A coalition of immigrant- and minority-owned grocery stores is suing Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration over its plan to open city-run supermarkets selling food at 30 percent below market prices, a discount the plaintiffs say will drive them out of business.

The Multicultural Business Coalition filed two separate lawsuits in state court Monday challenging the mayor's municipal grocery program, known in the filings as "NYC-GP." The first suit alleges the program violates grocers' civil rights by denying them equal protection. The second accuses the administration of failing to study the impact subsidized city stores would have on existing businesses. Mark Jaffe, president of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, is representing the grocers.

Mamdani's plan calls for five city-run grocery stores to open next year, backed by $70 million in taxpayer funding. The city would own the land, cover rent and construction, and select a private operator through a competitive bidding process. Prices inside the municipal stores would be set at 30 percent below retail and reviewed once a month.

For small grocers, many of them immigrants who built their businesses from scratch, the math is straightforward. They cannot compete with a government-subsidized competitor selling the same products at a steep discount. And they say City Hall never bothered to ask what would happen to them.

Plaintiffs call the discount a threat that "rivals or exceeds Walmart"

The second lawsuit, obtained by the New York Post, draws a pointed comparison. The filing states that municipal stores would "sell food items 30 percent below the market-rate, a rate that rivals or exceeds Walmart discounts." That language is deliberate. New York City grocers spent years fighting to keep Walmart out of the city's market, arguing the retail giant would eliminate what the filing calls an "untold amount of opportunity for minority businesses and small business at large."

Now the same grocers say the city government itself is doing what Walmart never could, undercutting them with prices no independent store can match, using taxpayer money to do it.

The first lawsuit, obtained by Fox Business, frames the issue as a constitutional violation. The filing argues that "predominately immigrant and minority owned grocery stores" cannot offer the same discounted prices as the city-run program and are therefore "being unduly denied the equal protection of the subsidized municipal grocery stores." The plaintiffs contend the administration "failed to take corrective action, namely meaningfully study and analysis to avoid furthering historic discriminatory exclusion."

The legal language is dense, but the claim is plain: the city is building a competitor with public money and has not examined whether doing so will harm the very communities it claims to serve.

Mamdani's administration is no stranger to legal setbacks. A judge earlier blocked the rollout of the mayor's pied-à-terre tax in what amounted to a direct rebuke of the administration's policy process. That case followed a similar pattern: ambitious government action, thin legal groundwork, and a courtroom correction.

Mamdani dismisses the threat, points to two existing markets

At a press conference Monday, the mayor pushed back. He framed the grocery program as a modest response to a genuine crisis, telling reporters:

"We are talking about a reflection of a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30 percent over the last few years, and we're also talking about delivering five city-run grocery stores in a city of 8.5 million people that has more than a thousand grocery stores."

Five stores among more than a thousand, the mayor's argument is that the program is too small to hurt anyone. He also cited two existing city-subsidized markets as proof the model works without harming neighbors.

"And we've seen, in fact, with Essex Street Market in Manhattan, as well as Moore Street Market in Brooklyn, a model where the city has subsidized groceries and it has not had a negative effect on bodegas around them or on grocery stores around them."

What Mamdani did not offer was a study, a report, or any independent data to support that claim. The lawsuits allege precisely this gap, that the administration moved forward without conducting a meaningful impact analysis. Whether Essex Street Market and Moore Street Market actually left surrounding businesses unscathed is, at this point, the mayor's assertion and nothing more.

His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill. Neither did Jaffe.

A pattern of policy ambition colliding with legal reality

The grocery lawsuits land at a moment when Mamdani's administration is already contending with friction on multiple fronts. An appeals court recently weighed in on his pied-à-terre tax, and homeowners have pledged to continue that legal fight. The mayor has also faced public backlash, he was booed off stage at an NYPD event on Staten Island in under a minute, and his administration drew scrutiny after an NYPD dispute over a police escort for his wife's overseas trip.

The grocery store fight, though, cuts deeper than the others. It pits the mayor's progressive policy instincts directly against the livelihoods of immigrant business owners, a constituency most Democratic mayors would go out of their way to protect.

The grocers' argument is not complicated. They spent years building businesses in a city that is expensive, heavily regulated, and difficult to operate in. They fought off Walmart. And now the city itself wants to open stores next door, underwrite the rent with tax dollars, and sell the same products for 30 percent less. The plaintiffs say they are "suffering undue harm." They want a court to stop it.

Mamdani says grocery prices are up roughly 30 percent in recent years, and that is a real problem for New York families. But the question these lawsuits raise is whether the right answer is for the government to become the grocer, or whether that just trades one problem for another, crushing small businesses while spending $70 million in public money to do it.

When the government decides it can do your job cheaper with taxpayer subsidies, it is not competing. It is replacing you. And the people being replaced here are not corporate chains, they are immigrant families who played by the rules.