@MrLee do you think this video makes its argument well?
I feel like if you're arguing in favour of government-run groceries, you should probably spend more than 15 seconds on the municipal case studies (that all failed!) instead of talking about military commissaries.
This part was interesting:
"So maybe you take all this to mean that it's true: the secret to all this is that taxpayers foot the bill for some giant subsidy. But actually, the subsidy is quite small. The defense budget is almost $1 trillion, and the subsidy for DeCA is roughly 0.2% for the whole defense budget. This is for almost 250 stores serving 8.8 million households"
Saying that the subsidy is small compared to the whole defense budget is a sloppy rhetorical move. What matters is is it cost-effective, how does it scale, etc.
Running the numbers: 1.5B subsidy for 8.8M households = $170 per household. If they're delivering on their mandate of 23.7% annual savings for households' grocery budgets (which tracks with the video's Walmart basket of goods comparison), that seems like quite a good deal!
I wonder though, will that be possible for Toronto to replicate with four pilot stores. Seems like a really different dynamic:
- No subsidy (beyond eliminating the typical 3-5% grocery profit margin)
- Fewer economies of scale
- More competition
- Highly visible if it starts to fail
- Not a sacred cow in the way that military benefits are in the US
Best of luck to them! But I would imagine the odds of this pilot succeeding and growing over the next 5 years to be quite low.
