No. The bodegas (and small restaurants) are buying soda and snacks that are stolen by organized theft by the route drivers themselves. The coke guy will pull up behind XYZ Supermarket and deliver 15 pallets of coke. The “receiver” at the store will sign for 16 pallets. One pallet will be delivered to a van waiting on the next corner. The van driver will then sell this for cash to a bodega or pizza place for half the price Coke/Pepsi would charge. Ironically if someone then steals a can of coke from the bodega, the bodega owner will complain about rampant criminality. The receiver is known to be lazy and not verify anything or actually paid to sign for a higher quantity than was actually delivered. There are supposed to be processes to detect this kind of fraud. Supermarket chains with weak inventory control systems are the ones that lose the most, and the delivery drivers know which ones to target.
“Receiver” in this case is an actual job in the retail sector, not a name for a person who buys stolen goods. In US English that’s called a “fence”. A fence is where shoplifted high value items ended up (small appliances, cosmetics, baby formula, shaving cartridges), but now these are sold on Facebook Marketplace and other online outlets. A shoplifted steak or avocado is likely just eaten by the shoplifter’s family.
Retailers play fast and loose with statistics on retail theft and fraud. They want more enforcement of shoplifting (and more leeway in using force to stop shoplifting themselves).
You can contrast what they say in press releases with what they are willing to say in notes to financial statements. The latter are very guarded because it’s a criminal offense to exaggerate or straight up fabricate numbers in the notes to your financial statements.
So the CEO on Monday will be out there saying the Mike’s Friendly Supermarkets lost $50m to “organized retail crime” and the DA and judges refusing to prosecute and jail shoplifters is a huge problem. The CEO knows that of the $50M, $10M was taken by shoplifters and $40M by vendors and employees. So when the quarterly earnings results go out on Tuesday there will be no mention of shoplifters. Or the statement will be worded differently so as to not imply that shoplifters made off with $50M.
No, that misses on two scores. First, the purpose of affirmative action isn’t discrimination; it’s to decrease discrimination. And second, proof that the purpose of that form is affirmative action?
And again: If you think that he filled out the form wrong, how do you think he should have filled it out? I contend that anything else he could have put down would have been even more inaccurate.
The argument that he filled out the form wrong basically boils down to “people with complicated ethnic identities shouldn’t be allowed to apply to college”.
That’s all very interesting. So not only are the supermarket chains losing money directly, it also allows the bodegas to undercut them. It’s not a wonder they are driven out of business. Why don’t they do more to stop this kind of organised theft?
It sounds like to some extent, New York’s economy relies on this criminal enterprise. That makes it even more dysfunctional.
Can New Yorkers not afford to buy groceries at normal prices, with no theft involved? My sister lives in London, and not in an expensive area (well, it’s all expensive, but comparatively). She shops at normal chain supermarkets that are within walking distance. Granted they are smaller and the prices higher than elsewhere, but she doesn’t have to worry about expired products. Surely you weren’t living in that bad a neighborhood, @puzzlegal ?
He should have ticked ‘South Asian’. The same way a white South African would be expected to tick ‘white’. I don’t understand why you think it’s complicated. Americans can be of various different ethnicities; so can Ugandans.
I applied to college the same year or the year after Mandani. Since I’m exactly as African American as Mamdani is, and was applying to college at the same time, I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to say that it was not confusing at all. African American means Black, not American from the geographic continent of Africa.
Doe it matter? No; it’s certainly not a reason to oppose Mamdani over. I just think it’s silly to pretend that he would have done this for any reason but the obvious one: putting down African American gives an advantage, and so if you’ve got even a spurious claim to being “African” American, you may as well apply as an African. Like I said up thread, I thought about precisely that, but decided not to do it because I figured there was some level of enforcement that would say ‘Hey, you’re not black - we don’t want someone who lies on their forms to go to our school’. Obviously, that was extremely naive.
I lived on the cusp of two neighborhoods. That grocery store was in Black Harlem. There was an expensive specialty grocery store a little father from my home in the opposite direction, and a convenience store with some groceries literally in the basement of my building.
We went out to eat a lot when we lived in NYC. It was often cheaper than cooking for ourselves.
You were born in Africa and lived there until you were 5?
If there’s anything we know about seventeen year olds, it’s that everything they do is calculated, and they never make little mistakes or fail to understand something perfectly. An error? Impossible!
It seems to me that if NYC really wants to address this, the problem needs to be attacked from both ends. Find stores that aren’t doing this and subsidize or aid them (or as Mamdani proposes, create your own stores… Government run enterprises are a whole other kettle of fish with its own risks and potential for corruption, but assuming you’re doing a good job creating them, it could work also). And at the same time, increase enforcement - go after corruption and theft with sting operations and the like.
By the way, the euphemism for stolen groceries in NYC is that they “fell off a truck”. And everyone knows it happens, even people like me who are basically pretty innocent and out of the loop.
No, zero people think that descendants of non-black people who have ancestors from Africa are “African American”. That is literally 100% of Americans, if you go back far enough.
Lots of people use “place American” for people who were born in “place” and live in America, though.
Do the ethnicity forms go to whoever makes the admission decisions anyway? I’m used to their being separated from the rest of the application papers; there’s a common ID number, so that the outcome is noted in a separate database for monitoring in the aggregate to see what systemic inequities there might be across the whole population, but the monitoring forms aren’t a factor in individual cases
I would love it if, before people criticized him for this application, they would lead by telling us the most foolish thing they did when they were 17, so we could understand where their criticism was coming from.
Maybe you’re just smarter than him? I’m sure none of us are under the illusion that competence is necessary to win elections.
In the UK, stolen goods traditionally “fell off the back of a lorry”.
This is silly. Descendants of Moroccans have as good a claim to be African as descendants of Nigerians. It’s just that ‘African American’ as a phrase means black, and everyone knows it.
Race-based affirmative action was common in America until the Supreme Court ruled it illegal a couple of years ago. (And it probably still is common; IIRC some colleges are in the process of being sued.) A few states had already banned it by referendum, so in those cases the form would be separated and used for monitoring, but in most states it’s something that could have been taken into consideration in admissions.
I’m saying there are two meanings of “African American”. The usual meaning is “Black American”, but it’s really not that uncommon to hear people use it to refer to an American born in Africa.
Literally the only time I’ve heard that meaning is when people are making fun of the term “African American” by claiming that people like Elon (or me, or Mamdani) are African American. Maybe your mileage varies and you’ve seen people use the term earnestly, but I’ve never come across that usage.
Good point- if others decide what ethnicity a person is- that gets into racism.
There are 5658 Grocery stores in New York City as of May 5, 2025; which is an 0.02% increase from 2023. Of these locations, 4834 Grocery stores which is 85.44% of all Grocery stores in New York City are single-owner operations, while the remaining 824 which is 14.56% are part of larger brands. Average age of Grocery stores in New York City is 6 years and 6 months.
Exactly.
Other than a small amount, most shoplifted items are not food, except baby formula.
It is interesting but not back up by any cites or solid information.
Cite?
Yep. I mean, it is reasonable to discuss and criticize his platform and ideas for running the City. But not what he self-identified as many decades ago.
How often have you been to NYC? That cite is useless and is probably counting bodegas (which are not full grocery stores).
There are supermarkets in NYC but they tend to cluster in expensive neighborhoods. Poor and minority neighborhoods are not well served and tend to have more adverse health outcomes due to poor diet. I hate to just tell someone to just google, but just google food deserts NYC and you will see cite after cite about the issue and for how long it’s been an issue.