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Friedberg predicts NYC’s "socialist" grocery stores will be "wildly popular" over…

2026-08-01 · 13:54 UTC ·@theallinpod ·2 min read

Brief

Friedberg predicts NYC’s new "socialist" grocery stores will become wildly popular over the next 24 months and act as a grassroots marketing engine for the DSA into the 2028 cycle. He argues stores will draw shoppers from far away, avoid ID checks ("IDs are racist"), and that $10M/year losses per store (10–20 stores → $100–$200M) are negligible versus NYC’s $125B budget.

Why it matters

Friedberg predicts NYC’s "socialist" grocery stores will be "wildly popular" over the next 24 months and serve as a grassroots marketing engine for the DSA into the 2028 election cycle.

Key details

  • He claims the stores will generate a social-network effect as shoppers travel from far away and that they will not check IDs (he states "IDs are racist"), enabling out-of-area use.
  • Financial claim: if each store loses $10 million/year and there are 10–20 stores, losses would reach $100–$200 million/year — which he compares to NYC’s $125 billion budget as under 0.25%, calling it a cheap marketing expense for the DSA.
Source evidence

Friedberg Predicts NYC’s Socialist Grocery Stores Will Be Wildly Popular and a DSA Marketing Tool for 2028

@friedberg:

“I think that people have it wrong. I think these grocery stores are going to be wildly popular.

I think that everyone's being a little bit too long-sighted in their view on what's going to happen with these grocery stores, with the basic obvious economic arithmetic that someone has to pay for this, and who's going to pay for it, and blah, blah, blah.

I don't think it really matters because over the near term, what the cheap grocery stores do is create an incredible success story for socialism that will help to support and fuel the socialist wave in urban centers around this country.

Think about the social network effect of the grocery store. So there's a couple of them, and then people start traveling from far away to the cheap grocery store because it has this discount.

Again, this'll play out over the next 24 months, going into the 2028 election cycle, and everyone's like, ‘This is so wildly popular. People are coming in from all over the place to go to these grocery stores.’

They're not checking IDs, because IDs are racist, and you can't check IDs to vote, so we shouldn't be able to check IDs for grocery stores. So people will come in from all over the place to use these grocery stores. The demand will go up. And then they'll start to open more and more grocery stores like this.

And let's say each one loses $10 million/year and they get to 10 or 20 of these. That's $200 million of losses/year on the grocery store chain. But it creates this extraordinary social movement for more of these grocery stores supporting the DSA and so on.

$200 million/year on a $125 billion/year budget for the city of New York is nothing. It's less than a quarter of a percent of the city's budget.

That is so cheap to market the DSA platform, and to get the DSA platform to become a social marketing element that drives the next wave here.

So again, I do think that these grocery stores, believe it or not, they sound silly, they sound small, but I predict that they will be deemed a point of success, and they will end up being a big part of the fuel for the DSA going into 2028.”

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