You Watched a City Fail in Real Time. And Still Think More Bureaucracy Is the Fix?

Kansas City tried running a grocery store, it failed of course, so now New Yorkers think maybe we can do correctly! Yeah, right!!!

Photo by Carlos de Toro @carlosdetoro on Unsplash

Let’s get one thing straight: socialism doesn’t fail quietly. It crashes, burns, and then asks for more taxpayer money. Case in point? Kansas City. The city poured $17 million into a grocery store project that, shocker, ended up having exactly one tomato. Not metaphorically. Literally. One. Tomato.

They called it KC Sun Fresh. Fresh as in "fresh out of inventory, hope, and common sense." It was supposed to be the savior of the east side. Instead, it turned into a ghost town guarded by armed security, haunted by addicts, and managed by a nonprofit that probably couldn’t run a lemonade stand.

In case you’re wondering, yes, this store had every flavor of urban decay baked into it:

• Shoplifting tripled.

• Assaults, urination, and public sex acts became the ambience.

• They ran through $750,000 of city aid just restocking shelves and still ended up in the red.

But wait, it gets dumber. Because now, over in New York City, Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is campaigning on the exact same garbage idea: city-run grocery stores. Five of them. Run without profit motive. Because, apparently, what Kansas City needed was more proof that ideology doesn’t fill shelves.

Let’s play pretend for a moment. Imagine any sane adult in either party seeing this trainwreck in Missouri and thinking, "Hey, let’s do that! But with more stores, more bureaucracy, and more delusion!" You’d laugh. Unless you lived in America, where the punchline is policy.

You know what’s even scarier than Mamdani’s platform? The silence. New York’s Democrats are pretending this isn’t moronic. And the GOP? Radio silence. Not a peep. Not a tweet. Not even a snarky meme. When the door was wide open to call out stupidity, both parties tiptoed away like it was a fart in church.

This isn’t just political malpractice. It’s cultural rot. Because when no one’s willing to say, "Hey, this is stupid," then stupidity becomes default. We don’t have an education crisis. We have a common sense crisis. A memory crisis. A "Did we not just watch Kansas City fail in real time?" crisis.

The saddest part? KC Sun Fresh wasn’t born bad. It opened with flowers, fresh shrimp, and fanfare. It died because government can’t manage businesses, communities need more than ribbon cuttings, and crime doesn’t take coupons. And now, some lunatic thinks New York, with its glorious track record of efficiency should take this idea for a spin.

Call me crazy, but maybe, just maybe, a grocery store shouldn’t be a social experiment. Maybe it should be a place where people can buy milk without stepping over a junkie or dodging a fight in aisle four. Maybe the free market with its annoying obsession with profit, actually works because it rewards results, not slogans.

But hey, what do I know? I’m just one of those wacky Americans who remembers things. Like what happened last time. And the time before that. And the ten times before that.

And speaking of remembering, Baby Boomers didn’t just grow up with rock 'n' roll and station wagons. They also watched millions of Soviet citizens stand in endless lines outside grocery stores, praying they might get something more exciting than a bruised beet. When the Iron Curtain cracked open, it wasn’t tanks or treaties that did it, it was the sight of American grocery shelves, gleaming with choice, abundance, and stuff you could actually buy. Turns out, if you can't even stock a store, you probably shouldn't run a country.

So here’s the question for today’s enlightened voter: Do you really think it would be different here? That somehow, with enough government pamphlets and feel-good press conferences, this time, the shelves won’t be empty? The same system that can’t fix potholes is suddenly going to master food logistics? Please. Show me a single politician in 2025 who could pass the grocery store IQ test. Hell, I’m not even sure I could, and that’s the most honest thing you’ll read all week.

So go ahead, New York. Build your city-run stores. Print the flyers. Make the speeches. Just don’t act surprised when the shelves go empty, the funds run dry, and the voters, somehow, still never learn.

Because that’s the real tragedy here.

Not that socialism failed.

But that we keep letting it try again.