In urban sociology literature, most research on neighborhood/community identity and change utilizes a range of social and economic indicators. Sociologists use demographic measures and indicators for "social organization and disorganization" such as crime, divorce, voluntary associations, and churchgoing to study neighborhood identity and change. Indeed, sociologists consider community/neighborhood identity and change in myriad forms. However, and perhaps surprisingly, sociologists still know little about local patterns of consumption and lifestyles within and across neighborhoods. This dissertation argues that daily consumption is a critical form of social and economic engagement that has become so ingrained that it is a completely taken for granted action. In this sense daily consumption is a category of economic action that may be considered normative. Using grocery store purchases from eighteen stores, for 592,834 persons and roughly 890,000 stocked items from January 2003 through December 2004 for the city of Chicago, this dissertation adds consumption to the aforementioned set of social indicators of community change and identity. I use regression, multiple cluster analysis, GIS mapping and adjacency tables to reveal Race, Education, Income, Mixed Demographic, Percentage Consumption and Average Dollar Consumption Cluster communities.

I show that community areas once thought of as being homogeneous, and hence often portrayed as having a cohesiveness based on race or demographic composition, should not be viewed as such when everyday consumption patterns are taken into account. The residents of these areas are both members of groups whose consuming characteristics identify them as belonging to both a larger society and, at the same time, members of a much smaller tribe. In short, conventional approaches to analyzing neighborhood boundaries that neglect individuals' daily consumptive routines are likely to understate the importance of not only neighborhood environments and boundaries but also the routine actions of the area residents themselves.