FOOD BAZAAR

Very she she. I'll say this much the building is brand new and the design of the store is beautiful. The variety in the store is the best in Harlem for the prices offered that's for sure. Their cheese counter is impressive and so is their sea food section the fish is so fresh there that you can't smell it. They even have two locations to buy hot food in the store, one of them is a Korean fried chicken place. They have a disproportionately large number of security members on staff there which is hard to ignore particularly when there are more security people roaming the floors than there are customers, or staff as there was on the day I visited. All but one of them I noticed is of African descent. What I find very interesting about grocery stores in Harlem is that they almost exclusively are staffed by Dominicans with the exception of Foodtown on 145th Street, Associated on 142nd (they are managed by a Mexican man and have one other employee who isn't Dominican) and Whole Foods on 125th. Whole Foods noticeably hires people of all backgrounds, which I applaud. The only Staff in Food Bazaar that I noticed that weren't Dominican were the security staff and the gentleman who worked at the Korean fried chicken place. I'm not going to lie, it kind bothers me that grocery stores seem to have a hard time hiring people that reflect the cultural background of the neighborhood. This isn't the case in Chinatown, K-Town, the Heights or Williamsburg. I can understand having a solely Dominican staff in Inwood or Washington Heights but Central and Spanish Harlem are more ethnically diverse. So why does this matter? Some of the latent and cultural biases against people of darker hues are reflected in the 1 and 2 star ratings this grocery store is getting. When you hire people that have implicit biases against certain communities that's reflected in the way that they interact with customers. The comments to the Black women about using EBT because they're Black or telling a woman that she should wait for as long as someone that looks like her should have to wait. This is why who you're hiring matters. You all should be ashamed. I don't think I'll shop here again. I'm not paying another cent to support this type of behavior.