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Apple Only Wants To Put Its Stores Where White People Live, Investigation Reveals (theoutline.com)
Brian Josephs, writing for The Outline: New York's northernmost borough is the city's most diverse, has the lowest income per household, and is the only borough without an Apple Store after one opened up in Brooklyn's predominantly white neighborhood of Williamsburg last year. This trend holds true on a national scale. That means 251 of the 270 stores, or 93 percent, are located in majority-white ZIP codes. Of the 19 that are not located in majority-white ZIP codes, eight are in ZIP codes where whites are still the largest racial bloc. For context, Garden City, New York, a city with a population of around 22,000 that is 94 percent white, has an Apple Store. Lake Grove, New York, which has a population of around 11,000 and is 89 percent white, has an Apple Store. By comparison, nearly 1.5 million people live in the densely-packed Bronx, which is only 21 percent white. Bronx residents must travel either north to Ridge Hill or down to the Upper East Side to get to an Apple store. Apple told me it couldn't comment on the record about what criteria it uses to decide where new stores are built or the demographics of its stores' neighborhoods, but USC Marshall School of Business professor Ira Kalb reasoned that the company is "going after the high-end of the market, so their store location choices typically go after areas that are considered upscale."
You go where the money is? Reasonable business decision, I'd say.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The article makes it sounds like Apple selects the store locations based on skin color, but I suspect Apple just picks places with high potential customer demographics. That those areas happen to correlate with skin color is not Apple's fault.
Seems that Slashdot is trolling us. Instead of realizing this is non-news, they're trying to race bait us.
Correlation does not imply causation. And in this case, it seems like there are pretty good candidates for the common cause. And the article even recognises that - the headline is clickbait.
Apple doesn't put stores in regions where people can't afford 1100$ phones?
Who would have thought?
Where are the Apple stores in rural Appalachia?
Where are the Apple stores in the trailer parks?
Seriously. Whoever wrote this story and Slashdot's "editors" should both be ashamed of themselves. Really ashamed. Even more than usual.
Apple makes expensive consumer electronics. They have stores. They put those stores where the people are who can afford them. If those happen to be in "white" ZIP codes, that's an inequity issue that can be chalked up to US society as a whole (and has been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere), not to Apple's store selection. The headline might as well be "People With Money Only Want To Live In Expensive Neighborhoods, Investigation Reveals."
The implication that Apple is somehow racist because of where they put their stores is just flamebait/clickbait of the worst sort. As in, genuinely harmful to society to stoke false racism claims. Serious shame here for everyone involved in producing this.
"95% of all Slashdot
They used to call "baiting" articles like TFA here "Yellow Journalism". I'm not sure where the "Yellow" came from; but the definition is "Something published as 'News' that is actually nothing more than the author's Opinion, and generally published to further the author's agenda".
Plus, as many others here have pointed out, Correlation is not Causation. Apple is studiously, almost fervently, ethnically and culturally-diverse in its policies, advertising, marketing and even product design. And they don't just talk the talk, they actually walk the walk, too.
This article really should be taken down, and the Slashdot editor that approved it should be dismissed, with an Apology to Apple.
Because if they did it would be racist for thinking they could prey on the blacks with money, because in their racist mind they spend money inconsiderately and for worthless bling.
Didn't you get the memo? No matter what you do, it's racist. Tell me anything you do and I can tell you why you're a horrible, racist person.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not that long ago I saw right here on Slashdot that we had (A) identified a gene for a kind of cancer that was very difficult to treat and (B) this gene was largely unique to people of African ancestry. So, because we have a high rate of people that die of cancer of African ancestry therefore racism. But we were just told this tendency was genetic! A + B = racism, that's the only way to add that up apparently.
When I go to most any store to buy electronic the people at the cash register will ask for a ZIP code. I asked one day why they did this, it was so they could plan for more stores. I hated being asked for my address before, as that meant I'd get more crap in the mail from the stores. This practice is rare now, but they still ask for your ZIP code.
When more minorities buy stuff from Apple, and give their ZIP code, then we'll see more stores in those neighborhoods.
I remember seeing some comedy skit where Blacks were portrayed as paranoid about being tracked by the government. Is there some truth to this? I didn't get the joke. If this is true, and many minorities are reluctant to give their ZIP code then the people that plan where stores go don't know that people willing to buy their stuff are traveling so far to buy. Maybe this has something to do with the culture that comes with the race. Paranoid parents raise paranoid children.
Another thing I see are neighborhoods that protest when someone wants to open a store there. Walmart is a popular target. Walmart, or whomever, wants to open a store because they think people will shop there. People in the neighborhood protest because they this this store will bring the "wrong" kind of people to the neighborhood, or there's some racist undertone to the store. (Selling chicken in a Black neighborhood? Are you racist?)
Here's the deal, not everything is about race. If all people see is racism then I think they protest too much.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
First, putting 93% of their stores in majority-white zip codes is meaningless without also knowing what percentage of zip codes are majority-white. Pulling some demographics out of a zip code database gives 17,409 zip codes which are more than 50% white. 2591 zip codes where whites are 50.0% or fewer. So white-majority zip codes comprise (17409)/(17409+2591) = 87.0% of all zip codes.
That is, if Apple located the stores randomly based on zip code, you would expect 87% of them to be in white-majority zip codes. On top of that, there's a margin of error. 99% of the time, you'd expect these stores to fall within a range of (2.576)*sqrt((0.87)*(1-0.87)/(270)) = 0.0527, or +/- 5.3%. That is, 99% of the time you sprinkled the stores randomly in a table of zip codes, you'd end up between 81.7% to 92.3% of stores in white-majority zip codes. 93% falls just outside this range, so we're talking about just barely being 99% confident that this is a real deviation, not a random occurrence.
Second, these are zip codes, not areas of equal population or population. Zip codes vary in population by about a 7:1 ratio. It's much more advantageous for a business to put a store into a zip code with a high population. So if there's any correlation between zip code population and racial diversity, it could be enough to offset the margin statistical significance we found above. I don't have time to research this, but my hunch would be that the low population zip codes tend to be skewed towards white-minority (e.g. remote areas like Indian reservations, sections of Alaska with large Inuit population, etc) compared to white-majority zip codes. Since a business is unlikely to put a store in an area of low population, that would erase a good chunk of the discrepancy between 87% and 93%.
Third, related to the second, is that high population density zip codes tend to be smaller and near other high population density zip codes. So whereas a store in a medium population density zip code may be meant to stand on its own, a store in a high population density zip code may be meant to draw customers from nearby zip codes. That is, people in neighboring zip codes are expected to travel the short distance to the single store servicing all those zip codes. I also suspect that high population density zip codes tend to be more white-minority (e.g. the Bronx). If so, this would also skew the number of stores in minority zip codes down. Not because there are fewer stores within a x mile radius, but because there are more zip codes within an x mile radius.
tl;dr - This looks more like just a straight random distribution, with some biasing due to how minorities tend to distribute themselves geographically compared to whites. Not some form of discrimination on Apple's part.
Apple is not obliged to put their stores in places chosen by anyone else other than themselves, this is pure speculation based on spurrious correlation, and it's just plain stupid to think they have anything else other than money on strategic placement of stores.
And I'm not a fan of the company myself, but if you are gonna write some hitpiece article, you are gonna have to do better than this crap.
This is the kind of stupid shit article that makes people create terms like SJWs and use it in a derrogatory manner.
You are not contributing to the discussion here. Unless you found some internal memo stating that the construction of Apple stores needs to avoid black neighborhoods specifically or something like that, this is just bullshit. It's pure sensationalist use of statistics to bend the company image with some lame ass weak and indirect libel.
I'd avoid posting anything from the source of this crap in the future, as it's no different than Breitbart pulling crap out of their asses.
Fucking shame to put such piece of garbage here, I thought Slashdot was better than that.