Americans like their eggs. While for Britons it is but one part of a fry up or mere fodder for toasted soldiers, for Yanks there is a deep romance, whether eaten at an old-school diner or as part of a trendy brunch.
It was therefore bemusing for outsiders when the price of eggs caused a national crisis of confidence in the spring of 2025. A third of Americans stopped buying eggs as prices rose to more than $6 per dozen in March 2025, leaving the nation feeling poached.
Those egg costs are back to a more reasonable $2.50 a dozen, but the cost of groceries is still scrambling voters’ loyalties, not least in the Big Apple. And having helped usher New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani into office in November, the issue has come back as he marked 100 days into his first term.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani had a shopping list of bungs for his voters: free childcare, free buses and rent freezes – paid for by a tax hike on the rich that the New York City mayor actually can’t implement. Perhaps most striking was the promise to open five city-owned grocery stores across each of the city’s boroughs.
The first of these stores to be announced is the Manhattan branch. Located in a Latino neighbourhood in East Harlem, La Marqueta is a city-owned food hall that currently features a garden centre and a vegan soul food shop, and is within a 10-minute walk of 65,000 residents.
It’ll cost $30 million to extend the unit by 9,000 square-feet and turn the new space into a supermarket by 2029. Mamdani promises the store will serve essential groceries like eggs at a lower price than the current cost, though he couldn’t tell a pack of American hacks how much a cucumber would set them back.
Unsurprising perhaps, since Mamdani is a man with scant business experience, and seemingly none in the US’s hypercompetitive grocery sector. What he is well versed in is spending other people’s money, which is why alongside the eight-figure cost of expanding La Marqueta, the city administration will also waive rent and property taxes.
In some sense, it’s less radical than it sounds. New York City already subsidises grocery stores via its Fresh programme, which includes tax breaks on buildings, land, sales and mortgages for those building or running supermarkets. Mamdani is not a fan, arguing that the programme has not delivered the cheap food he craves for his voters.
As with Fresh, the bureaucrats will be calling in private help to actually run its five city-owned stores, one of which is supposed to be opening by the end of this year. It looks to be a challenging contract: as well as meeting a price differential that isn’t just ‘incidental’, in Mamdani’s words, the operators will have to employ staff on union standards, seemingly with commensurate pay. And they won’t be able to sell tobacco and lottery tickets, products that likely turn a profit at what New Yorker’s call ‘bodegas’ – or in English: the offy.
Nobody doubts that groceries have gotten pricier in recent years. Brits will be keenly aware how the cost of their weekly shop has inflated since the Covid pandemic. And the fact that New Yorkers seem to think this is a conspiracy against them speaks to the city’s legendary self-absorption.
If there is a conspiracy, the industry is certainly maintaining discipline. Multiple news outlets quoted independent New York retailers complaining about the slender margins they were having to navigate, usually estimated at between 1-2%, as well as the prospect that competition they subsidise through taxes might put them out of business.
Put simply, food across the West is cheap. It’s so cheap, in fact, that some have argued it has made consumers complacent about the costs of producing food, including its impacts on the environment and the potential risks of food insecurity when shoppers prefer cheap imports over pricier home-grown fare.
That it has become more expensive in recent years is not because of price gouging, but because the cost of growing, processing, shipping and retailing food has gone up. Only this week, it’s been reported that unstable CO2 supplies caused by the war in Iran could affect the availability of beer.
American city politicians might have expansive powers compared to their British peers, but even they still remain at the mercy of these global economics. Whether the food supply chain is privately or publicly owned, shortages of goods are always liable to drive up prices, for the obvious reasons that any economics undergrad could explain.
Mamdani is a charismatic politician, likely with a long political career ahead of him. But short of starting his own egg farm and finding a way to lay eggs more cheaply than his rivals, even the New York City mayor can’t bring down the price of eggs without unaffordable subsidies. His plan is half-baked, and destined for the food waste bin.
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