LeftofLeft
Diamond Member
- Oct 18, 2011
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As far back as maybe the late 80's or early 90's pizza chains started red lining some hoods and would not deliver there.Back in the day, New York cabbies, particularly in Manhattan, were persecuted, fined, sued, etc. for not picking up Black people. If not getting paid the fare and getting mugged or worse is dramatically reduced with some common sense, why not?
This happened in DC as well. It also extended to pizza delivery. A Dominoe’s franchise was fined by a court because it stopped serving a part of a neighborhood where drivers were always getting robbed. I know a guy who worked for a National home improvement chain. He would get leads and inquires and go onsite and do an estimate for services. If a call /lead came in from a certain zip code, In almost all of the cases, their estimates were too expensive so he would not get paid. On top of that, he had his car vandalized and was threatened a couple of times just for being in the neighborhood. He solved his problem by simply speaking with the customer over the phone in an initial consultation gathering some information and then intentionally give them an estimate that was artificially high so as to disqualify his company so he would not have to travel into the bad neighborhood and risk his life for a most unlikely sale.
I am sure the “racist” buttons are going off . But, this not about race. It is about human behavior and economics . Small business service providers such as Uber, Lyft, pizza delivery, and home improvement contractors have enough economic challenges to worry about. Why should they risk their business and their lives in bad neighborhoods?
I can never forget a story that I read some years back.
Two young men (no need to be specific) called a Chinese restaurant to order food. (This was before delivery apps).
When the deliveryman came, the two young men killed him, and then they sat down to enjoy delicious Chinese food.
Even before that. Pizzerias couldn't get the drivers to go into ghetto- even the black drivers. Too dangerous.
If the drivers were willing to risk life and limb, the restaurants might have thought different. But even then, that might have opened them up to litigation from the widows of the drivers for sending the men into death traps.
Yes. what gets left out in these redlining stories is that the drivers and delivery persons are mostly non-white or as you said, Black themselves, who are refusing to go into these neighborhoods. The politicians think they are getting something out of it by blaming whites when in fact all that is happening is a community gets further blighted.