BOOK REVIEWS
BLACK CONSUMER PROFILES: F O O D P U R C H A S I N G IN T H E I N N E R C I T Y
By Marcus Alexis, George H. Haines, and Leonard Simon (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Division of Research, GBA, University of Michigan, 1980, $4.00)
The authors introduce their study with a comprehensive summary of the major research concerning the consumer behavior of black Americans. They divide this research into two major periods: before and after the 1960s. Before 1960 the primary question posed by students of the consumer behavior of Blacks was whether or not significant differences existed between black and white consumption patterns. After the 1960s the issue shifted to that of the conditions of the supply of consumer goods---the prices and qualities of goods available to black consumers compared with the prices and qualities of those goods available to whites. " D o the poor and the black pay more for less?" was the major query of the early 1970s. In this book a third question is added: " I s race a predictive factor in consumption patterns?" Alexis, Haines, and Simon try to find answers to these three questions in their analysis of the food shopping patterns of black and white consumers and the characteristics of the food stores from which they buy. The survey was conducted in four distinct neighborhoods in Rochester, New York in 1964 and in 19691971. The neighborhoods selected ranged from one in which the population was predominantly white and middle income to one in which most of the residents were black and poor. The emphases of the approaches to studies of black consumers vary with the objectives and orientations of the researchers. Concern with black-white consumption patterns is an outgrowth of marketing concerns with segmented markets and the efficacy of applying different marketing techniques to different kinds of consumers. The conditions of supply to black consumers as compared with white consumers are of interest to an entirely different breed of researchers-those concerned with the depth of economic and social discrimination in the United States.
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The Review of Black Political Economy
Alexis et al. summarize the positions and arguments of the two groups in what, in my opinion, is the most valuable portion of this book. An extensive bibliography of the writings pertaining to black consumers is also provided. The summaries account for nearly one half of the book. It is not until chapter 4, "Determinants of Food-Buying Behavior," that the survey from which the pamphlet obtains its title is described and analyzed. Findings about the food stores in the four neighborhoods are presented in detail, with charts illustrating the differences in the characteristics of the stores. The characteristics surveyed include store configuration, physical conditions, visual display space, equipment, and personnel. No attempt is made to assess the quality of the foodstuffs such as meat, fruits, and vegetables. The characteristics of the consumers living in the four neighborhoods are presented in tables with rifles in the form of the questions asked. The answers are expressed in numbers of persons responding, by neighborhood. The weakness in this presentation is that differences or similarities in consumers from the different areas (e.g., years of school completed, age, marital status, income, amount spent for food, occupational status, type of stores used for shopping) are not immediately apparent. If the reader wants to find the difference in the family take-home pay between Maplewood (population almost completely white, middle-income level) and West Half of Model Cities (heaviest concentration of Blacks in the city, many of the very poor and those on welfare) s/he must calculate from the numbered data provided in Table 14, "In Which of These Groups Does Your Total Family Take-Home Income Fall?" Table 28, " T h e Effect of Income Upon Family Purchases of Foodstuffs" is as fascinating by what it omits as well as by what it includes. According to the findings summarized in this table, as family income rises there is a decrease in the mean amount purchased of 15 listed commodities; an increase in the purchase of seven listed commodities; and no change in the purchase of six listed commodities. The authors, true to their market orientation, state that these findings have "important implications for the product assortment a grocery store should offer, depending on the clientele it serves." Even more important it would seem are the implications for the consumer economist, the consumer educator, and the nutritionist with a concern for family health. On the basis of their findings in the two Rochester surveys and the findings of other surveys of consumer behavior, Alexis et al. attempt to give answers once more to the two basic questions. In answer to the question as to differences between black and white consumption patterns, they state: "The food purchasing behavior of blacks is affected by both their race and their low socioeconomic status" (p. 92). They reframe the question about the poor and the Black paying more by pointing out that reviews of black/white consumption expenditures have always assumed a normally operating market, while studies of prices have almost always assumed a prison market. A prison market is one in which consumers must buy because they lack
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mobility. The question to be answered, Alexis and his co-authors maintain, is "Where do people shop?" On the basis of the answers they received to their questions about shopping locations and their analysis of existing studies of the relative mobility of black and white consumers, they argue that the results are inconclusive: "There is ample evidence to suggest that consumers do not restrict their food shopping to the area of the city in which they reside . . . . residents of low income areas pay higher prices if they shop at the smaller stores in their areas" (p. 93). This conclusion agrees with the findings of the author of this review in 1967 in interviews with a limited number of black consumers with low incomes.1 The authors cite in their extensive footnotes studies that compare the shtpping behavior of Japanese-American consumers with that of white consumers, and the shopping behavior of Blacks with that of Puerto Ricans. These references open a broad new area for the market researchers---an almost limitless field in which shopping behavior comparisons can be made between and among the multitudinous ethnic and racial groups of consumers in the United States2 who shop in the normal and the prison markets of this consumer-oriented economy. Messrs. Alexis, Haines, and Simon recognize that their conclusions may be valid for a limited period: " A s lower socioeconomic ethnic groups become more like the majority in income, education and occupation, one may expect that their food buying behavior will become more like that of the majority group" (p. 95). Patterns of food consumption have changed radically within the United States during the past two decades, partly as a result of studies showing the relationships between food consumption and certain diseases, and the dangers of eating too much and becoming too large. Both white and black consumers have modified their food consumption patterns as a result of warnings from newspaper columnists, magazine writers, television documentaries, and the medical profession. The data collected in Rochester, N.Y. in 1969-71 may already be obsolete, but this book is a valuable addition to the literature concerning black and white consumers in the United States. Aurelia Toyer Miller University of Massachusetts, Amherst NOTES 1. Aurelia Toyer. "Consumer Education and Low-Income Families." Journal of Consumer Affairs, vol. 2, no. l, summer 1968. 2. A newspaper article reports that the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups lists 106 ethnic groups in the United States. New York Times, August 3, 1980.
