Willie Wardell owns the Mighty Midget Mart Shell gas station, located at 4936 Albemarle Road in Charlotte, N.C., and he’s been in the convenience store business for the past 40 years. His store has everything that other gas stations in the neighborhood have, and he makes sure to price things competitively.
But when I started talking to him and he told me that he made his own ice, that sparked an idea. Could I answer the lifelong question that African Americans have always had about ice: Is ice purchased from a white-owned store actually colder than ice purchased from a black-owned store? I just had to know …
So to find out, I headed to the CVS down the street, bought a bag of ice and a thermometer. Behold what I found out:
So there you have it. The results speak for themselves. And you should never think that ice purchased from a white-owned store is colder than ice at a black-owned store. Total spent? $5. Total spent on black-owned businesses: $930.
