Cities: Paying More for Being Poor

Sometimes the difference between riot and order in the slums may be not a question of billions spent on social welfare but a matter of a few cents—like 10¢ more for a dozen eggs, 20¢ more for a pound of hamburger or 2¢ more for a loaf of bread. For, cruelly enough, as hearings by a House subcommittee investigating consumer problems in New York City and St. Louis indicated last week, the poor are often charged more for groceries—and often given worse goods and services—than relatively affluent shoppers in suburbs and middle-class city neighborhoods.

Seated behind a pile of groceries and waving a package of Velveeta as she talked, Mrs. Gladys Aponte, a Puerto Rican who heads a consumer group in Brooklyn’s bleak Bedford-Stuyvesant district, told of the results of two days of comparison shopping a fortnight ago. On every one of 20 standard items, she said, prices were higher in Bedford-Stuyvesant than they were in nearby Flatbush, a middle-class area; totaled up, the difference was as much as $1. Making the arithmetic even more onerous is the fact that people in the slums spend up to 33% of their income on food v. 23% for all Americans.

Final Arbiter. Price is not the only difference between slums and suburbs. During the luncheon break in Harlem, Subcommittee Chairman Benjamin Rosenthal of New York City led aides and reporters to a supermarket for a personal check. Packaged goods were found to be mismarked, frozen foods were half thawed, and the manager admitted that after two days on the shelf, packaged meat was taken back to the butcher’s block, repackaged, relabeled—and redated. In St. Louis, a test by the city health laboratory determined that hamburger purchased at a slum store was 26.5% fat compared with 18.5% fat in similar meat bought in a good neighborhood. Even a head of lettuce is often wearier and smaller in the slums—and without the cellophane packaging common in the suburbs. Ghetto markets are usually older and dingier than stores in better areas.

The markets, to be sure, have some excuses—though they almost invariably deny that there is even the smallest price or quality differential between neighborhoods. Overheads are higher in the slums, a result of such things as pilferage and steep insurance costs. There is also less competition, the final arbiter of price. Slum residents, who lack the mobility of suburbanites, are generally stuck with one or two stores—or the choice of going hungry.

Practical Answer. One man who accepts neither alternative is the Rev. John Schocklee, a priest in a low-income area in St. Louis. His solution: bussing slumdwellers out of the central city so that they can shop in a farmers’ market. A more practical answer is the cooperative. Manhattan’s Morningside Heights Consumer Cooperative, a clean, friendly store on the fringes of Harlem, not only offers prices as low or lower than commercial outlets but also gives a 4.3% rebate on each customer’s annual purchases. So successful has Morningside been that another coop, in the very heart of Harlem, is planned for next year.

There is ample evidence that people in the ghetto are aware that they are often bilked—and resent it more than a little. During the 1965 Watts riots, five supermarkets of one chain, in bad odor with local residents, were burned to the ground, while three markets of another chain, which was considered fair, were spared. The chain grocers are now clearly in the spotlight and under duress to do better for the poor.