Greens pledge publicly owned supermarket chain called KiwiMart with Foodstuffs and Woolworths required to divest at least 120 stores and distribution centres

My reckon is that this proposal has been done on the fly and hasn't been thought through rigorously. 

China has state-owned supermarket chains and state-linked grocery networks. The older supply-and-marketing cooperative system has remained important, especially in rural areas. It was originally a major state channel for supplying farm inputs and daily necessities and for buying and distributing agricultural output. More recently, China has strengthened this network partly to preserve resilient distribution capacity during supply disruptions.

The Greens do not explain how they can regulate costs across the supply chain. The only way that can really be done is to regulate profit margins, unless of course they plan to nationalize logistics and production. To think they can do that is something quite absurd. 

we state own our airline, generators, transpower.   a bank even why not super markets?

I am a bigger fan of buying out all the generators, energy is in need of more competition.

"a million dollars a day in excess profit out of our shopping baskets" - less than 20 cents a day per person, $1.40 a week.

Once they do this, there is no chance of the likes of Aldi coming here. Not if the government will force them to sell their best stores to them. 

Why stop there!

Petrol stations

Butchers

Hair dressers

Pubs

What could possibly go wrong ...

Essentially a forced nationalisation of a large part of something that isn't a natural monopoly public good, creating a commercial enterprise that's run by a government department. 

What could possibly go wrong?

EDIT: how about Co-ops rather than central control? See below.

As usual, Chloe has demonstrated her failure to grasp math and how real businesses work.

What is the ROE for Woolworths?

Is this reasonable or low?

What would happen if Woolworths withdrew from NZ?

Is Food Distribution Critical Infrastructure?

Remove the GST from Fresh fruit and Veg. Consider removing GST from unprocessed meat.

Recover the GST loss with a sugar tax (15% with item with >10% sugar)

This has been implemented in several countries.

The Illusion of the Grocery Aisles - Why KiwiMart is a Micro-Distraction from New Zealand’s True Macroeconomic Hemorrhage

New Zealand is currently in the grip of a biting cost-of-living crisis. For working-class families across the country, just the daily act of putting food on the table has transformed from a routine chore into a source of severe financial anxiety. 

It is against this backdrop of genuine economic pain that the Green Party has launched its latest policy headline - "KiwiMart," a proposed publicly owned supermarket chain intended to smash the long-standing domestic grocery duopoly. 

Politically, the move is potentially a masterclass in voter harvesting. By targeting a highly visible, household expense, the Greens have engineered a tangible, emotionally resonant policy, designed to capture the frustrations of hurting New Zealanders. Yet, beneath the populist veneer, KiwiMart is an economic nothing-burger. 

As a commercial entity, its chances of long-term survival, let alone its ability to meaningfully move the needle on working-class living standards, are negligible. More critically, by dedicating immense political capital to a retail side-quest, the Greens are actively distracting the electorate from a structural, multi-billion-dollar systemic failure - a debt-based commercial banking system that bleeds tens of billions out of the domestic economy every year in unearned economic rent.

20 Cents a Day Keeps the Structural Reform Away

To understand why KiwiMart is a structural mirage, we need to look at the cold maths of grocery retail. The Greens’ policy proposes using billions in state funds to forcibly acquire roughly 120 existing supermarkets and distribution centers to build a public competitor. 

However, the Commerce Commission’s own data reveals that the excess profits extracted by the existing duopoly amount to roughly $1 million per day. While a million dollars a day sounds egregious in a headline, when distributed across New Zealand's population, it equates to a meager 20 cents per person, per day. 

Even if KiwiMart successfully eliminated every cent of this excess profit and passed it directly to the consumer, a working-class family of four would save a grand total of $5.60 a week.

Bureaucrats in the Broccoli Aisle: A Recipe for Freshly Audited Lettuce

Worse still, the likelihood of KiwiMart even surviving to deliver those trivial savings is extraordinarily low. Grocery retail is a brutally complex, low-margin industry reliant on hyper-efficient logistics, sophisticated global supply chain management, complex inventory turnover, and razor-thin operational tolerances. 

History shows that when governments attempt to run complex consumer-facing retail networks, they routinely succumb to bureaucratic inertia, rigid procurement rules, and an inability to dynamically adjust to shifting market forces. 

Entrenched private duopolists, possessesing decades of localised logistical optimisation and global buying power, would easily outmaneuver a state-run startup. KiwiMart would likely face a grim choice - either require continuous, multi-million-dollar taxpayer bailouts just to keep its doors open, or watch its artificially lower prices swallowed up by operational inefficiencies. 

It is a policy that risks billions of public capital to fix a 20-cents-a-day problem, only offering a statistical rounding error to the working-class balance sheet.

The $40 Billion Invisible Elephant Extinguishing the Room

The true tragedy of this policy platform is the profound opportunity cost it represents. While the nation’s attention is directed at supermarket checkout counters, a monumental macro-economic extraction is taking place entirely unvetted. Over 98% of New Zealanders do not understand the very basic mechanics of how ~98% of the broad money supply is created. 

The prevailing myth is that commercial banks act as mere intermediaries, lending out the savings deposited by others. The reality, well-documented by central banks globally, is that commercial banks create money out of thin air via ledger entries whenever they issue a loan. This private monopolization of money creation saddles the New Zealand economy with an structural, unearned burden: interest paid on money that cost commercial banks nothing to produce.

This private credit engine results in an estimated $40 billion in economic rent escaping the productive domestic economy annually, primarily funneled out as profits to foreign-owned financial institutions. This is wealth entirely unlinked to actual productivity, a parasitic tax on every business, mortgage holder, and renter in New Zealand. 

If the state were to reclaim the exclusive right to create money as a strict public utility, retaining seigniorage and funding public infrastructure and social services through debt-free sovereign currency creation, the economic transformation would be profound. 

Rather than scraping by on 20-cent retail subsidies, the domestic economy would instantly retain billions in structural wealth. New Zealand could transition into an incredibly vibrant, self-sustaining economy within a matter of years, completely shifting the baseline of working-class societal wealth.

This structural revolution could be supercharged by coupling monetary reform with a modest Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), such as a 0.25% levy on all transactions, INCLUDING high-volume electronic financial transfers. 

Currently, the working class bears the disproportionate brunt of the national tax burden through income tax and GST, levies on the physical necessities of life and labor. Meanwhile, the dizzying volumes of the speculative financial economy escape virtually unscathed. A 0.25% FTT would capture vast revenues from high-frequency institutional trading, currency speculation, and corporate financial looping. 

By forcing the parasitic financial economy to finally carry its share of the national tax burden, New Zealand could aggressively cut regressive taxes like GST and income tax on lower brackets. This single systemic shift would inject more disposable income back into working-class pockets than a lifetime of subsidised grocery aisles ever could.

The Grand Logo-on-a-Bus Voting Heist

Ultimately, the KiwiMart proposal exposes the deep-seated pragmatism, and intellectual cowardice, that plagues contemporary politics. The Greens assume that explaining sovereign money creation, and financial transaction taxes on a campaign trail is politically difficult - when it should be anything but. 

However, it does require educating an electorate that has been systematically conditioned to ignore the mechanics of macroeconomics. It is infinitely easier to stick a "KiwiMart" logo on a bus, validate the public's justifiable anger over food prices, and harvest the votes of desperate families. 

But by choosing the path of least resistance, the party is selling working-class Kiwis an illusion. They are offering an ill-thought-out, commercially unviable publicity stunt that fails to address the underlying disease. 

As long as New Zealand's political leaders choose to fight microscopic battles over 20-cent grocery margins while completely surrendering a $40 billion monetary monopoly to private banks, the structural impoverishment of the Kiwi working class will continue unabated.