Main Street

The Costs of Poverty

With 37 million people living in poverty in the United States, and rising unemployment rates suggesting that more people may be joining their ranks, the Washington Post takes a look at some of the costs of being poor. Those are costs as in, costs—concrete, not metaphorical ones.

Take groceries:

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.)

Then there are the fees charged by check-cashing stores, and payday lenders. When you’ll be stretching every dime to begin with, a 10% charge before you even see your money is a big hit.

There’s also that clichéd time-money link. Need to wash your clothes? That’ll be a couple hours in the Laundromat. Don’t have a car? In most places, you’re going to spend a lot of time waiting for the bus.

Moralizing about poverty tends to ignore these costs of time and money. If a poor person would just work another job (never mind that there may not be jobs; that even if there is another job, the bus ride from job one to job two might take another hour), if they’d just buy cheaper food they could save some money (never mind that they’re paying $2 extra for a loaf of bread).

These costs of poverty increase the importance of finding ways now to support newly-unemployed workers, to get them back on their feet before $3.79 bread is digging the hole under them as quickly as they are working to get out of the hole.

Tags: poverty, unemployment