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."

Comments

Well

[jawtheshark]

You go where the money is? Reasonable business decision, I'd say.

Re:Well

[Archangel Michael]

Its not just that, its that the people who live in low economic areas make excuses as to why crime against "the man" is okay. So they have higher costs they have to pay, to pay for the crime that they commit. It is self fulfilling at some point. "These people deserve it, because they are ripping us off" vs "I need to make a profit, and have to cover the cost of the theft".

Please note, I am NOT mentioning skin color/race (until here), because it doesn't really matter for this discussion. The greatest victims of crime in poor neighborhoods are the poor in neighborhoods.

Re:Well

[tripleevenfall]

Business locates itself near high concentrations of its most lucrative customers, film at 11.

Re:Well

[cayenne8]

You go where the money is? Reasonable business decision, I'd say.

I'm guessing you'd find the same spread of stores vs neighborhood wealth with Ferrari, Porsche, Jaguar dealerships...

Re:Well

[houstonbofh]

The only color Apple cares about is green.

Re:Well

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Crime? It's a rich man's racket. The numbers show it. Everything else is brainwashing about race and class.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DP...

Re:Well

[naubol]

Yeah, that stuff happens. We don't notice when we make 50% of what we should because of the totality of white collar crime or other aristocratic bullshit. Nobody is angry that several thousand dollars have been stolen from them via their mortgage because of the LIBOR manipulations. Its invisible to us.

Trillions have been stolen by rich men. People don't care because they don't understand or they've learned to accept the system as it comes to them. It's hard to get outraged about these things because it's unclear what to do. Our legislature seems captured by these fucks, on both sides of the aisle.

It's worse than that, because much of the crime that we experience up front by the poor would be lessened if the economic situation improved for the poor. A rich man's crimes breed poor men's crimes.

Re: Well

[saloomy]

But all that doesnâ(TM)t matter. Do you really think Apple Co. bosses yelled âoeget me census data on race! Weâ(TM)re going to find the next most majority white neighborhood to open a store!â ?

No. Of course not. They opened up their ERP system and looked at where most Apple IDs home or work addresses are locacted and though to themselves: would it be more convenient for our customers and better for our bottom line if this cluster of users had easy access to a Apple store?

Just because something ends up a way doesnâ(TM)t mean it is because of it. Too bad, we have to teach that to this schmuck writing this study.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.

Re:Well

[alvinrod]

It's not even a hard question to answer if you bother to stop and think about it, but most people don't like to because they don't like the answers. But if you are poor, it's incredibly likely that your parents were poor, and their parents in turn. You don't have to trace back too many generations to see that in the United States you had the vast majority of blacks in chattel slavery where there was no ability to accumulate generational wealth, and even after that ended, a long period of time where the government had laws (Jim Crow) designed to disadvantage blacks. Since then, the welfare system is poorly designed and does not incentivize the type of behavior that will result in the impoverished improving their condition (this applies to any racial group) and the war on drugs has essentially destroyed the family unit in black communities which is another huge impediment to creating generational wealth.

The same goes for Latinos as well. A lot of them are or had parents who were poor immigrants. If you look back historically, the same was true for a lot of Irish, Italian, German, etc. immigrants who came to the U.S. decades or centuries ago. The only real difference is there used to be land that the government would hand out to anyone who would show up and live on it so it was a bit easier to get started even if you had nothing if you were willing to at least try and make something of yourself. If you expect some arbitrary person who just came to the United States whether legally, illegally, or even as a refugee to have as much wealth as the average person living in the U.S., I'm not sure why you believed that way to begin with.

As to the other points you raise, again just stop and think about it. Do you yourself live in an area with a lot of poor minorities? If you don't, then you probably already know the answer to why other people with more wealth don't either. There's your clusters right there. And when minority groups do get more wealth, they don't stick around in poor neighborhoods either.

Re:Well

[sexconker]

Hispanics are white, but the media treats them as non-white. Until you get a George Zimmerman nutjob incident, then suddenly Hispanic is white again to drive the narrative.

Re:Well

[swb]

My ancestors emigrated (actually escaped, from what my genealogically inclined uncle figured out) from somewhere in German-speaking Europe in the 1830s. But there's no real "accumulated family wealth" -- my dad grew up pretty poor in the Ozarks in a family of 9 kids. For a while in his teens they lived in a house built in the 1880s with no indoor plumbing at all, and this was the early 1940s.

He got drafted into the army in 1953, and after that merely worked his way through a series of sales jobs until he retired. No college education, but he did finish high school.

In theory, if he grew up poor, shouldn't he still be poor? As far as I know, the only low-cost land my ancestors ever had was a farm in eastern Kansas in the 1880s, but that's about 2 generations before my dad was born. The farm is still owned by a relative, but no "land wealth" was ever accrued or given to my dad or his dad.

I'm inclined to believe in the cycle of poverty, but I don't think it's 100% of the story. It's almost like there has to be material poverty, extreme ignorance, and other factors as well. There's too many people like my own relatives who basically grew up with nothing who didn't end up in poverty themselves for just material poverty to be the only explanation.

Rich

[fluffernutter]

Not an Apple fan, but really? Right or wrong, 'white people' tend to live in more affluent neighborhoods. Seems to be non-news to me.

Re:Rich

[0100010001010011]

Where are the Apple stores in rural Appalachia?

Where are the Apple stores in the trailer parks?

Re:Rich

[schnell]

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.

Color or money ?

[religionofpeas]

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.

Is this racist or economic?

[xmas2003]

Are you sure that Apple isn't just plunking their stores in places where people have more money? From TFA:
"Apple Store neighborhoods have a median household income of about $73,475 per year; black American households earn a median average of $38,555, according to the ACS estimate for 2016. The median household income in the Bronx is $34,299."

trolls

[TimMD909]

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

[Gerv]

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.

Wow!

[nospam007]

Apple doesn't put stores in regions where people can't afford 1100$ phones?
Who would have thought?

theoutline.com, what a dumpster fire

[grasshoppa]

Another recent article on that website: https://theoutline.com/post/25...

And I quote:

Okay, so, here's a controversial opinion that will likely anger some people. You don't have to say anything. Ever. About anything. Ever. Especially if you're a man.

Yellow Journalism

[TheFakeTimCook]

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.

Re:Yellow Journalism

[cervesaebraciator]

I'm not sure where the "Yellow" came from [...]

In the late 19th century Pulitzer and Hearst were going at it hammer and tongs trying to outsell one another in the newspaper business. They ended up in a contest over who could come up with the most sensationalized headlines and copy to sell papers. One of the simplest going theories for the origin of the term in the use of yellow ink during this period of big, exaggerated headlines. There are, however, other theories as well.

Re:Affluent black neighborhoods

[Opportunist]

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.

Few problems with this

[Solandri]

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.