ABSTRACT
As discussed in chapter 5, the ethnic beauty aids industry is divided into two distinct economic niches, a niche focusing on retail sales and a niche focusing on the sales of professional products to black beauticians and barbers. Traditional middleman groups, such as Koreans and Jews, are concentrated in the retail niche, and blacks entrepreneurs are clustered in the professional niche. The tendency for middleman and black entrepreneurs to cluster in these economic niches became more pronounced during the early 1990’s, when the economy on the South Side of Chicago stagnated. However, this effect was not limited to merchants in the ethnic beauty aids industry. The development of separate niches for middleman and black entrepreneurs was also found at other levels of the ethnic beauty aids industry. In this chapter, the development of separate economic niches for middleman and black distributors in the ethnic beauty aids industry is examined. The central argument of this chapter is that these economic niches developed for distributors of ethnic beauty aids in response to each group’s ability to mobilize class and ethnic resources, just as they did for merchants. As a result there is a close relationship between the economic role of middleman and black distributors and that of middleman and black merchants. Korean and Jewish distributors sell ethnic beauty aids primarily to Korean merchants who own retail stores in the black community, and black distributors sell ethnic beauty aids to black merchants and black salon owners in the black community.
