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A recent Washington Post article discusses the high cost of being poor and provides some quasi-documentation for the general truism that, while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. None of the hardships of the poor cited by the article are earth-shattering news to people who have done their time below the poverty line, but it’s an intriguing look anyway. Among the paradoxes of being poor cited by the article are:
- Higher prices on food. The poor often have to spend more for food, due to their lack of a car or any other means of getting to the kinds of stores (Costco, Target, Trader Joe’s) that the middle class frequent in order to save money. When you buy most of your food at the corner store because it doesn’t require a bus ride, you end up spending more.
- Poorer Quality of Food. Not only do scarcity and convenience allow neighborhood groceries to charge more for food, they also ensure that people will buy the food, all of it, even when it doesn’t look all that great. The article makes reference to “picked over” oranges and “shriveled” green peppers, though it does not seem to have a scientific approach for documenting this claim, even if it seems logical that this claim might be the case.
- With less money, you have to spend more time doing basic things. The poor spend a lot of time doing things that are much quicker for the middle class. They wait in lines for buses. The bus rides take much longer to get to a destination than the same trip would take in a car. Doing laundry in a laundromat not only requires you to spend cash, it requires you to spend time, which in turn costs you money. Now this is one part of being poor with which I am very familiar. If you don’t have a washing machine, not only do you have to find all the quarters to run your load at the laundromat, you also have to take time out of your day in order to do the wash. Whereas now that I have a laundry machine, I can run the clothes at my leisure and go about my day while it’s running, when I did laundry in a laundromat, I would either have to sit there during the cycle (I’d often save my seminar reading for those days when I was in graduate school), or I would have to risk the possibility that somebody might steal my clothes while I left to try to do something else in the meantime. Neither option is particularly great, although I did get some good editing done on my dissertation while I was waiting for umpteen thousand loads of laundry to finish.
The article tends to equate the reality of being poor with being in debt, and I don’t believe these two circumstances are always hand-in-hand. For one thing, the article goes on to say that the working poor use cash advance places because of their lack of credit, and though one might arrive at a lack of credit because of maxing out all credit cards, I maintain that I think it is difficult for many of the working poor to get credit cards in the first place. And let’s face it, poor without credit is better than pretending-not-to-be-poor with credit. At least in my book.
I found some of the claims made by the Post article to be far-fetched. I do believe that the poor are short on time, due in part to the added hassle of things like the laundromat and riding the bus, and just generally being left without a choice but to spend more time to do less than the middle or upper classes. But to say that the poor spend money unnecessarily to save themselves time by doing things like “using caller ID” is absurd. Everyone uses caller ID, whether or not they have bill collectors calling. And just because you are poor doesn’t mean you do have bill collectors calling. Also, last time I checked, many companies offer direct deposit for their paychecks. Not everyone who is poor is forced to use check cashing places or payday advance places. Point taken that these kinds of companies use people who are desperate to pay their bills, but again, you are confusing the working poor with people who are hopelessly behind on payments and in debt. There is some common ground, surely, but the two categories are not identical.
Even when I was very poor as a graduate student, I still did not have the full experience of the working poor in an urban environment. Even if I was making comparable money, I was really just travelling through the experience of being very poor, given my education and background. I had a car (my parents bought me), an education (my parents bought me), and access to some luxuries of the middle class via my parents (occasionally doing the laundry, the possibility of an emergency loan in the case of dire financial need). One thing the article might have considered was a better explanation of how to get out of being poor often requires a leg up somehow–some form of help or guidance from outside of the class, because I think the cyclical nature of poverty is often ignored by people who don’t have to deal with it.
Still, the Post article, written in the form of “case studies” given by “guest lecturers” from poorer classes does offer an interesting glimpse into the first-person experience of urban poverty, and is worth a look.
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ABout direct deposit, you can’t direct deposit for a person who doesn’t have a bank account, which is much more difficult to set up because they don’t have enough cash at one time to make the minimum initial deposit — and for many illegal aliens, they don’t have the documentation to set up the account, either. I’m a middle class white woman working for an attorney, and I don’t have direct deposit. A lot of small employers won’t pay the fees to be able to do that for their workers.
Good point, weezy. It occurred to me that there could be a documentation problem in some cases, but the article doesn’t address immigrants (illegal or otherwise) directly. But you’re right–the need for money in the account would probably be a barrier in itself.
I moved out of my house at 16. I had no phone, no car, no laundry, no furniture, and the slummiest linoleum covered duplex in town. My job was to fill a urinal with ice. I appreciate my experience (I would NEVER go back). Smaller things are much more satisfying knowing the alternative.
Cashing paychecks has something to do with not having a checking account at all. I imagine that living on the margins sometimes means bending the law. You might pay cash to an unscrupulous landlord. You may get paid under the table yourself. Maybe you missed a payment on your phone or car and are required to pay by money order or cash. In those cases, you wouldn’t necessarily need or want a bank account with it’s fees and tracking abilities. Perhaps you can’t even maintain a balance had you ever opened an account.
It’s not just a cycle of poverty, it’s also a surround of force (to borrow from Shorris). Job, home, health – if one of those is compromised, there’s a chain reaction. I’m not saying people can’t climb out of poverty. They can and do, but they have to work way harder and be luckier that some people might expect.