Convenience Stores as Social Spaces: Trust and Relations in Deprived Neighborhoods in the U.S.

by Cosima Werner

Overview

Liquor, tobacco, processed food, and sugary snacks: this is the range of products that are far from healthy available in convenience stores. Yetthese stores have become people’s resource for meeting daily needs in deprived neighborhoods in the United States. In her book, Convenience Stores as Social Spaces: Trust and Relations in Deprived Neighborhoods in the U.S., Cosima Werner explores the contested meanings of these stores and their function as social hubs in a social fabric where poverty, violence, and social neglect are part of peoples’ daily life. Despite the strict security measures around the stores, language barriers, and cultural differences that make convenience stores appear as the antithesis of social spaces, trustful relationships are crucial for residents to access resources such as loans, food, drinks, or information to make ends meet. The concepts of trust and mistrust shed light on the fragility of trust within these communities. Through ethnographic research conducted in Chicago and Detroit, she reveals the unique ways in which these stores are viewed and utilized by residents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666930771
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	05/31/2023
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.31(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Cosima Werner is postdoctoral fellow in the Geography Department at Kiel University, Germany.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: At the Store

Chapter 1: Social Spaces and the Meaning of Trust

Chapter 2: Practices of Convenience Food Shopping

Chapter 3: Spatialities of Convenience Stores

Chapter 4: The Neighborhoods‘ Decline

Chapter 5: The Muddle of Daily Life

Chapter 6: Practices of Social Distinctions

Chapter 7: Practices of Trust: Relations between Immigrant Shop Owners and Black Clientele

Conclusion: Convenience Stores as Social Spaces

Epilogue – Back at the Store

Appendix: People in this Study

References

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Werner’s book is an extensive analysis of the neighborhood corner store in two of the United States’ most complicated cities: Detroit, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois. Employing traditional ethnographic analysis, Werner’s research ambitiously addresses every aspect of the corner store: the layout of the store, the food and products being sold, its location, and the surrounding neighborhood, as well as its owners, employees and customers that frequent these spaces. Werner’s gaze as a white woman and social scientist from Germany provides a distinctive analysis that exposes the overlapping ways in which race, class, geography, gender, need, tenacity, and trust come together and play out in the social spaces of the convenience store.

Solange Muñoz

Werner provides us with a radically new, open rendition of an age-old bugaboo in the struggling U.S. city, the corner liquor store. Rich ethnographic analysis reveals a vision of these stores tied to complicated human needs and aspirations which too few urbanists have recognized. This is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of daily urban life in the current U.S. city.

David Wilson

In neighborhoods lacking supermarkets, convenience stores often become residents' sole source of food and beverages. Werner explores the social relations that occur within and around two liquor stores in predominately Black and under-resourced neighborhoods, one in Chicago and the other in Detroit. Her main concern is how poor people manage to support themselves through low-wage jobs or hustling and by engaging in mutually supportive relationships. In addition to selling beer, alcohol, and food, these stores offer part-time jobs, extend credit, and provide places to meet. Her ethnographic research enables Werner to introduce readers to residents, store owners and their employees, local drug dealers, and homeless people with the text toggling between the stores and neighborhood life. She adopts the perspective of her informants and is dismissive of most efforts—deemed moralistic—to aid them. The documentation of the two stores and how poor people relate to them has value for understanding what being poor means in the US. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Werner’s book is an extensive analysis of the neighborhood Corner Store in two of America’s most complicated cities, Detroit, MI. and Chicago, IL. Employing traditional ethnographic analysis, Werner’s analysis is ambitious as her study seemingly addresses every aspect of the corner store: the food, its location, the spaces as well as its owners, employees and customers, and the neighborhoods around it. Werner’s gaze as a white woman and social scientist from Germany provides an outside, unique analysis that exposes the overlapping ways in which race, class, geography, gender, need, tenacity, and trust come together and play out in the social spaces of the convenience store.

Solange Munoz