Brief words to describe people who are not able to shop because of old age and / or absence of shops nearby

I’m looking for the English counterpart to the Japanese word, “ショッピング難民” - shopping refugees by verbatim translation.

Because of the rapid graying of Japan’s population, the population in the remote rural areas is in sharp decline, and retail shops such as grocery stores, supermarkets and gas stations are all closed.

Not only old people, but the healthy residing in depopulated places are now suffering difficulty / inconvenience in shopping.

I don’t know if there are similar situations happening in other corners of the world, but I would like to know how to describe both these people - those who are unable to shop due to old age and those who cannot shop due to the disappearance of shops in two or three English words.

Solution 1:

tl;dr we don’t really have a common idiom for this in British English; others have answered from an American viewpoint (food desert in particular, which term has shown up here — originally in ‘so-called’ quotes, then later without — but I’m still not hearing it used in everyday speech).

In UK English, at least, we’d sometimes refer to such people simply as housebound (for those with “mobility issues, a.k.a. the “elderly and infirm”; where the difficulty is high rather than absolute we’d temper it slightly and say virtually or almost housebound), or (@mari-lou-a’s word choice :o)) isolated. The difficulty shopping part is taken as read, in both cases. There is social awareness of this which is reflected in the existence of specific charities who help people with access to (primarily food) shops.

As Mari-Lou noted, this (isolation, difficulty shopping, &c) is the normal state of affairs in rural communities such as those in Italy (for example), and so isn’t really remarked upon (thus isn’t usually featured in the language in a special way). It’s normal in many parts of Britain, too.

Finally, we don’t really seem to have the problem to such a degree here in my neck of the woods. There was a trend over the last twenty years or so towards large, out-of-town supermarkets, which did make life awkward for those without cars, especially for poorer people who struggled to pay the higher prices of small urban retailers; but the current trend is now for the large chains to aggressively target urban and suburban areas with smaller versions of their stores (that suffix their branding with words like Express, Local or Metro). These have higher prices than the large stores on some items, especially in the capital, but still tend to undercut the more traditional local retailers.

I’m aware that blanket statements are almost always wrong somewhere, so please treat all of this with a healthy degree of skepticism.

It’s also possible the difficulty of finding a good term is compounded by the British tendency to understate things (“can’t get out so much these days” versus “bedridden”), where the Japanese term is rather a (slight) exaggeration.

I found little with Google, possibly because the words are too common, but a search for elderly people who can't go shopping turned up this gem (Cambridge University Press, via Google Books).

Solution 2:

People, old and young, who live in areas where amenities have withered away have been marooned - 'lost and separated from companions', in a 'desolate' place 'from which (they) cannot escape"(OED).

So Japanese 'shopping refugees' might be odescribed more accurately in English as marooned shoppers.

Solution 3:

I think that, being a typical Japanese phenomenon, shopping refugees is the new coined term you have to refer to as suggested in the following article:

A new term being tossed around by the media is kaimono nanmin (shopping refugees). It refers to people who have been cut off from the retail sector. Usually, it describes older people on fixed incomes living in remote areas, which over the past decade or so have become even more remote with the shuttering of traditional local retail districts (shotengai).

(blog.japantimes.co.jp)

Also:

Analysis of Shopping Behavior of Elderly People considering the Satisfaction of Quality and Distance to Grocery Stores

Focusing on the "Latent shopping refugees"

(www.jstage.jst.go.jp)