"There's No Nothing": Empty Shelves, Rotten Odors Plague Gov't-Funded Supermarket In Missouri

"There's No Nothing": Empty Shelves, Rotten Odors Plague Gov't-Funded Supermarket In Missouri​

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.


Jason Curtis Anderson from One City Rising comments on this:
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.