Brief words to describe people who are not able to shop because of old age and / or absence of shops nearby

Question

I’m looking for the English counterpart to the Japanese word, “ショッピング難民” - shopping refugees by verbatim translation.

Because of the rapid graying of Japan’s population, the population in the remote rural areas is in sharp decline, and retail shops such as grocery stores, supermarkets and gas stations are all closed.

Not only old people, but the healthy residing in depopulated places are now suffering difficulty / inconvenience in shopping.

I don’t know if there are similar situations happening in other corners of the world, but I would like to know how to describe both these people - those who are unable to shop due to old age and those who cannot shop due to the disappearance of shops in two or three English words.

Answer 1

tl;dr we don’t really have a common idiom for this in British English; others have answered from an American viewpoint (food desert in particular, which term has shown up here — originally in ‘so-called’ quotes, then later without — but I’m still not hearing it used in everyday speech).

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In UK English, at least, we’d sometimes refer to such people simply as housebound (for those with “mobility issues, a.k.a. the “elderly and infirm”; where the difficulty is high rather than absolute we’d temper it slightly and say virtually or almost housebound), or (@mari-lou-a’s word choice :o)) isolated. The difficulty shopping part is taken as read, in both cases. There is social awareness of this which is reflected in the existence of specific charities who help people with access to (primarily food) shops.

As Mari-Lou noted, this (isolation, difficulty shopping, &c) is the normal state of affairs in rural communities such as those in Italy (for example), and so isn’t really remarked upon (thus isn’t usually featured in the language in a special way). It’s normal in many parts of Britain, too.

Finally, we don’t really seem to have the problem to such a degree here in my neck of the woods. There was a trend over the last twenty years or so towards large, out-of-town supermarkets, which did make life awkward for those without cars, especially for poorer people who struggled to pay the higher prices of small urban retailers; but the current trend is now for the large chains to aggressively target urban and suburban areas with smaller versions of their stores (that suffix their branding with words like Express, Local or Metro). These have higher prices than the large stores on some items, especially in the capital, but still tend to undercut the more traditional local retailers.

I’m aware that blanket statements are almost always wrong somewhere, so please treat all of this with a healthy degree of skepticism.

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It’s also possible the difficulty of finding a good term is compounded by the British tendency to understate things (“can’t get out so much these days” versus “bedridden”), where the Japanese term is rather a (slight) exaggeration.

I found little with Google, possibly because the words are too common, but a search for elderly people who can't go shopping turned up this gem (Cambridge University Press, via Google Books).

Answer 2

People, old and young, who live in areas where amenities have withered away have been marooned - 'lost and separated from companions', in a 'desolate' place 'from which (they) cannot escape"(OED).

So Japanese 'shopping refugees' might be odescribed more accurately in English as marooned shoppers.

Answer 3

I think that, being a typical Japanese phenomenon, shopping refugees is the new coined term you have to refer to as suggested in the following article:

A new term being tossed around by the media is kaimono nanmin (shopping refugees). It refers to people who have been cut off from the retail sector. Usually, it describes older people on fixed incomes living in remote areas, which over the past decade or so have become even more remote with the shuttering of traditional local retail districts (shotengai).

(blog.japantimes.co.jp)

Also:

Analysis of Shopping Behavior of Elderly People considering the Satisfaction of Quality and Distance to Grocery Stores

Focusing on the "Latent shopping refugees"

(www.jstage.jst.go.jp)

Answer 4

PREFACE

The problem with using the Japanese phrase “shopping refugees” is that it is unknown outside of Japan. In fact, if we Google the phrase in quotation marks, Japanese websites are among the first results: The Japan Times, J-Stage, a website dedicated to science and technology information in Japan, and a paper written by three Japanese academians, entitled Web shopping support system for elderly people using WebRTC

If we search the expression refugee shoppers on Google News, we receive exactly three results, one of which is a false positive. It's worth citing these two excerpts to illustrate why the coined expression “shopping refugees” would be misunderstood.

1. But for the immigrant and refugee shoppers at the farm, cooking bitter melon and foods such as okra, mustard greens, long beans, and red roselle is second nature

2. … humanitarian funding means much-needed relief for refugee families but also a considerable boost for Djibouti's economy, with thousands of refugee shoppers buying food in local shops and markets.

Oxford Dictionaries define refugee as “someone who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.”

Consequently, from a native speaker's point of view, the term "refugee" conjures up images of immigrants, of all different ages, fleeing from political or religious persecution and oppression, people in desperate need of shelter, and protection. Not the elderly who live in towns or regions where small grocery stores have been forced to close. So @user2922582's answer, which recommends adopting verbatim the Japanese phrase won't work unless the context is provided and/or its meaning explained. Likewise, the answer the disenfranchised, which was suggested by @Bread, fails to describe the social phenomenon in Japan unless its author preemptively explains its meaning.

There is no established English counterpart to “shopping refugees”

This is reinforced by the following scaremongering newspaper headlines, articles that describe the demise of retail shopping often due to the rise of online commerce. Journalists and editors tend to focus on the loss of profit and jobs in the retail sector, rather than its effect on the poor, the infirmed elderly, and the semi-invalid

• The retail apocalypse
• Streets without shops
• The death of brick-and-mortar
• Retail Meltdown
• Walmart Is Ruining America's Small Towns
• War of convenience
• High street gloom

On the socioeconomic front

• Barriers to food shopping for older people
• Food Shopping in Later Life
• Small towns fight to save grocery stores

The disappearance of the grocery store — more than an inconvenience to the elderly, the poor and those who don’t drive — speeds the plummet of home values and any other lingering retail activity.

I did find one American English expression that had some affinity with the Japanese one, it's not one I am familiar with, so I don't know how well-known it is among British English speakers but the term food desert is about the availability of grocery stores and supermarkets or lack thereof, especially, in rural areas.

• More than 18 million people, including almost 5 million elderly, lived in a food desert in 2010. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a food desert as a low-income area where many residents do not live close to a supermarket.

• Residents of food deserts face many obstacles in consuming nutritious food, ranging from fewer local stores with healthy food, higher food prices at smaller local grocers, and the time and expense of travelling to a supermarket.

• As a result, living in a food desert may not only affect the quality of one’s diet, but also the ability to purchase food and other necessities and the need for public food assistance programs.

• Compared to other groups, elderly individuals may be particularly affected by food deserts: strong neighborhood ties encourage them to stay in a community even after businesses leave, fixed incomes make paying higher food prices difficult, and physical limitations limit travel.

The Impact of Food Deserts on Food Insufficiency and SNAP Participation among the Elderly by Katie Fitzpatrick, Assistant Professor of Economics at Seattle University

"Food desert" is also mentioned in The Kansas City Star

Two out of every five Kansas counties include a food desert, an area at least 10 miles from the nearest grocery.

Brief description

I would suggest that the OP explain to visitors coming to Japan that "shopping refugees" are basically

the elderly without means of transport who live in food deserts

I know it's not snappy–it's eleven words–but it is understandable.

Answer 5

I would go with a simple term: displaced elder consumer.

It's short, it describes being elderly, being a consumer, and being out of the reach of accessible shopping. It's not literal to shopping/kaimono nanmin, but I think fits the description the best.

As for being a consumer in a low availability area despite being not elderly, I may go with simply underserved consumer.

The area in which this situation occurs is commonly known as a retail desert, or, more specifically when relating to foodstuffs and groceries, a food desert.

Answer 6

"retail services in rural areas" is a good search term.

Housebound describes not only the elderly who may be unable to get to stores (if they exist), but also the temporarily or permanently disabled.

Areas not served by retail establishments is not a new, although the problem of retail establishments leaving remote areas because of online competition is relatively new.

Here are three articles on retailing in rural markets (in India, Scandanavia, and Japan):

https://hbr.org/2014/06/unlocking-the-wealth-in-rural-markets

http://www.rsv.is/files/Skra_0060124.pdf

https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/08/how-7-elevens-are-becoming-lifelines-for-japans-elderly/493772/

There seems to be no phrase that comes up to describe those underserved or no longer served by retail outlets.

The U.S. Constitution gave the Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads partly to ensure communications and also to make it possible to deliver goods (e.g., seeds) to farmers and others in rural areas. The Sears-Roebuck catalog sold just about everything. The modern version is Amazon. In this environment "dessert" seems more like a plea for a government subsidy than a statement of fact.

Answer 7

homebound

See for example:

New SNAP Pilot Provides Grocery Delivery for Homebound Disabled, Elderly:

It’s a difficult problem that USDA’s new homebound food delivery pilot aims to alleviate, not just for the more than 4 million nonelderly adults with disabilities participating in SNAP, but also for the nearly 5 million seniors, who often face similar challenges and who may face disabilities, as well.

Also shut-in

For example, form Aging Comes of Age: Older People Finding Themselves:

For example, no qualifications other than goodwill and faithfulness are needed to buy groceries or pay bills for shut-ins.

Answer 8

People who have been disenfranchised have been deprived of a right or privilege. That seems like a good English counterpart to shopping refugees. Of course, it can apply to many kinds of situations, and would need to rely on context in order to be meaningful.

[from] disenfranchise verb ~ 1.1 Deprive (someone) of a right or privilege.

• The disenfranchised are those people who have been deprived of the privilege of shopping (even for necessities like food) due to circumstances beyond their control, such as living too far away from stores or being housebound for any reason.

The disenfranchised is a noun phrase that has sharply gained usage in recent decades, particularly since around 1980:

Etymonline, for disenfranchise: "deprive of civil or electoral privileges"

"A privilege is a particular benefit, advantage, or Immunity enjoyed by a person or class of people that is not shared with others." ~ What is the difference between civil rights and civil privileges?

A Structural Definition Of Social Privilege

civil ADJECTIVE 1 attributive: Relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecclesiastical matters.