The Commissary Problem: "It's Failed Everywhere" vs. 235 Government-Owned Grocery Stores
Checks articles, The Matt Walsh Show, Louder with Crowder
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USA TODAY says government-owned grocery stores have "failed everywhere else it's been tried." The Defense Commissary Agency operates 235 of them.
Verdict: false, truth score 0.15 — and the real failures the column never mentions are the more interesting story.
On August 3, 2026, USA TODAY columnist Nicole Russell closed a column on Mamdani's N.Y.C. Groceries plan — five municipal stores, $70 million in capital funds, a 30% discount on a defined basket — with an absolute: this has failed everywhere. The record it describes is genuinely mixed, not empty.
Against the claim: 235 DeCA commissaries as of September 30, 2024, with a savings mandate written into 10 U.S.C. § 2484 at roughly 23.7% system-wide; St. Paul, Kansas, city-owned since 2013 and running about 3% profit; and the Cato Institute, hostile to the plan, forecasting a "boondoggle" rather than a collapse.
For the claim, and it is serious: Kansas City's Sun Fresh closed in August 2025 after roughly $18 million in public investment, in a dense market. Baldwin, Florida (pop. ~1,400) closed in 2024. Erie, Kansas leased out its store in 2024. And in September 2025 the Pentagon issued an RFI on potentially privatizing the commissary system — the largest counterexample is not unambiguously settled.
We also follow the sentence: RNC post to Fox News Digital aggregation to USA TODAY column. In the handoff, the word "fantasy" survived and got promoted to an expert finding (mostly-false, 0.20), while a structural fact — private operators running day-to-day operations — was replaced with "run by the city at the mayor's discretion" (mostly-false, 0.25). And The Matt Walsh Show Ep. 1815, published the same day, described the program's mechanics more accurately than the newspaper did, while running the identical exceptionless-history move.
What we still don't know: whether N.Y.C. Groceries works. No operating-subsidy figure exists in public, no independent economic review has been published, and the first store isn't targeted until the end of 2027. Nothing in this episode is a defense of the policy.
Sources available upon request.