stores, and the shopping choices they make in the context of those choices, sheds light on the constraints they face in securing nutritious diets. From a conceptual perspective, ensuring access to food retailers by low-income households involves factors related both to the existence of food stores at reasonable distances from the households and to the ability of low-income households to get to those stores. Further, assessing the availability of stores in a meaningful way depends both on examining where they are located and on assessing the quality of the shopping opportunities they offer, in terms of prices, quality of merchandise, variety of merchandise, and other factors. Similarly, the ability of households to reach stores readily depends not only on the stores’ locations but also on whether the household has access to a car and on what other means of transportation is available. The FNS Authorized Retailer Characteristics Study provided extensive insight into the store side of this “access equation.”1 That study examined the availability of various types of food stores in both urban and rural areas throughout the country. For a sample of the stores, it also obtained data on the prices charged for a standard set of food items, as well as on other characteristics. The key findings of the study suggest greater degrees of access to stores by low-income households than many observers had expected. The study found that, nationally, “90 percent of the total population and 90 percent of the populations under the poverty line live in zip codes with at least one supermarket or large grocery present.”2 Proximity to stores was less common in rural areas but did not vary by the poverty level of the population. Apparently, scarcity of food stores in rural areas is mostly a result of retailers’ efforts to gain economies of scale.
1
Mantovani, Richard E., Lynn Daft, Theodore F. Macaluso, and Katherine Hoffman. “Food Retailers in the Food Stamp Program: Characteristics and Service to Program Participants.” USDA, February 1997. 2
See page iii of Montovani, Daft, Macaluso, and Hoffman. 6