Immigrant business owners of several New York City bodegas are suing Mayor Zohran Mamdani over his plans for government-run grocery stores, saying the scheme will destroy their businesses.
The Multicultural Business Coalition (MBC), a group representing a large number of immigrant-owned businesses, filed two lawsuits on Monday just as the Mamdani administration announced that the first government-owned grocery will open early next year.
MBC’s president Ken Roldan blasted the mayor on behalf of businesses that the groups says have been “historically discriminated against.” Roldan also says that the mayor’s scheme is a “a direct assault on minority business by a mayor who claims to be a champion of disenfranchised poor and working-class New Yorkers.,” according to the New York Post.
One of the lawsuits likens the opening of government-owned grocers to plans to open a Walmart in the city, an idea that detractors said would quickly run local stores out of business.
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The MBC suit says that city hall “failed to study the discriminatory effects” on local businesses if the government sponsors grocers. The filing asks the courts to force the city to make a feasibility study on the effects of the mayor’s plan on local businesses.
“There is no extant evidence that the respondents have undertaken any studies and or serious analysis before its current arbitrary site selection,” the suit says.
“My grandfather opened up one of the first bodegas in the late 1960s when East Harlem was burning, and the A&Ps and Waldbaums were leaving,”” MBC Chairman Frank Garcia told the paper. “He established the first Latino Grocery Association to protect the rights of immigrant store owners. I am proud to be following up in his tradition because what Mayor Mamdani is doing is disgracing his memory.”
“Mayor Mamdani needs to withdraw his disastrous plan and work with us to find different ways to bolster and sustain what so many (New York City) immigrants have created,” added NY State Mexican Chamber of Commerce president Jairo Guzman.
“The Puerto Ricans were the bodega pioneers and they were followed by the Dominicans, the Arabs, the Koreans, the Chinese, and finally, my Mexican business members,” Guzman insisted.
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