Results 1 to 21 of 21

Thread: Food Stall Serves Up A Social Experiment: White Customers Asked To Pay More

  1. #1

    Food Stall Serves Up A Social Experiment: White Customers Asked To Pay More

    https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt...re-than-minori

    March 2, 2018


    A customer approaches the window at Saartj, a pop-up food stall in New Orleans running a social experiment. Customers of color are charged the listed $12 price for a meal. White customers are told about the income gap in New Orleans between whites and African-Americans and asked whether they want to pay $30 instead, a price that reflects the gap.


    Can a $12 lunch change the way people think about racial wealth disparity in America? How about a $30 lunch? That's the premise behind a social experiment playing out in a New Orleans food stall.

    Chef Tunde Way opened his pop-up stall in the city's Roux Carre venue in early February. The listed price for the Nigerian food is $12. But when white people walk up to order, they are asked whether they want to pay $30. Why? "It's two-and-a half times more than the $12 meal, which reflects the income disparity" between whites and African-Americans in New Orleans, says Wey.

    The median income for African-American households in New Orleans fell from $32,332 in 2000 to $27,812 in 2013 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to The Data Center's New Orleans Index at Ten. Over the same time, median income for white households in the city remained roughly the same, $61,117 to $60,070. In 2013, the median household income for African-Americans in metro New Orleans was 54 percent lower than for whites.

    Wey says that when customers come up to his window to place an order, he tells them that his food stall aims to engage people on the topic of racial income and wealth disparities and to share statistics on these disparities. He then informs them that customers who identify as white are being asked to pay the higher $30 price to reflect these disparities. These customers also have the option to pay the listed $12 price. The difference between the $12 and $30 meals, customers are informed, will be redistributed to minorities who buy food at the stall. How do white customers react to the proposition?

    "Some of them are enthusiastic, some of them are bamboozled a bit by it," Wey says. "But the majority of white folks, nearly 80 percent, decided to pay."

    "That was definitely higher than we expected," says Anjali Prasertong, a graduate student in public health at Tulane University who helped Wey design the experiment and collect data.

    Customers who agree to buy lunch were asked to fill out a brief survey online. A subset of these diners were also pulled aside and interviewed about how income and wealth disparities have played out in their own lives.

    Prasertong points to one anecdote from an African-American customer whom she interviewed. "I asked her, 'If you had been given access to more resources while you were growing up, would that have changed your life in any way?' " Prasertong recalls. "She immediately had an example."

    The woman told Prasertong that when she was a college student, she was offered an unpaid summer White House internship in Washington, D.C. But that meant she would have had to find a way to support herself in another city instead of spending the summer earning money that she could use to help pay for school in the fall. The woman passed on the internship, Prasertong says, because "she realized, 'Oh, it's just for rich people' " – meaning students whose parents could afford to subsidize them while they worked for free. "She still went on to be successful, but if she'd done that internship, who knows what she'd be doing?"

    "One of the things I took away from interviewing people was a greater awareness that people of color have thought about wealth disparity and how it has touched their lives and the kinds of things they've lost out on because they didn't have access to the resources their white friends did," says Prasertong. "Not that [white people] weren't aware, but they never really thought about how ... that might have affected where they are in the world in relation to people of color. They never stopped to think, 'Oh, that car my parents gave me in college allowed me to drive across town to get a good job.' "

    As Prasertong points out, "It's not a strict scientific study." One limitation of this experiment is that the customers who came to the stall were all in a higher-than-average income bracket. Prasertong says that may be one reason why the vast majority of customers of color – African-Americans, Latinos and Asians – declined to sign up to receive the redistributed money made from charging whites the higher price.

    As of Feb. 28, the day the premise of the experiment was revealed in a Times-Picayune article, 64 people had completed the survey, which included 32 whites, Prasertong says. Twenty-five white customers paid the extra $18, adding up to a pool of $450. Only six people of color had signed up for distributions, which they would split evenly among them, $75 each.

    The food stall — called Saartj, a reference to a 19th-century black South African woman infamously paraded as a "freak show" in Europe — will be open through Sunday, though the data collection part of the experiment is now over.

    While this experiment focused on racial income disparity in New Orleans, the numbers when it comes to the racial wealth gap in America are even starker. White families accumulate more wealth more quickly than do families made up of people of color. As NPR's Code Switch team has reported:

    "In 2013, the median white family held 13 times as much net wealth as the median black family and 10 times as much wealth as the median Latino family, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances."

    There are many reasons cited behind this gap, including slavery and institutional and governmental discrimination that excluded people of color from programs that helped Americans build wealth and pass it down through the generations. As Code Switch writes: "Segregation and redlining by banks made it impossible for many black and Latino families to secure mortgages, for example. The GI Bill, which helped establish an American middle class by helping veterans pay for college and buy homes after World War II, mostly excluded people of color."

    One goal of his experiment, says Wey, is to get people to think about how the racial wealth and income gaps affect their own lives and also how they can as individuals be a force for change.

    "We think of this as a systemic issue, like something that happens outside of ourselves, when in fact the aggregate sum of all of our actions and choices exacerbates or ameliorates the wealth gap," says Wey. That includes actions like "where we choose to send our children to school, where we choose to buy a home and critically, how we choose to spend our money and where we choose to spend our money. "



  2. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  3. #2
    Race war.
    It's what's for lunch.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  4. #3
    "Some of them are enthusiastic, some of them are bamboozled a bit by it," Wey says. "But the majority of white folks, nearly 80 percent, decided to pay."
    Of course they did.

    White people are weak and cowed.

  5. #4
    "In 2013, the median white family held 13 times as much net wealth as the median black family and 10 times as much wealth as the median Latino family, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances."
    South Africa has a solution.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    Of course they did.

    White people are weak and cowed.
    Anecdotally, when I was in college as an engineering student, the black kids did by far the worst. There was an occasional class where test scores were posted for everyone to see. Without exception, the black kids were at or near the bottom. Secondly, black kids make up a lower than expected percentage of programs that pay well (business, engineering, medicine). They make up a higher percentage of bull$#@! humanities majors that are easier and don't have usefulness in a market economy. Blacks also start businesses at a much lower rate.

    Reality is not racist. Maybe black people as a whole just make worse financial situations and get what they deserve.

  7. #6
    I usually pack my lunches. I would never pay $12 for a Nigerian food plate, or any other food plate, from a food truck. I do sometimes buy a couple $2 tacos from Mexican food truck.
    Last edited by phill4paul; 03-05-2018 at 08:00 AM.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    I usually pack my lunches. I would never pay $12 for a Nigerian food plate, or any other food plate, from a food truck. I do sometimes buy a couple $2 tacos from Mexican food truck.
    I would not even charge @Danke 12.00 for a nigerian food plate . Unamerican .

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Krugminator2 View Post
    Anecdotally, when I was in college as an engineering student, the black kids did by far the worst. There was an occasional class where test scores were posted for everyone to see. Without exception, the black kids were at or near the bottom. Secondly, black kids make up a lower than expected percentage of programs that pay well (business, engineering, medicine). They make up a higher percentage of bull$#@! humanities majors that are easier and don't have usefulness in a market economy. Blacks also start businesses at a much lower rate.

    Reality is not racist. Maybe black people as a whole just make worse financial situations and get what they deserve.
    Discrimination laws and redistribution laws just ruin any chance of me having sympathy for problems of minorities. If someone is asking for voluntary help, that's one thing. But if you point a gun to my head and tell me I HAVE to help, I have a big problem with that.
    Last edited by Madison320; 03-05-2018 at 02:51 PM.



  10. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    Discrimination laws and redistribution laws just ruin any chance of me having sympathy for problems of minorities. If someone is asking for voluntary help, that's one thing. But if you point a gun to my head and tell me I HAVE to help, I have a big problem with that.
    Those laws obviously hurt the people they are trying to help. Yet that is never be acknowledged. Smart people like Thomas Sowell are shunned and morons are held up as great thought leaders. I hate how that article implies that getting an internship or some lucky break is what determines success in life. I also hate how the article blames slavery for people having kids they can't afford.

    You can't just give unqualified people special privileges. Look at this graph. Do you want some guy with a 3.2 GPA and a mediocre MCAT operating on you? The wealth and income gap is not the fault of racism. It is an achievement gap.

    Last edited by Krugminator2; 03-05-2018 at 04:55 PM.

  12. #10
    I'm sure Monica Lewenski is proud of her White-privileged-House internship. Ah, the jokes she must enjoy hearing.

  13. #11
    I wouldn't buy anything from a place like that.

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Dr.3D View Post
    I wouldn't buy anything from a place like that.
    Guess we're not a part of the brainwashed. I could just see a tweet from a white-cis-male-$#@!lord named John Jonson proclaiming "I can't believe this wonderful place. They actually let me pay more so that we can all achieve ethnic financial equality. The food was OK, but the social economic issue is much larger in my mind. Thank you SAARTJ!"

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    Guess we're not a part of the brainwashed. I could just see a tweet from a white-cis-male-$#@!lord named John Jonson proclaiming "I can't believe this wonderful place. They actually let me pay more so that we can all achieve ethnic financial equality. The food was OK, but the social economic issue is much larger in my mind. Thank you SAARTJ!"
    All this while being one paycheck away from a financial disaster.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    All this while being one paycheck away from a financial disaster.
    I, honestly, don't know why black individuals haven't set up white privilege "absolution" kiosks across the nation. Much like religious absolution an individual enters, expresses a soulful recounting of the white privilege they have enjoyed, leaves an offering, and is forgiven for the week.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    I, honestly, don't know why black individuals haven't set up white privilege "absolution" kiosks across the nation. Much like religious absolution an individual enters, expresses a soulful recounting of the white privilege they have enjoyed, leaves an offering, and is forgiven for the week.
    Sounds like a great business idea. Why haven't I thought of that?

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Sounds like a great business idea. Why haven't I thought of that?
    If I had a hundred thousand dollars I'd hire me some blacks and get this started.



  19. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    If I had a hundred thousand dollars I'd hire me some blacks and get this started.
    Just call Maxine and tell her she gets to choose where 50% of the profits will go.

  21. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Just call Maxine and tell her she gets to choose where 50% of the profits will go.
    I'd rather invest $10k for one, put it by a California University, and take my profit margin for a year in front of "The Shark Tank." Mr. Wonderful would probably give me a better deal. $300k for 40% and $5 dollars for every absolution until the loan was paid back. Then again perhaps Lori would rather I just offered absolution on HomeShopping network. No kiosks needed. Cost overhead negated. She'd probably give me $300k for 35%.

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    I'd rather invest $10k for one, put it by a California University, and take my profit margin for a year in front of "The Shark Tank." Mr. Wonderful would probably give me a better deal. $300k for 40% and $5 dollars for every absolution until the loan was paid back. Then again perhaps Lori would rather I just offered absolution on HomeShopping network. No kiosks needed. Cost overhead negated. She'd probably give me $300k for 35%.
    I would say - Get busy!

  23. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    I would say - Get busy!
    I'd need a front man. If it ever came out the fact that I was the white-cis-male-$#@!lord that owned the company it would doom it. I wonder what Sharpton, Jesse or Maxine would charge to be the cut out?

  24. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Race war.
    It's what's for lunch.
    And more:

    Click image for larger version. 

Name:	Screenshot-2018-3-6 Whiteness We Can Do Better - A Workshop.png 
Views:	0 
Size:	434.8 KB 
ID:	5954
    I have seen through it all... the system is against us. ALL OF IT.



Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 9
    Last Post: 10-25-2016, 05:53 AM
  2. Wendy’s Serves Up Big Kiosk Expansion As Wage Hikes Hit Fast Food
    By younglibertarian in forum Economy & Markets
    Replies: 8
    Last Post: 05-13-2016, 01:32 AM
  3. SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIMENT
    By QuickZ06 in forum U.S. Political News
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 11-19-2013, 02:34 PM
  4. Replies: 16
    Last Post: 12-12-2011, 10:15 PM
  5. Repost: Social experiment! Please help!
    By reardenstone in forum U.S. Political News
    Replies: 0
    Last Post: 03-23-2010, 06:38 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •