Opinion

Quinn’s Christmas bauble

In other pander-to-the-power news this week, City Council Speaker Chris Quinn got an early Christmas present — one that she worked hard for, too.

Quinn has stood in the marketplace door for years, brazenly excluding Walmart from the five boroughs, and on Wednesday she got her reward: a mayoral endorsement from the city’s grocery union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500.

Sweet for her.

Not so sweet for the two-thirds of New Yorkers who tell pollsters, time and again, that they want Walmart in the city.

Or for poor folks who lose out on the relatively cheap, nutritious food Walmart brings to neighborhoods in need.

Elsewhere.

Walmart would also bring jobs to the city, thousands of them. But the company generally isn’t unionized — and so, rather than do the hard work of organizing new stores, Local 1500 badgers Quinn and her colleagues — and they simply roll over.

In September, Quinn helped kill a 200,000-square-foot Walmart proposed for Brooklyn’s impoverished East New York.

Now East New York is instead in line for a supermarket about a third the size of the planned Walmart, with barely half as many jobs created. And Brooklynites are paying more, more, more for basics.

Walmart has other rarely discussed benefits: It offers checking accounts with no annual fees, saving its customers an average of $259 a year. And there are no overdraft fees either, saving them even more.

That makes a huge difference for people who are on the razor’s edge financially, who have to think hard about every purchase they make.

Bottom line: Shoppers all over New York City have been shortchanged for years by Quinn and her council colleagues.

Now she’s running for mayor — and it’s time for a little payback.

Hence the Local 1500 endorsement.

No doubt there will be others.

Just for the record, none of Quinn’s fellow mayoral aspirants is any more hospitable to Walmart.

It’s just that her pander seems to have packed the most punch.

Alas.