Outcasts United: Chapter 19

This chapter is directly connected to chapter 12 of our textbook. That chapter is about services. The specific services spoken of in the book are the Thriftown supermarket, The Clarkston Baptist Church and the Clarkston Police Department.

When I first bring up the concept of "service" in class, a lot of students get confused with the time they spend helping another person without expectation of payment. That is not the kind of service we are talking about here.

Every economy, no matter how big or small, is divided into three parts: agriculture, industry and service. Agriculture (also known as primary industries) includes any job that grows plants, raises animals or extracts resources from the ground. Industry (also known as secondary industries) are those jobs that use the materials from primary industries to make/manufacture some product. Services (also known as, you guessed it, tertiary industries) are all the jobs that take place after a product is manufactured. If you use this definition to find out which of these three categories your parent's job(s) fall into, you will probably find that they fall into the service category. Everything from hairstylist to mechanic, cashier to accountant, day care to college professor or salesperson to scientist are service type jobs. Think about it; none of these jobs grow plants, raise animals, extract minerals or manufacture products.
The more developed a country becomes, the more advanted their economy is. That means that jobs go from basic to very, very specialized. I heard a story in NPR the other day about people in China who play video games on-line to acquire credits for certain weapons or tools that can be used to gain advantage over other players. After they gain these tools, they sell them for actual cash to American's and Europeans so they can use them in their own on-line games. Tell me that isn't a super specialized job.
In Outcasts United each of the services listed in the first paragraph had to adapt to a changing demographic base in order to survive. Thriftown was probably a lot like Day's or Smith's. They sold foods that the typical white American wanted. The problem is that Clarkston had changed so much that the typical resident of Clarkston was not a typical American. Their sales begin to fall to the point where they were about to go out of business. One of the workers at the store happened to be a Vietnamese woman by the name of Hong Diep Vo. She knew a lot of Vietnamese people who would buy the foods they wanted from Thriftown because Thriftown was much closer to their homes than the stores (probably in Atlanta) where they had to go to get these foods. When sales improved, the owned started looking for other kinds of ethnic foods that would cater to people from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe and Asia. As they did so, not only did the store survive, it thrived!

There are many concepts from this example that can be explained by geography. The first is actually a principle of economics. That is supply and demand. If there is something everybody want but there isn't much of it, the price will go up. If not many people want a product and there is a lot of it, the price will go down. In the case of Thriftown, they had a lot of foods that people in Clarkston didn't want.
The other concepts are threshold and range. Threshold is the number of people living in an area need to support a certain business. Range is the distance a person is willing to travel to buy something. This also varies by product or service. The average distance (range) people are willing to travel to go to McDonald's is about 3 miles. However, how far would you travel to see your favorite pop-artist perform? Maybe you would travel hundreds of miles. While both of these businesses are considered to be non-basic, that is, they are not necessary for survival, they have a very different range. Generally speaking, the easier something is to get the shorter the range will be. Also, the range can get longer if there is something a person really wants but it is not close. If, in the case of ethnic foods at Thriftway, the food they want is suddendly closer, they will go to the closest place. Since, McDonald's food (or fast food in general) is not that important to most people, they are not willing to travel very far to get it. Therefore, in order for McDonalds to survive, their threshold (number people within range of the desired service) has to have a lot of people in not a pretty small area. The Mumford and Son's concert, on the other hand has a much larger threshold and much longer range. There aren't enough people within the threshold of your typical McDonalds to sell the number of tickets need to make the concert a success. People will come from all over the state and maybe even parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming to see the show. Lucky for them, seeing their concert is more important to their fans than eating a Big Mac.
I hope you can see that a service that could find the best location for some other service could be very valuable and make a lot of money. That is a type of service that would be performed by a geographer or someone who understood these geographic concepts and has the means to apply them.
I also hope you can see how these concepts help explain why the local Baptist church and police station changed to cater to Clarkston's changing population.