‘I don’t want to be branded a bandit’: how discrimination limits consumption by the poor to the periphery

It was the summer of 2021, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The young Leonardo Vitor de Oliveira went with some friends to Arpoador beach, in Ipanema, in the south of Rio de Janeiro. Halfway through the tour, they decided to buy food and drinks at the nearest supermarket and left with the products in hand, “without a bag” (bag), paid separately.

On the way back to the beach, he and two friends were stopped by police officers who were carrying out a checkpoint across the street. “Did you pay for that there?”, asked one of them, already leaving for the magazine. Fortunately, the invoice was in Oliveira’s pocket.

“There were just three men carrying products in their hands”, says the 25-year-old, who lives in the favela of Maré, in the north of Rio. “If we had stolen something, we would have run away, but no, we were walking normally, without any mess.”

But for Oliveira –a young white man, 1.95 meters tall, with a thin mustache and a “jackfruit cut” in his hair (a razor cut with a gradient effect, who would have been born in the Jacarezinho community)– it was clear that the police saw him and us two black friends who accompanied him showed signs that they were residents of the favela.

“They would never have done that [abordagem sem motivo] with people from Ipanema, even if the locals were dressed like us”, he says, remembering that they were wearing flip-flops, shorts and no shirt. “It’s discouraging to go to the beach like that.”

And not just to the beach, according to a study by FGV Ebape (Brazilian School of Public Business Administration), in partnership with the French Iéseg School of Management. The survey pointed out that the fear of discrimination makes low-income consumers prefer to shop in stores with an audience of the same social class — even in cases where the product is more expensive than in places frequented by more affluent people.

“There is a high expectation of discrimination from poor consumers in more sophisticated commercial environments, a concern that is practically non-existent among rich consumers”, says Professor Yan Vieites, coordinator of Ebape’s behavioral research center, and one of the authors of the study, entitled “Expectation of socioeconomic discrimination reduces price sensitivity among the poor”.

The survey was conducted from August 2017 to January 2022, with the participation of 1,936 people, including residents of the Maré favela complex and the south zone of Rio de Janeiro. “But the expectation is that they can be generalized to other locations, because they reflect the reality of other states and even other countries”, says Vieites.

According to the expert, often the poorest end up paying an economic cost to avoid prejudice in commercial environments. “We call ‘social toll’ the additional cost that is paid to have access to the same goods and services”, he says. “Big market networks tend to be outside favelas, for example, as well as formal banking services,” he says.

More expensive slippers and a smaller voucher so as not to be the target of prejudice

The research involved some experiments. In one of them, residents of Maré were given a sum of money to buy a pair of flip-flops, with the right to keep the change. There were two options: pay more at a newsstand or cheaper at a store in a luxury mall, which was on sale. Most preferred not to enter the mall and pay more for the product at the newsstand.

In another experiment, supermarket shopping vouchers were offered to respondents. Higher values ​​were for shopping in malls that were more distant and more frequented by another social group. But there were smaller amounts to buy in closer locations and where the same social group as the residents predominated. Most opted for the smaller voucher.

An employee at a hardware store, where he works as a delivery man, Vieira would like to go more often to the Rio Sul mall, in Botafogo, in the southern part of Rio de Janeiro, with his girlfriend. “They have more variety, more options”, says the young man, who is studying to take a competitive exam to join the Fire Department. “But I end up going to NorteShopping”, he says, referring to the shopping center in the Cachambi neighborhood, in the north of Rio. “I don’t want to be branded a bandit.”

That’s exactly how Douglas Viana, 30, felt when, after the beach at the weekend, he went to a supermarket in Ipanema. “The security guard chased me and my friends inside the store, staring at us the whole time. He realized that we weren’t part of that store’s captive audience”, says Viana, executive coordinator of Seja Democracia, a non-partisan political training project by the Maria and João Aleixo Institute, supported by the Tide Setubal Foundation, in Maré.

With a degree in marketing and a post-graduate degree in project management, Viana says that he usually analyzes shopping options a lot before deciding on one. And that there are interesting chances of consumption outside the north zone of Rio.

“As a black man from the periphery, I understand that it is better for me to consume in Maré, a space that in a way protects me from structural racism”, he says. “I was raised by a simple logic: be careful where you walk so as not to be mistaken for a bandit.”

According to Viana, the signs of disapproval of his circulation in areas of the middle and upper middle class in Rio are very subtle. “The eyes of others are always on you. The security guards and attendants, who come from the same social class as me, recognize me as an equal. But they’re there to show that I don’t belong as a customer.”

In Leblon or Ipanema, he says, a young person can wear shorts, a tank top and flip-flops and be treated well, because he is recognized as a resident of the neighborhood. “I need to dress up more to go to the same place as him. In these spaces, I can’t dress the same way I would dress here in Maré.”

Strolling through a mall in the south zone is always a problem, he says. “I can’t go into a store, look and leave. The security guard will definitely want to see what’s in my bag. And since I don’t like being approached that way, I’d rather not go.”