How will Mayor Mamdani make his groceries work? First, smoke some more pot . . .

Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s farcical city-run-grocery scheme ever going to be more than a façade that simply serves to score cred with Che-loving TikTokers?Last week, city Economic Development Corp.bigs took prospective bidders on contracts to run the stores on a tour of  .

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a vacant lot in East Harlem. What a waste: People with real work to do got pony-walked around a patch of asphalt under the Metro North tracks in East Harlem. Bids to run a Mamdani Mart are supposedly due mid-October, though City Hall has yet to issue remotely enough specs on how the whole thing’s going to work.The concept has always sounded like something cooked up in a late-night, stoned college-dorm discussion — and still hasn’t been fleshed out much more than that.So the only reason anyone would enter a bid is as part of some grift ..

.or graft.Team Mamdani’s theorists have imagined they’ll build five stores for $70 million, with the East Harlem spot commanding $30 million of that; industry experts openly laugh at that figure as vastly more than what it costs to launch a high-end store in a pricey nabe, not the kind of “affordable” shop the mayor has waved at.Adding to the absurdity of the Harlem tour is the unsettling apparatchik in charge of the grocery project: dead-eyed Waverly Neer, who blabbered in NPR-voice about how “excited” the project has gotten the Harlem locals.“Furious” is probably the better word for the locals who already run groceries in the target areas staring at having to face government-backed competition.  Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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The five blocks just around the Harlem site contain 15 bodegas and groceries.Neer last week pointed to one possible answer: “grants” to support independent businesses near the Mamdani Marts.The city has “a whole ...