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 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, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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, University of Tennessee, Knoxville