Posted on 04/18/2013 3:08:12 PM PDT by blam
Racist 'Retail Redlining' Is Still A Big Problem In America
Emily Badger, The Atlantic Cities
April 18, 2013
David Mekarski, the village administrator for the south Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields, told a startling story this week at the American Planning Association's annual conference about a debate he recently had with a restaurant official.
Why, he wanted to know, wouldn't quality restaurants come to his mixed-race community, where the average annual household income is $77,000, above the county average?
The reply: "Black folks don’t tip, and so managers can’t maintain a quality staff. And if they can’t maintain a quality staff, they can’t maintain a quality restaurant.”
A gasp then rippled through the room in front of Mekarski. "This is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of racism left in America today," he says.
There's a term for the phenomenon he's describing: retail redlining. The practice is a more recent and less studied variation on redlining as it's been historically recognized in the housing sector. In the context of retail, grocery stores, and restaurants, redlining refers to the "spatially discriminatory practice" of not serving certain communities because of their ethnic or racial composition, rather than their economic prospects.
It's a newer phenomenon in part because there are more upper-income minority communities in America today. Households that can afford the same stores and restaurants as comparable white communities now want to know where the retailers are. The practice is tricky to study, though, because these types of communities are still relatively few in number (with hard-to-find comparison communities), and because it's difficult to distinguish a retailer's "unconscious racism" from its legitimate business reasons for locating a store or a restaurant.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
see post 29 I wrote when you get a chance.
Black groups ignore their problems in their communities, and yet in those areas they get lots of free stuff, parks, boys and girl clubs, community centers, etc, lots of free barbecues put on for the areas etc and yet the trash which is let behind is disgusting.
It’s high time the black groups which shout racist look at their own areas and tell them to look after their area,s pick up trash, look after their houses, tell their kids to not wander streets acting up like Tryvon Martin etc, how about do well at school, stop trying to be different to be black like have those silly names, mubresha, kahisha, tahisha, labresha, etc , stop dressing and acting in a certain way where they get negative attention and stop with all the fake crap they wear, drive a fancy car and yet live in a trailer.
Just found this out but they wear weave and when I asked my kids what it was they told me it was horse hair, I never look at my horse the same again when I brush her mane EEK.
How can anyone wear horse hair yuck
wife worked as a waitress , not a fancy place but a chain place and she said when they got groups of them in the wait staff never wanted to serve them because they would have you running about, make such a mess and they were so loud and obnoxious , even food on the floor, all over the place and many a time the other people would complain about the noise they made.
This is not just restaurants either but hotels, by the swimming pool, late at night , even in stores.
Not sure why they have to be so loud all the time especially when there are groups of black women
And after the housing crash began to result in foreclosures, ACORN turned around and blamed the same banks for pushing credit on people who couldn't afford it. Of course, the media reported it with no history or irony.
Part of the business model for quality restaurants is great service. How do they promote great service? By hiring and retaining servers who provide great service. And why do you suppose the servers provide great service? Because they don’t get paid if they don’t. Wow, what a concept!
If a restaurant added the 15 - 20% tips to the bills and then handed over the money to the servers regardless of the quality of the service they provided, take a guess what would happen to the quality of the service over time?
See, by making the transaction directly between the server and the customer the restaurant is establishing the optimum environment for providing quality service and thereby maintaining its reputation as a quality restaurant. Hopefully, that’s good enough to keep the restaurant in business.
“But race would only be the predominant factor for business reasons. It’s ironic - - a regular “Catch-22”. It’s like when banks were turning down mortgage applicants with crappy credit histories. Blacks as a group have crappier credit histories than whites and so were turned down more frequently than white applicants. Voila! Must be racism! In reality, it is 2013 and the kind of racism that puts the color green second to any other color is pretty much non-existant.”
It doesn’t stop being racism just because particular prejudgements happen to be correct in many circumstances. If Herman Cain walks into a restaurant and receives poor service because of all those other Black folks who didn’t tip the staff, he’s still being discriminated against based on his race. We can’t aspire to have a color blind society and be okay with people being discriminated against because of their skin color due to the behavior of people they have nothing to do with. I’m black, and I’m not anymore responsible for Black folks who don’t tip then you are. If I walk into a restaurant and get treated like crap because of the behavior of people who look like me, how is that not prejudice?
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In Chicago we have black-owned Leroy's Chicken in black neighborhoods. There's one with a window and "Go Obama" written in large letters. It closed back in 2008.
There's a term for the phenomenon he's describing: retail redlining reality.
The fact is dollars are green and in some neighborhoods you cannot charge enough premium to make a go of it. In Chicago's Hyde Park there's a breakfast shop that takes only cash. They gaurd the door like hawks, but not from robbers outside. It's the customers skipping that they watch for.
Years ago we had a high school summer hire. She was neat, polite, and sweet. I took her out to lunch on her last day. She sent her meal back three times and ran the waitress ragged. The steak was too rare. The steak was too fatty. She changed her mind and wanted shrimp instead. I was mortified and tipped extra. She must have learned that behavior from eating out with her family, so sad.
That’s what makes the story seem kind of off to me. These chain restaurants are going to turn down potentially profitable revenue streams because a problem that can be easily solved with a mandatory tip policy? Most of them are already doing that for large parties, just do it across the board and put a sign out front to that effect.
wife was a waitress and she said they were loud, messy and a pain and not one wanted to serve them as they knew that they would be treated awful along with other customers complaining about the noise if there were a few of them.
I could not be bothered anymore about being called a racist, I;m sick of the racist card being played, facts are facts and there are big problems in the black communities where kids are brought up off older folks who still have a chip on their shoulders and who make it out that they were slaves.
“Part of the business model for quality restaurants is great service. How do they promote great service? By hiring and retaining servers who provide great service. And why do you suppose the servers provide great service? Because they don’t get paid if they don’t. Wow, what a concept!
If a restaurant added the 15 - 20% tips to the bills and then handed over the money to the servers regardless of the quality of the service they provided, take a guess what would happen to the quality of the service over time?
See, by making the transaction directly between the server and the customer the restaurant is establishing the optimum environment for providing quality service and thereby maintaining its reputation as a quality restaurant. Hopefully, that’s good enough to keep the restaurant in business.”
I’m not confused as to how restaurants justify the practice. I just don’t believe that employees have to be bribed into providing customers with good service, not beyond their salary and the value to them of continued employment anyways. But regardless of any of that, most of the large chains already implement mandatory tips on large parties(5-7+). My point was that if they thought the only thing standing between them and additional profit was a mandatory percentage tip, then they’d implement it in a heartbeat.
Of course I agree that's racism, 100%. But that kind of racism is the racism of individuals, not the businesses that employ those individuals. And I believe most, if not all, business managers would unload an employee who displayed that kind of racism. Why? Perhaps for reasons of common decency, but mainly for business reasons - - it is simply bad business to employ racists.
Now, on the other hand, if you get crappy service because you happen to get a racist server, guess what? ...That simpleton DOESN"T GET PAID, now does he? (See? That's why the tipping model is so effective.)
I simply refuse to assume any guilt .. we gave people the benefit of the doubt forever, it was never 'enough', and here we are.
I simply no longer give a damn.
Okay, I work w/ a large percentage of black women ( I’m a teacher) & when we have gone out to eat they either don’t tip or tip so poorly that it is embarassing. When COGIC ( Church of God in Christ) holds their yearly convention in Memphis many waitstaff notoriously become sick that week, quit, or refuse to come in.
I am a VERY generous tipper because I waitressed in college. I don’t know what the solution is, but it is a cultural problem & unfortunately good tippers like you are probably looked at w/ the assumption that you will tip poorly. It is not an isolated incident in the black community and along w/ the constant requests & demands that I have seen when I have gone out w/ colleagues ( I don’t go out w/ them anymore because it is too cringe inducing)happens consistently. As a waitress I am here to say that a waiter doesn’t care WHAT their table is composed of as long as they are nice, mannerly, & good tippers.
It is a Catch-22, but a large portion of the black community have really wrecked it for all. Unless there is some mass education it will not change & people will not be happy when groups of black people enter dining establishments.
I’m sorry that you are unfortunately caught in the middle.
If not getting the restaurants you want is “one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of racism left in America”, I think you’re doing not so very bad.
Shoplifting, employee theft, armed robbery, bad checks, insults to staff and that latest black amusement groups of their youth raiding a store. Then they wonder why businesses stay away.
If the “economic opportunity” is there, let black entrepreneurs serve their community. Let THEM deal with a poorly educated, surly workforce. Let THEM deal with gangs and crime all around them.
The current pResident was done his best to destroy business in this Nation; let HIS favored “people” take care of their own dysfunctional communities.
Check the history on buildings and foreclosures. You’ll find the same building over a 30 year period having been foreclosed on a up to dozen times.
Is that a building you’d ever finance?
Gentrification is a long slow process and it doesn’t always take and it doesn’t always result in positive change.
Say what? The better the service, the bigger the tip (ie., paycheck)? I can hardly think of a more basic free enterprise practice.
The story answered its own question: It is *not* racist, it is based on the different *cultural* behavior of a race. Ignoring that difference can be disastrous to a business.
In this case, “black folks don’t tip”, is not racism that matters, unless you are the service personnel who are not tipped. Much of their pay is from tips, and if customers don’t tip, why should they expect the same service as those who do tip?
If you ask service employees, *even if they are black*, they do not like to serve black customers, because they know they almost never tip. And this is true throughout the US. It is not universal, but it is very common.
And since this is the “bread and butter” of service people, they are very attuned to who tips and who does not.
As a different example, I can cite a grocery store in South Florida. They had a huge banner inside the store which said: “WE DO NOT GIVE DISCOUNTS FOR DAMAGED MERCHANDISE. IF YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT.”
Yet all day in the store, you could hear people damaging merchandise with the hope of getting a discount. Then they intended to argue the store manager into giving them a discount. This was so time consuming that the store hired an “arguments manager”, and all he did was to refuse to give discounts, and tell customers with broken merchandise that they had been videoed breaking it, so if they attempted to leave the store without paying full price for it, they would be arrested for shoplifting.
And most of the people demanding discounts were in there every day, breaking things and demanding again. They would not buy anything that was not damaged, even if they could not get a discount.
What really makes bad behavior stand out like this are the majority of customers who do tip, and always pay full value on the price tag without breaking things. These are seen by businesses as reliable customers who are courteous, so deserve courtesy themselves.
Truthfully, most any business prefers to provide services and merchandise for them, instead of customers who are demanding, yet cheap.
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