Zohran Mamdani, the communist mayor of New York City, ran on a campaign promise so simple even a Queens college sophomore could understand it. The city would open its own grocery store. Prices would be low. Food would be plentiful. The evil capitalist supermarkets would tremble. The people would eat like kings. And it wouldn’t cost the taxpayer a dime because — and this is the important part — the city was going to do it “at scale.” Whatever that means.

Well, the first budget numbers just dropped this week, and it turns out “free” means $30 million of your money, “grocery store” means one single location in one single borough, and “opening day” means sometime in 2029. Which, if you’re doing the math at home, is after the next mayoral election. Which means Zohran might not even be mayor by the time the doors open. Which means he’s asking New Yorkers to pay thirty million dollars for a grocery store that might be inherited by somebody else entirely. That’s not a campaign promise. That’s a timeshare pitch.

Let’s run the numbers live, because this is the kind of math that makes your forehead vein twitch.

Thirty million dollars. One store. For context, a brand new Whole Foods — granite countertops, organic kale bar, guy playing acoustic guitar next to the cheese section — costs between $8 and $12 million to build. So Zohran Mamdani is about to spend three Whole Foods worth of money to build one city-run bodega, and the bodega won’t even have a roof on it until his next re-election campaign is already printing yard signs.

You know what else $30 million buys? It buys every single resident of Astoria — where this thing is supposedly going — a $400 gift card to the actual Whole Foods that’s already there. You could literally hand every person in the neighborhood a pile of cash, tell them to go buy groceries like normal human beings, and still have money left over to throw a block party. Instead, Zohran wants to build a government store that’ll open three years from now and probably charge you in ration coupons.

Here’s the part nobody in the press is asking. What does this store actually sell? Nobody knows. What does it charge? Nobody knows. Who staffs it? Nobody knows. Does it accept food stamps, credit cards, or gold bars melted down from confiscated landlord assets? Nobody knows. The entire plan is thirty million dollars and a vibe.

And that vibe is communism.

The last time a government ran a grocery store with this kind of enthusiasm, it was Venezuela, and people were weighing their money before they bought bread. The time before that, it was the Soviet Union, where if you wanted a banana you had to know a guy who knew a guy. Every single time in human history a government has said “we will now sell you food,” the result has been empty shelves, long lines, and a black market that runs better than the official one. But Zohran looks at that track record and says “yeah, but we’ll do it in Queens.”

Okay buddy. Good luck with that.

The funniest part — and by funniest we mean most infuriating — is that New York City already has grocery stores. A lot of them. ShopRite. Key Food. Trader Joe’s. Gristedes. Stop & Shop. C-Town. Like four hundred bodegas per square block. If you walk out your front door in New York City and can’t find a grocery store within five minutes, it’s because you’re standing in the middle of the East River. The problem in New York isn’t a lack of grocery stores. The problem is that Zohran’s own party has spent the last decade passing laws that made it impossible for the existing grocery stores to operate without getting robbed blind. Shoplifting got decriminalized. Prosecutors stopped prosecuting. The bodegas started locking up the deodorant and the baby formula behind plexiglass, and Duane Reade turned into a CVS-themed prison. That’s the grocery crisis. That’s the thing you’d fix if you actually wanted people to eat.

But no. Instead of enforcing the laws that already exist, Zohran wants to spend thirty million dollars to open a competitor store that won’t be ready until the kids born today are in kindergarten. Because nothing says “I care about hungry families” like a grand opening scheduled for when their children have grown teeth.

And here’s the kicker. This is the cheap promise. This is the one that was supposed to be easy. Zohran’s whole campaign was built on promises like this — free buses, free childcare, free this, free that, rent freezes, higher minimum wages, the works. If the grocery store is already blown up to thirty million dollars and a four-year wait, what do you think the free buses are going to cost? What do you think the childcare is going to look like?

We’ll tell you what it’ll look like. It’ll look like this. A big announcement, a huge price tag, a timeline that stretches past his term, a ribbon-cutting ceremony that never happens, and a bill that your grandkids are still paying off in 2055.

New Yorkers voted for this. They looked at a guy whose biggest professional accomplishment was rapping about Bollywood movies and said “yes, you should run the fifth-largest economy in the world.” And now they’re getting exactly what they ordered. A $30 million grocery store that opens after the heat death of the universe, staffed by nobody, stocked with nothing, selling food at prices nobody will commit to, paid for by people who won’t get to shop there until their kids are in middle school.

You can’t make this stuff up. They keep making it up for us.

If you live in New York City, buy a freezer. Stock it now. Because by the time this store opens, you’re going to need it.