By BJ Bjornson
A pretty good article in the Washington Post regarding the high cost of being poor. They leave out the real biggie of health care, which costs those without insurance far more than what those with insurance pay for the same services, but they do a decent job of noting a lot of the day-to-day costs that come from not having enough money.
Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.
A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.
(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 -- $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)
This sounds not too dissimilar to the situation where I live, right down to the crappy fruit and veggies, where the entire territory can be considered a poor neighbourhood, with a small population and isolation conspiring to ensure costs are very high. There are two major ways to beat these high prices up here. The first is a federal program called food mail, which subsidizes the rate the airlines charge for freight on perishable, nutritious foods. But in order to use the program on an individual basis, you basically need a credit card or another banking arrangement not available in many communities or to those in without steady income. Northern retailers also use the program, but a recent report noted that they aren’t terribly good at passing their savings on to the consumers. (Weirdly, the same report recommended cutting the individual orders from the program, as apparently the best way to convince northern retailers to pass on the savings is to further eliminate any competition they face. One really has to wonder at the Conservative view of the free market sometimes.)
The other method is to bring up bulk shipments of non-perishable goods on the summer sealift, particularly those not covered by the food mail program. (A true must if you have pets. I usually save enough on the dog food alone to pay for the shipping of the entire order, and my understanding is the costing of cat litter is even worse.) The issue here is that you’re facing a large up-front cost to save money over the rest of the year. Even some people who aren’t poor have difficulties with that one.
The end result of both methods is that you need money to save money.
The laundromat example they use is another I recognize. I used to hate even living in an apartment without in-house laundry. Fortunately the only time the machines where I was staying broke down, I was only a couple of blocks from the laundromat, but hiking over with the dirty laundry was most definitely a pain, not helped by the fact that my only previous experience with said service was during my short stint working the oil patch, where I was advised to take my grease and oil-soaked clothes down to the laundromat to clean rather than muck up the home machines.
But it is the last example of Marie Nicholas that really gets me. Rather than the caricature of the lazy and shiftless poor, here is someone working their ass off to get ahead and finding themselves in even worse shape than had she just stayed at home. It is the mark of the poor design of many of the programs that target the poor that there is a pretty significant swath of income levels where the cut-offs for those programs are actually a disincentive to going out and getting a job. (This also makes the whole living wage argument a lot more relevant as well, don't you think?) Add that to the above problem of paying more for things when you don't have the money to save money, and you get a really good idea how poverty can become chronic.
