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Article Excerpt
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 fred 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.
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.
The Reporter also examined consumer expenditures and retail sales figures for each of Chicago's 77 community areas. The data were provided by MetroEdge, a market research firm, for the city's department of planning. The Reporter defined black and white communities as being at least two-thirds black or white. Asian and Latino neighborhoods were at least 50 percent Asian or Latino. The Reporter found:
* Residents of black communities spend an estimated 64 percent of their consumer dollars, more than $5.3 billion a year, outside of their neighborhoods.
* Among neighborhoods with median household earnings between $40,000 and $50,000 per capita, white areas have 47 percent more major retailers than black areas.
* White neighborhoods have nearly eight times more apparel retailers than black neighborhoods.
* There are three times more...
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