Alameda: Economics

By Jackie.P, Ernesto and Amairani

Economically speaking, Alameda is quite diverse. If you walk down Park St. you find so many little shops that are all different. There’s clothing stores, shoe stores, kids toy stores, coffee shops, ice creamshops, nail shops, antique stores, retail stores, bookstores, comic book shops, a karate school, differentr estaurants and much more. They all vary in price range. Some boutiques and antique stores might be a little more on the expensive side, but you even see bookstores giving away free children’s books and smoothie shops giving away free children’s smoothies on Mondays.

It is important for students to start saving when they are young so that they could have enough money to pay the bills and for retirement, and there were posters on the bank to open accounts for kids to start saving. Most people that we interviewed had a separate saving account where they put some money. We didn’t go inside the banks to ask them how to invest our money, but one person we interviewed said that we should put 10% of your paycheck aside.

The prices were the same like Oakland but there were more clothing and food stores than our neighborhood. We think that the prices vary: there can be stores that might be expensive and others that can be affordable to people. The stores in Alameda can be competitive to making the most profit since people can easily walk to their competitor's store: for example Starbucks is right across the street from Peet’s Coffee (an East Bay coffee franchise). Most people said that ther job pays enough to pay the bills that they receive, and save money.