A $315 Grocery Fix That Buys Wholesale, Not Stores

A family of four would save about $315 a year under a new proposal that lowers grocery prices by cutting what stores pay, not what shoppers are charged. The Kitchen Table Project plan, published November 6, 2026, keeps the government out of retail entirely. It offers no city-run stores and no price controls.

Almost every plan to lower food prices puts the government in one of two businesses. Either it runs a grocery store, as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now doing, or it tells stores what to charge. This proposal does neither. Instead of working on what shoppers pay, it works on what the store pays.

How would the buying club work?

The federal government already buys an enormous amount of food. USDA runs competitive auctions to supply school lunch and other nutrition programs, and it has done so for decades. The proposal would let any grocer — a bodega in the Bronx or a Kroger in Lansing — buy a basket of 20 staples at a similar auction price. One condition applies: the store must sell them at a markup that is set in advance and posted where customers can see it.

The structure is like a Costco membership where Washington is the buying club and the grocer is the member. The government never owns a store, never runs a warehouse, and never writes a check to cover the gap between what food costs and what a politician would like it to cost.

Why purchasing power matters

The mechanism targets a real gap in the market. Small stores pay more for the same case of eggs because they buy fewer cases. Price surveys consistently show the big discounters undercutting most supermarkets. The Atlanta Fed has found that food inflation ran hottest in lower-income metro areas, where shoppers have fewer stores to choose from.

If a corner store could buy at something close to Walmart's price, that would be a form of relief neither a price cap nor Mamdani's city-run supermarkets can offer. New York is paying for a 30 percent discount at five stores, while this proposal would reach every store that signs up. Because the markup is public, shoppers would have a number to hold their regular supermarket against. It also gives other supermarkets a reason to watch their prices.

Where the savings stop

For six of the 20 items — including eggs, milk and ground beef — the report shows no savings at all. That is less a design flaw than a reminder of where food prices come from. Ground beef is close to $7 a pound because the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest it has been in 75 years. No auction or purchasing plan, however large, produces more cows.

There is also a negotiation question. The federal government is unlikely to out-negotiate Walmart and Costco, which have spent decades on procurement and are very good at it. If Washington simply matched what the big chains pay, that would still be meaningful help to independents. It is just a smaller promise than the headline number suggests.

Who sets the markup?

The report does not say who sets the markup. Rent and wages in the Bronx are not rent and wages in Lansing, and a single national margin could squeeze out the stores the program is meant to help — or leave so little room that the discount barely shows up on the shelf. The chains that already get good terms may look at the paperwork and decide it is not worth it.

A second-order problem follows. A grocer selling 20 items at a capped margin still has to make payroll, and the obvious way is to raise prices on the other several thousand items in the store. A family could save on the program staples, lose it on everything else, and never know the difference.

What comes next

Even with those gaps, this is the first grocery proposal in a while that tries to lower prices through competition rather than by having taxpayers absorb the difference. That alone makes it worth piloting. The test for policymakers is simple: name the markup, say who can join, and then judge the program by what a family actually saves on the whole cart — not on a handful of staples.