African-Americans Forced to Spend 2/3 of Their Retail Dollars Outside of T

[nosmokes]

original

African-Americans Forced to Spend 2/3 of Their Retail Dollars Outside of Their Neighborhoods

From: <http://www.chicagodefender.com/page/business.cfm?ArticleID=3370>
Chicago Defender - IL, United States

Paper bag test: Retailers shun big bucks in Black neighborhoods

by Kimbriell Kelly, Chicago Reporter

December 23, 2005

Retail Runaround:
It's 7:45 a.m. Tina Saphir has been awake and milling about for hours. She
glances at the corner of her vestibule at a heap of recently purchased
merchandise. Everything must go. Either it didn't fit or didn't work. But
the mother of three decides that it must wait for another day.
Today, she's headed on a road trip. It's one that doesn't happen as often as
she'd like because of time and distance. But, with the minivan gassed up and
the trunk full of beverages, she's just about ready to go. Her destination:
the grocery store.

It will be late afternoon by the time Saphir returns. She'll spend a
majority of the next four hours driving to and around a mostly white North
Side neighborhood searching for groceries and other items at stores she
cannot find in her predominantly black South Side neighborhood. "There's
money on the South Side and nowhere to spend it," said Saphir, 36, an
African American who lives with her husband and their three children in the
Kenwood neighborhood.

Share your thoughts on this story on the ChicagoDefender.com message board.

During this holiday shopping season, residents of Chicago's black
communities are likely to spend nearly two-thirds of their money outside of
their neighborhoods, far more than those living in Latino, mixed or white
areas, a Chicago Reporter analysis of consumer market information shows.
In Chicago, the rate of major retailers per 10,000 residents is nearly three
times higher in white areas than in black areas, according to the analysis.
Some black neighborhoods are home to far fewer retailers than white
neighborhoods even when their incomes are similar.

This means blacks in Chicago are likely to spend more time, money and energy
than whites when they buy gifts, groceries, clothes, tools and other items
at stores located far from their homes. It also means black neighborhoods
lose out on billions of dollars in consumer spending each year that could
help revitalize those areas. Furthermore, Chicago could be losing millions
of dollars in sales tax revenue as many drive to south suburban Calumet
City, Lansing and Evergreen Park, among others, to do their shopping.
The Reporter mapped nearly 900 Chicago addresses of companies that Stores
listed as the top-selling retailers in seven categories: supermarket,
apparel, department store, home improvement, drug store, restaurant, and
value retailer, such as Target. Stores, a monthly magazine of the National
Retail Federation, the world's largest retail trade association, ranked the
retail companies by their 2004 sales revenues.
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complete articlehere

[MsKandice01]

1. Anyone who lives in/near the inner city knows this...

I grew up near L.A. and spent a lot of time in South Central and you're hard pressed to find even a decent grocery store, let alone a major chain store.

[GrumpyGreg]

2. All neighborhoods should have a decent grocery store inplace but

I can't imagine anyone,rich or poor,wanting to be surrounded by the discounters and big box stores. Tacky,tacky,tacky.

I have a way to drive for most of my shopping and that suits me just fine.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. Yep no surprise here

I work in an inner city. Pizza Hut won't deliver in our neighborhood. I would be shocked if any business other than a convenience or liquor store ever opened there.

[pitohui]

4. it takes everyone 3-4 hrs to do a real grocery shopping trip

i don't get it, of course, there is not a grocery store in the neighborhood, hello, it's zoned residential

as things to get exercised about, all i can figure is it's a slow news day in chicago

[politicat]

5. True of most neighborhoods....

People move to new neighborhoods to get away from the retail congestion that is endemic in established suburbia; they move to urban areas to be close to urban core services (like public transit) but the last thing people really think about when they pick a place to live is how close to shopping they are.

Then the stores follow them. Whenever we go into a store, they ask for our zip code - they're trying to figure out where to put the next store.

We see it all the time in Colorado - people will move up the mountain, come down once a week or once a month to shop, and six months or a year or two later, the big boxes will open up a new development. A couple years after that, people start moving further up the mountain, to get away from the retail congestion and the pollution and the noise caused by the big box development... and the cycle restarts.

[nosmokes]

6. that's the problem of a non-local based economy

if, instead of the huge megastores and chains we had mom and pops, green grocers and butchers supporting local farmers and producers, and money staying in the neighborhoods where it's spent instead of going into deep pockets thousands of miles away, we might to start to see some change.