Viral video of bare shelves seen as cautionary tale as Mamdani campaigns on city-run stores

An ominous video of a mostly empty, government-run grocery store is causing alarm as socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pledges to bring something similar to New York City.

Despite millions in public investment, Sun Fresh market in Kansas City, Missouri has fallen into sharp decline, with residents complaining of food shortages and rancid odors.

“The milk, I am scared to buy some,” shopper Michaelle Randolph told KMBC. “Even the dates, they may have a few days over. I don’t want to buy that.”

Empty shelves

The dystopian condition of the store is being seen by many see as a cautionary tale.

BREAKING: City-funded grocery store trial in Kansas City has already failed. Shelves are completely empty, food rotten, theft. pic.twitter.com/UWlFZDkcYM

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 23, 2025

Foot traffic in the government-run store has plummeted, and shoppers find they can no longer get everything they need. The store has lost $900,000 over the last year, despite receiving millions in taxpayer funding since it launched in 2018.

As is often the case with socialist projects, the failing store was created in response to a genuine problem: the lack of affordable, nutritious food for people in eastern Kansas City.

Mamdani has tapped into economic anxieties among cash-strapped New Yorkers, who inhabit one of the most expensive cities in the nation.

“It’s like a public option for produce,” he said in one of his campaign’s TikTok videos. “We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is to lower prices, not price-gouging.”

Mamdani’s “experiments”

Socialists like Mamdani often blame food inflation on corporate “price gouging,” but supermarkets are known for having thin profit margins.

While Mamdani’s public grocery stores might break even, customers will find a “bare-bones” operation, said retail consultant Brittain Ladd.

“These would be very specialized grocery stores. This would not look like a grocery store. It would be a very bare-bones operation,” Ladd said.

“It would be to really just provide the things that people need the most.”

While we have real-world evidence that Mamdani’s proposals do not work, the mayoral candidate has shown little concern about the potential downsides of his “experiments.”

“No matter how you think about the idea, I do think that there should be room for reasonable policy experimentation in our cities and in our country, where we actually test out our ideas,” he said on a recent podcast.

“And if they work, they work. And if they don’t work, c’est la vie, then the idea was wrong.”

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