Study Finds Shopping in Black Community Far Inferior to White Area

This is a shopping story, a tale of retail in two cities.

To illustrate the long-held belief that many major retailers have given the cold shoulder to Los Angeles County’s black communities, The Times compared the retail choices available to parts of Inglewood and North Hollywood that have much in common.

The two are solidly middle-income communities in the center of large urban areas of the county.

In North Hollywood, which was predominantly white a few years ago but now is home to a growing Latino population, shopping opportunities abound. In the predominantly black city of Inglewood, they don’t.

To be sure, Inglewood is not a shopping wasteland, nor is North Hollywood a retail mecca. But even if you ignore the two small and aging malls in North Hollywood, that community has much more to offer its residents in terms of variety and quality of stores than does Inglewood.

This comes as no surprise to Luz Yarleque. Since her family moved to Inglewood 14 years ago, a Sears and a J. C. Penney store have closed in the neighborhood. “Those were the stores that the community really needs--the quality and the guarantee,” she said. When the family needs to do some serious shopping, all five pile into the car for a 50-minute trek to Del Amo Fashion Center.

“It’s a long drive,” said Yarleque, who lives with her husband, Carlos, in a comfortable home on a tidy street. But outfitting their three children is a task that area retailers just aren’t up to.

“To get what I need at a price I want to pay, I have to go all those miles,” said Yarleque, a native of Peru who is a bilingual teacher in the Inglewood Unified School District.

The Times picked ZIP codes with similar incomes for purposes of comparison.

Residents in the predominantly black areas generally had to pay more for a poorer selection of goods. Residents of North Hollywood could frequently find better merchandise at lower prices sold in air-conditioned stores, complete with public restrooms. In the Inglewood shopping area, public restrooms are scarce and some have coin locks on the doors.

What’s more, the small businesses that dominate in Inglewood tend to be less liberal in their merchandise return policies than are big stores, and warranties often are shorter or nonexistent.

The Inglewood ZIP codes surveyed--90303 and 90305--account for about half of the city, and the big retailers there are few: one Vons, one Ralphs and several Boys supermarkets, a Pic ‘N’ Save discount store, a Home Club home improvement center and a Price Club warehouse-style membership store.

At the Inglewood Department Store, a large indoor swap meet filled with Asian merchants where the J. C. Penney store once stood, the mix of merchandise is colorful. But items generally bear no price tag, making browsing difficult. Most stalls have restrictive return policies, usually within three days, with the receipt and only if the clothing or shoes has not been worn.

Quality of merchandise is varied and name brands are few. None of the toy stalls carried Barbie, but a “Groovy Susie” fashion doll could be had for $7.99. Cotton clothing for sensitive-skinned babies seemed to be absent.

One retailer featured a KTV 19-inch television for $269 with a three-month warranty. K mart carries the same TV for $259 with a one-year warranty for labor and two years for parts.

Yarleque said the Price Club and Home Club stores were both welcome additions to the community a few years ago, and she looks forward to the promised building of a K mart in Inglewood.

At the neighborhood swap meets and discounters, “maybe the price doesn’t look too expensive, but at the end it’s going to be very expensive because you can only wear it once. After you put it in the washer and dryer you don’t have the same dress,” she said.

The service, too, received criticism.

“They don’t welcome you,” Yarleque said. At the Inglewood Department Store, “the last few times I was there, I was looked at like, ‘Watch out for this lady, maybe she wants to take something from the store.’ ”

But while shopping variety is the exception in Inglewood, it is the rule in North Hollywood.

The area--specifically the 91606 ZIP code--is thick with mini-malls and famous retailing names. The median household income there is $26,120, actually lower than the $29,450 median household income found in Inglewood’s 90303 and 90305 ZIP codes.

A drive around this piece of North Hollywood turns up a J. C. Penney, a Target, Wherehouse Records, Florsheim Shoes, Kinney Shoes, Payless ShoeSource, Footlocker, Kids Mart, House of Fabrics and a Snyder-Diamond plumbing-supply store.

And then there are the malls--two of them.

The aging Valley Plaza is an outdoor, 1950s-era shopping center dominated by a large Sears store, flanked by dozens of smaller retailers carrying a wide range of goods. Laurel Plaza is newer and enclosed, anchored by a May Co. department store and an Ice Capades Chalet skating rink.

Given the competition from its glitzier mall cousins, Valley Plaza probably isn’t on anybody’s list of hot shopping destinations, although Sears remains a retail draw. Neither is Laurel Plaza large or particularly fancy. But both overshadow anything that can be found in most minority communities, with the exception of the recently overhauled Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, in the Crenshaw District.

Still, that showplace mall is a rare oasis in the retailing desert of minority communities in the heart of Los Angeles.