Timothy Birdnow

If Whole Foods has trouble keeping salmonella out of their produce imagine how it's going to be in Mamdani's government-run stores.

If I were a shopper in New York I'd make sure everything I bought from there was pre-packaged.

Meat is susceptible to problems if the butchers are unsanitary in their practices. For instance, you don't cut chicken with your beef saw or vice versa (vice versa more as chicken is especially infectious.) You don't throw old meat into your hamburger grinder. But all of that will probably happen and Happy Zohran's Merry Market.

And who knows what you will get in the produce department.

Good thing most dairy is dated; at least the customer will know how old the stuff he's buying is, although he won't have a guarantee about how fresh it is since the milk or eggs might have been left in a hot stock room rather than refrigerated right after delivery.

These are all problems that are likely to happen in a store run by people undoubtedly hired by the city from the unemployment office.

I was a grocery store manager (well, co-manager, but I ran the store with the top guy) when I was younger and our company got bought out. The new owners hired a bunch of people through the unemployment office, and they were worse than useless. We kept them out of the departments where they could make people sick - like produce or dairy (meat cutters were outside of all this by union rules) but they still were terrible. The cashiers all stole. The stockers did little work and complained and had to be constantly supervised. We weeded them out over the course of months.

As I say, we dared not let them near any department with fresh food. (My store thankfully didn't have a deli.)

These Mamdani stores are going to be run by people who do not care, and the staff won't care. This is a poisoning waiting to happen.

BTW the changeover happened when I was called to jury duty and I wound up on a trial that lasted a solid month, so I missed the absolute worst of it. My poor boss had to face the disaster alone. My return probably saved the poor guy's life. It certainly saved a few years on my own by not being there at the very beginning. But it was one messed up operation until we thinned the herd and hired our own people. Within six months almost all of the people the corporation hired were gone - and thankfully so. I spent all my time doing damage control that first six months.

We got the store profitable again then the out-of-town company that bought it sold it to a local chain, and THEY came in and systematically began cleaning us out. I remained but it was clear I was being pushed to leave because the local chain had their own people who wanted our jobs. I quit shortly after my boss Herb was demoted to grocery manager in a store in Illinois - one of the physicall most demanding jobs in the business and herb was a man within a year of retirement - and within a few months my store closed. The entire chain is out of business now - bad management led to their collapse. It warms my heart.

At any rate these government stores are going to be monuments to socialist stupidity and will eventually be closed after losing the city massive amounts of money and making people sick. Mark my words.

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at August 24, 2026 02:02 PM (+uala)

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