How can the city make Mamdani Marts work when it bungles a simpler grocer plan?

For yet another angle on why Mamdani Marts are a surefire failure, it’s hard to beat City Hall’s bungling of a far simpler program that just buys quality food for low-income folks.Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team is expanding the city contract with online platform Mercato from $30 million to $75 million even though it’s been stiffing local grocers for over $1 million.This “Groceries to Go” program is way more straightforward than his dreamed-of city-owned supermarkets: Qualified beneficiaries place order groceries online at steep discounts and Mercato fills the order from a local store, using taxpayer subsidies to cover the price-cut.Except it hasn’t been reliably paying on-time, squeezing store owners that already operate on narrow margins; many are opting out of the program altogether.It’s not clear if Mercato’s problem is that the city isn’t paying it on time, so it can’t cover its own bills — or whether the San Diego-based company is the real villain.Maybe City Hall can work out the bugs — though that would raise the question of why this program doesn’t beat Mamdani Marts all hollow, since it can help the needy citywide whereas the mayor’s stores can only benefit folks who live near them.And the city-owned groceries will also need to find reliable vendors, to do the more complex more work of running entire stories and also pay them on time.Indeed, the concept is so complicated that Team Mamdani is still unable to say how it will work, well over a year since he first proposed it.Nor is “Groceries to Go” the only existing program that makes more sense: Since 2009, the city Economic Development Corp.(which is also point on the Mamdani Marts) has run FRESH, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, which offers private supermarkets various breaks to open in low-income ’hoods that would otherwise be “food deserts.”It has placed 30 stores citywide, including some right where the mayor plans to plant city-owned shops; how exactly do...