So I thought I'd follow up on the grocery store discussion just because I love math and I think it's fun.
Let's assume a household goes to the grocery store 3 times every 2 weeks. I think that's conservative -- I think most households that aren't a single guy go 2 times rather than 1.5 times a week -- but I want to keep it conservative on purpose. If it's 5 minutes extra to the second closest store, that's 10 minutes extra there and back each time. You go 78 times for our household, which is 780 extra minutes of travel. Over the course of 20 years of travel (again, trying to be conservative here -- let's say once the kids are grown up you decide to move to a friendlier neighborhood where the closest grocery store will take your money -- that's 15,600 extra minutes of travel in that time span. That's 260 hours of extra travel, or ~10.3 days, over the course of 20 years.
And again, this is about as conservative an example as it gets; I'm only talking about one single store rejecting you. Your Best Buy and your record store and your Toys R Us and your favorite falafel joint all still accept you. We're not assuming 30 miles of extra travel, just a simple 2 miles.
And even with these very conservative assumptions where just a single store rejects you because you're black, you're talking about 10 days of your life just vanishing because of the inconvenience. It's also ~500 dollars of gas over those same twenty years. I like examples like this because they're very realistic, and don't involve imagining some apocalyptic future where every store rejects black/hispanic/muslim/whatever people, just one simple store, and how much that seemingly minor inconvenience costs a family.
