First: a counter example. Zone pricing for gasoline distribution. Here we have (and this is big in California) a case where using computerized demographics and income studies, the oil companies price higher in richer suburban and richer downtown areas than they do in poorer areas, on the theory that rich people don't give a damn about an extra two bucks when they fill up. Poor people by contrast are more likely to shop around for best price. Interestingly, this is one case where "market equilibrium" leads to divergence from a mean price and the rich get screwed, rather than vice versa.
Second: considerations on food. Do we mean the poor or the very poor. The very poor cannot afford vehicles. Their carrying capacity is limited to what they can lug, usually a few blocks. This tends to lead to a large number of small outlets with low volume. Because of the low volume these outlets go for the "high value added" food items with long shelf-lives and which incidentally are high-sugar and high-fat, adding addictive properties to their long shelf-lives and lack of nutrition. Due to the higher inefficiencies of more localized distribution you get higher prices. To some extent these higher prices have to be measured against the cost of owning a vehicle. I also suspect that the difficulties of distribution (slow traffic speeds) increase costs of distribution relative to lower density suburbs. But to some extent we should "expect" higher food costs in these situations since the real "penalty" is that the inability to own and operate a car gets built into the food price structure in areas where there are many such people. I expect that this result is "rational" in the sense that ceteris paribus the transportation penalty is less than the real cost of owning and operating a car. But it does have the effect of altering prices and sale volumes of particular kinds of foods, which probably then channels consumption into canned high-salt high fat stews, etc.
Third: Even the supermarkets in poor areas (I lived across from one in Boston, near Symphony Hall, which some years later was replaced by a yuppy organic outlet) suffer from a vicious cycle. The economics of distribution doesn't favor providing first rate food (esp fresh vegetables, meats, and fish) and because the poor don't buy as much of that stuff the volume falls, which supermarkets rationally react to by raising price (causing fewer to buy, etc.). The condition of fish and meats in the aforementioned store was truly appalling, as well as vegetables. So you pay more for lower quality.
Fourth: The poor don't know how to be poor. That may sound stupid: but let me explain. When I graduated from college (in Berkeley) I was for a time on welfare (post oil shock, and I was unmotivated). Food stamps. In the days of the Berkeley Coop. Giant jars of peanut butter. Great. Anyhow I paid a good deal of attention to what I bought and what other food stampers were buying; that I could amuse myself with a cheap used book whereas the distractions of "the poor" were rather more expensive. I concluded that the quality of life being poor (I think I was living on $200 a month) and educated is an altogether different experience than being poor and uneducated, and this permeates into the whole structure of decisions that are made with regard to food, amusement, reproduction, and what have you. I.e., if you are of middle class origins and educated and happen not to have money, it means you happen to be living without much money, but that this is not the same as being poor. You may not believe this, but while a welfare bum on $200 a month (about $150 earned income, the rest foodstamps) I actually managed to put aside $15 a month to join four friends in a party pool: we bought chevre cheese and Chateau d'Yquem (about $45 or $50 a bottle in the early 1970s) once a month for several months. All of which is to say that just because I didn't have money doesn't mean that I was buying shit. But empirically, that's what's sold and distributed in poor areas. Part of the tremendous cultural antipathy to the poor is that the better well-off probably assume that they could handle having no money better than poor people do. And that's probably true. But "being poor" is substantially more (or less) than having no money. Indeed, when I applied for foodstamps this was evident, as it seemed to me that it would be very difficult to negotiate the application process without a college education. (Which was confirmed by the fact that the the really poor people would spend an afternoon vainly trying to fill out forms which took me an hour. In any case it was evident that being really poor is hard work.)
But this gets back to food distribution. In the reciprocally vicious cycle the poor are not equipped to "demand" good food, and as a result of that lack of demand such good food as does make its way into their distribution chain tends to deteriorate in quality (since high volume turnover is essential to maintain a low price and good quality of fresh foods). As a result they eat the addictive sugar-fat stuff which fuels the next cycle and sends the "market signal" that more such shit should be brought into that area. (But let us not exaggerate: the sugar-fat-shit products are readily available elsewhere and liberally consumed, but I think that the poor are at a greater disadvantage)
We do not need to posit a conspiracy of the grocery stores. Each manager acting "rationally" in purchasing decisions helps to perpetuate the negative cycle. We don't even need to posit "cruelly motivated" oligopolists; as I pointed out in the first example, oligopolists are happy to soak the rich. The "crime" resides in the interactive effects of the spatial layout of people by class and income, the affect of education and upbringing on demand patterns, and the fact that the energy which ought to be going into education (as for exmaple on nutrition) is being funneled into the high value added food products in the form of advertising, rahter than nutritional education as such.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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