With that said, it’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes. Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes.

What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations make them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods…

The result is that, for both groups—but low-income blacks in particular—there is a “spatial mismatch” between neighborhoods and employment opportunities.

Put simply, the greater the sprawl of jobs in an area, the less likely it is that black residents will have easy and reliable access to them. Or, as UCLA professor Michael Stoll writes in a 2005 paper for the Brookings Institution, “Blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas regardless of region, metropolitan area size, and their share of metropolitan population.” And this isn’t an accident: “Metropolitan areas characterized by higher job sprawl also exhibit more severe racial segregation between blacks and whites,” he writes.