Patti Labelle’s Sweet Potato Pies Selling $2.3 Million Underscores the Power of Black Dollars

by | Nov 16, 2015 | Celebrities, News | 1 comment

There is a hilarious review of Patti LaBelle’s sweet potato pies called Patti Pies being sold in Walmart stores around the country. However, if you followed only this story, then you missed a VERY IMPORTANT point and lesson for the community.

In one weekend, Patti Pies sold completely out of Walmart. The demand was so high, the store’s bakeries were telling callers they were out before even saying hello. It’s estimated over $2.3 million dollars of pies were sold this past weekend alone.

What’s the lesson?

There is economic power in the black dollar.

With over $1.2 trillion dollars in annual spending power, the black community has an opportunity to not only enjoy Pattie’s pies, but also enjoy some financial control over the future, create jobs, businesses and funds to help make our communities better.

Instead of making it rain into Walmart registers, imagine if the community came together to put our money in black owned banks in the community, shopped with the local black entrepreneurs in the community and helped to circulate our funds among ourselves first.

This would create the jobs we so desperately need in our community. Provide lending options for the banks and credit unions in the community which makes more businesses, more opportunity to spend with each other, more jobs, more tax revenue for schools and social programs.

READ MORE: Walmart’s Patti Pie Drought Could Be a MAJOR Opportunity for Local Black Businesses

PLEASE, black people, wake up and start using your economic power to help yourself. As Dr. Claude Anderson said, you have already made everyone else on the planet rich.

It’s time we did that for ourselves.

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1 Comment

  1. Reneegede

    They are making a big deal out of a factory manufactured pie because it has Patti’s endorsement, and probably one of her “magic” recipes.

    I hate to label ALL Black people as anything, because the truth is that we can say “Black people this” and “Black people that” all day long and all it means is CERTAIN Black people are …

    Celeb-chasing, status-seeking, name-dropping, label-ho’s.

    I’m not mad about it, if Patti can get that kind of money over some white pie manufactured by a white company using her face and name while the magnanimous all-inclusive “we” sit back and let Black schools fallow and our children die in the streets, to buy pies from a white retailer who specializes in impoverished “always the low wages” employees who need food stamps, then we are telling the rest of the world that the magnanimous “we” don’t give a chit about ourselves OR our Black businesses unless they are ‘underscored’ and co-signed by white people.

    That’s all “we” need to know.

    If Black people and their white constituents have that kind of money over “singing dancing pie jigaboos,” then they don’t need the kind of rescuing some of them have tried to make the world think they need.

    If “we” love pies that much, “we” should have made a million Black women into millionaires by now, cuz it’s some danged good Mama’s Sweet Potato Pies out here all day every day that she should have been selling instead of giving away.

    No “endangered species” of a Black male can get that happy about a damned pie in the midst of all the chit crumbling around us in the Black community.

    Or is this “hunted disenfranchised Black people” thing really
    “Just our imagination”?

    I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again … I understand why President Obama just shakes his head every time we try to come at him with some “black mess,” Black folks had the open doors ENOUGH and the MONEY to get ourselves out of this subjection to white people a LONG time ago and we refuse to leave Massa’s plantation.

    We WILL have that plantation and subjection, one way or the other.

    Reply

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