all the things they reject such as jobs, capitalism, corporations, education, and laws are what make a grocery store work, not a building that structurally resembles a grocery store and has big letters on the outside.

It is absurdly ignorant and infantile.

They are the same kind of people who think electricity comes from a ivory colored plastic rectangle on a wall in their house that has funny looking holes in it. They haven't the ability (or desire) to even comprehend the oil wells manned by roughnecks being paid to get oil out of the earth, put it on trucks driven by truck drivers being paid a wage to drive or ships with paid crews to send the oil to refineries, and an electric grid that collects revenues from people for the electricity they consume and pay workers to maintain that grid, all operating under laws passed to regulate and guide, with corporations at every step of the way.

That is Socialism, Communism, and Leftism in a nutshell. Things will just magically appear. It would be hilariously funny if it weren't so crushingly sad. We can't even view them in the prism of a quaint, understanding of a primitive mindset we might view the Cargo Cult Melanesians in. The Cargo Cult Melanesians largely appreciated and enjoyed all things American even though they had no understanding of it.

People like the ones in Kansas City and the evil Leftists who use them as tools, universally despise the equivalent of the America that sent the planes to the South Pacific, and the Americans that flew them there.

This is Leftism in a nutshell.

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