Sixty dollars a week. That is the number Chandler-Mather’s plan puts on the table for a four-person household, and I want to sit with it for a second before anyone in Canberra starts calling it a moonshot, because I have run a household budget at eleven at night with two kids asleep upstairs and I know exactly what sixty dollars a week buys. It is the school-lunch money. It is the pediatric co-pay we skip until the deductible resets. It is the week in August — the one week, the one my parents never failed to deliver on a postal supervisor’s income — that we keep deferring because the grocery bill and the utility bill are already fighting over the same dollars. Two hundred and forty dollars a month, three thousand one hundred a year, and the proposal is not exotic: it is a grocer that does not extract a dividend from your basket first.
The markup is not an accident and it is not a market failure in the textbook sense. Last year a report ranked Coles and Woolworths among the most profitable grocers in the world, and the competition watchdog has already taken both chains to court over false or misleading discount representations. The market is delivering exactly what its owners asked it to deliver. The rest of the country — my cohort especially — is paying the difference, and we have been paying it for a decade while every alternative was abandoned on schedule. Governments announce pricing reforms and call them ineffective. The Australian federal government shelved its own packaging laws, citing the cost of living — reform that dies quietly so the markup survives. That is the pattern millennial parents in Philadelphia, in Lansdale, in Sydney and Auckland all recognise: the fix is promised, the fix is shelved, the bill arrives anyway, and someone calls it consumer adjustment.
Pew has been measuring the cohort’s verdict for years — roughly four in ten millennials say it is harder to feel financially secure than their parents were at the same age, and the number has never once bent the right direction. My parents raised three children on one income in Lansdale; groceries were the line that flexed least in their budget, and the house was paid off by the time I was in college. I run the same arithmetic on more real income than they ever had, and I cannot buy my children what they bought me. That gap is the generational betrayal in one sentence, and it is not a mood. It is delayed family formation, childless couples who wanted kids and did the math, mothers who returned from six weeks of partial-leave pay to a daycare invoice that swallowed the raise. The duopoly’s 22% has been sitting inside all of that, quietly compounding, while the policy class treated the grocery aisle as untouchable.
The polling that came with this proposal is worth reading as a diagnosis rather than a talking point: 84% of voters support publicly owned supermarkets being tried in Australia, and support runs to 88% among 25-to-34-year-olds — the exact cohort doing the eleven-at-night math, the exact cohort that has stopped waiting for the private version to work. And the private version is out of road. When a business coalition sued Zohran Mamdani over New York’s city-owned grocery plan, arguing small grocers could not compete, that was not evidence the plan was wrong. It was the duopoly reflex — litigate the public option because you cannot out-price it on fruit and vegetables, bread, milk and meat.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Australia already runs this experiment, at scale, and calls it sacred. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme costs the federal government about $24 billion a year and no serious person proposes abolishing it; Medicare and public hospitals are not left to charity and not left to market. The cost Chandler-Mather’s plan carries — $25.1 billion over five years, self-funding after — is not the anomaly. The anomaly is that food got carved out of the list, and the line between essential and not-essential was drawn by lobby muscle, not logic. In Lansdale the line was never drawn that way: the women of the Altar-Rosary Society at St. Stanislaus fed whoever needed feeding, and nobody ran a means test on the funeral lunch. Feeding the hungry is the first work of mercy on the list, not the optional one. A public grocer in the highest-need postcodes, priced monthly by a board with farmers on it, is that list written into statute — and Dorothy Day said it plainly enough that I will not improve on her: the works of mercy without the works of justice were never going to be enough.
Two thousand six hundred dollars a year is not a rounding error in a household carrying $2,400 a month in childcare and a mortgage that has not moved off 7% in three years of refinancing inquiries. It is the largest discretionary line we have, and it is discretionary only in the sense that the children still have to eat. Every millennial parent I know is managing the same ledger, and every one of them has stopped asking the market to fix this, because the market has told us, in quarterly profit statements, what it thinks our baskets are for. The Greens have put a $25 billion number, a statutory authority and an 88% polling floor on the table and said: fine, we will build the other grocer. The duopoly can keep its dividend. The rest of us would rather have the milk at a price that does not require a second job to justify.
That is what the aisle will feel like, if it works — not a revolution, just a trolley that weighs less on the way to the checkout. Swift wrote the mission statement of the American care infrastructure in five words: you’re on your own, kid. A public grocer is the sentence you write back. Somebody has to start writing it. This is as good a place as any, and the cohort that has absorbed the markup longest is done waiting for the private version to remember we exist.