I’m just spitballing here, but couldn’t they do something to treat food stamps as something akin to a club card and give discounts to people paying using foot stamps?
I would think? It's already pretty common AFAIK to give discounts to students and seniors, so another discount for another category of people ought to be easy enough.
I'm guessing they won't because of possible blowback. "These stores sell cheap necessities for everyone" is less politically contentious than "these stores sell cheap necessities to the poor"
Oh, yeah, Mamdani clearly has a very strong incentive to make the stores popular because public opinion is likely to associate them closely with him.
There are pros and cons to this, I guess. It does mean he has an incentive to make them pleasant to shop in, but maybe at the cost of externalities.
I don't live in NYC and don't know what power he has to unilaterally make changes, but my gut says he's throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks and is going to campaign on being the politician who at least tries to help people. Ultimately, he needs a more friendly state govt.
Yeah, my experience of municipal politics is not in NY but it comprises many examples of good policy being horse traded into mid/bad policy even without a ton of overt opposition.
And I mean, "make popular thing, put name on it" is usually pretty good politics if nothing else!
The law establishing SNAP prevents charging different prices to SNAP and non-SNAP customers. It's designed to prevent gouging but it cuts both directions. It came up last year during the government shutdown when some stores wanted to offer discounts to SNaP recipients.
