Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s farcical city-run-grocery scheme ever going to be more than a façade that merely serves to rating cred with Che-loving TikTokers?

Last week, metropolis Economic Development Corp. bigs took potential bidders on contracts to run the shops on a tour of  . . . a vacant lot in East Harlem. 

What a waste: People with actual work to do got pony-walked around a patch of asphalt under the Metro North tracks in East Harlem. 

Bids to run a Mamdani Mart are supposedly due mid-October, though City Hall has yet to challenge remotely enough specs on how the entire factor’s going to work.

The idea has always sounded like something cooked up in a late-night, stoned college-dorm dialogue — and still hasn’t been fleshed out much more than that.

So the only cause anyone would enter a bid is as half of some grift . . . or graft.

Team Mamdani’s theorists have imagined they’ll construct 5 shops for $70 million, with the East Harlem spot commanding $30 million of that; business consultants overtly snigger at that determine as vastly more than what it prices to launch a high-end retailer in a dear nabe, not the sort of “affordable” store the mayor has waved at.

Adding to the absurdity of the Harlem tour is the unsettling apparatchik in cost of the grocery undertaking: dead-eyed Waverly Neer, who blabbered in NPR-voice about how “excited” the undertaking has gotten the Harlem locals.

“Furious” is in all probability the higher phrase for the locals who already run groceries in the goal areas staring at having to face government-backed competitors. 

The 5 blocks just around the Harlem website include 15 bodegas and groceries.

Neer last week pointed to one potential reply: “grants” to support impartial companies close to the Mamdani Marts.

The metropolis has “a whole host of levers” it can use “to make sure everyone has equitable and equal access to opportunities here.”

Ah, sure: Subsidize the city-owned retailer, and also its close by opponents — and, when their opponents come calling, why not them too?

Light up another J, Mamdani mind belief, and hold on theorizing.

All this serves the mayor in one key approach: The grocery noise distracts his followers (and perhaps his opponents, too) from all his real-world bungling.

Mayor snubbed at a soldier’s funeral? Pied-à-terre tax mired in confusion? Look over there! Equity! Affordability! Economic justice! 

It works because so much of Mamdani’s base has always been about vibes and theater, so New York will proceed to hear a lot about these shops, even if we never truly get to see one.