Not many Walmarts in urban neighborhoods that I’ve seen. Even the ones in less populated areas, at least in my neck of the woods, often aren’t too central to residential areas.
There is not one Walmart in Detroit.
There is only one in Flint and it’s in the “nice” part of Flint.
Technically there are two Meijer stores (our chain cheap grocery store) but they are way, way on the outskirts. To the point that I have been to both and had no idea they had Detroit addresses.
The “shop Walmart” trope gets old.
People are assuming low income people are drinking soda for the taste. When you’re working long hours on not much sleep, soda and/or coffee are cheap energy boosters that help stave off hunger.
The stave off hunger bit is ridiculous. A 12 ounce coke can only has 140 calories, a little more than 1 slice of bread. If you’re actually hungry, you need to eat something. As energy boosters, yes, it’s one way to feed a caffeine addiction.
They were not only heavily marketed as an everyday drink back in the '50s, if one examines the widespread marketing of the major soda companies…especially Coca Cola, it went much further back before WWII. This is illustrated by the widespread ads from the period.
Also, this marketing was not only widespread in the US in the same period, but also abroad as shown by how the word “coke” became used as a generic term for soft drinks in other parts of the world and the interesting history of how one of Coke’s sub-brands “Fanta” was founded due to WWII cut off contact between Coca-Cola’s German subsidiary and the main Coca-Cola company.
One interesting factoid from the war was how Nazi troops in North Africa who loved coca-cola from pre-war memories were especially happy when they found crates/truckloads of coca-cola among captured Allied supplies and strapped them on wings of Luftwaffe planes flying missions as an improvised means to refrigerate them after they’ve become hot from being exposed to hot desert conditions.
@catahoula
https://www.philabundance.org/philabundance-takes-on-food-desert-in-chester-penn/
The USDA has found over 6500 food deserts in the US. These are urban areas with no decent grocery store within 1 mile in urban areas and 10 miles in rural areas.
My SIL used to live in a rural area with no car. She walked 6 miles to the mom and pop store. Forget buying anything that spoils or is frozen. Forget buying in quantity.
Someone along her route came out to warn her that coyotes were tracking her from the ridge. I guess they had their own food desert.
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring08/Cantwell/invention.html
Coke syrup was registered as a patent medicine developed by a pharmacist for fatigue and headaches. Just as cigarettes were marketed to women as sexy and would help them lose weight.
@austinmshauri wrote
A 12 oz can of Coke contains nearly 10 teaspoons of sugar. You’re not getting a sustained burn on this, you’re getting a sugar spike and then a sugar crash. You’d be much better off drinking a big glass of unsweet tea combined with an egg mcMuffin (which is one of the less awful choices at mcDonalds at 300 calories and 17 grams of protein, which will give you energy over a longer period of time).
I’d also recommend reading “Eat This, Not That” to find sustainable choices. I agree we can’t always have access to super healthy foods, but there are always smarter choices than chugging a can of coke.
Do vending machines on most job sites sell bread? The ones in the businesses my friends and I worked in while in college only offered soda, chips, and candy. When it was 4am and we’d eaten the lunch we could afford to pack but were still hungry, and tired, and had 3 hours left on our shift, bread wasn’t one of our choices. Our choice was to go hungry or scrape together enough change and try to choose something that would get us through the rest of our shift. If you drink it slowly enough, soda can last a couple hours (much longer than candy or chips), and it’s more filling too. If we had bread, we certainly would’ve eaten it.
^^The markup on vending machine products is ridiculous. Another option would have been to pack enough food you made at home to get you through your shift. You wasted SO much money paying for vending machine food.
@MotherOfDragons, Thank you. It is so nice of you to take the time to offer advice. I rarely have soda now that I’m out of college. The situation I’m referring to was a long time ago, but I’m sure it still exists. I attended college full-time during the day and worked full-time at night to pay for it. When we worked the overnight shift McDonald’s wasn’t open and we couldn’t afford the extra gas to get there even if it was.
My mother was a dietitian and she taught us a lot, so I knew better. I certainly didn’t eat like that at home. But when you’re tired, hungry, and your immediate choices are limited you do what you can. The suggestions people are making here for what others “should” do are based on assumptions of conditions that may not exist. Not everyone has the luxury of a full 8 hours of sleep, full service supermarkets within easy commuting distance, the facilities to store and cook the foods they’d prefer to be eating, or the money to buy it.
I don’t think most people on this website understand what it means to be poor. When I was young my dad started to lose his sight to a degenerative eye disease. He lost his union job, and our home, and it took a lot of years for my parents to recover financially. There were 8 of us crammed into a small one bedroom apartment with no running water, central heat, or phone service. My dad drew water from a well in the summer and chipped ice off the pond to get water in the winter. He chopped wood year round to keep our single wood stove running. My parents walked to the grocery store (3 miles away) even in the dead of winter. That’s after working in the woodlot all day to cut logs to sell at the mill. After that my mother would come home and cook dinner. My dad was nearly 60-years-old, so my mom was in her early 50’s.
I’m not that old, so it wasn’t that long ago. It’s really easy for us to sit in our comfy homes and tell other people what they should do. But instead of offering constructive advice for specific situations, as you did, what I’m seeing are a lot of judgmental remarks from people who don’t seem to know what they’re talking about.
In many countries, a job site with hungry workers would be supplied by somebody - a passing vendor or even one of the workers - selling low cost food to make a little extra money.
^that is absolutely true. Street food everywhere. …vendors even allowed to come into office buildings, and always onto busses during traffic stops. Lots of it tasty and nutritious, but no way to know the bacterial content. Of course, in many of these places, if you survive into adulthood, your immune system is a formidable force.
Once I saw someone in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington D.C. walking through a traffic jam trying to hawk a live chicken car to car. I figured the person was a recent immigrant from Central America.
@austinmshauri I was so poor growing up that we were occasionally homeless. I worked an overnight 12 hr clean up shift at an amphitheater to earn money for college. Don’t try the “you don’t understand” bit, because I do understand.
What I see is you making excuses.
Would it be awful of me to say I see both sides of this story?
I can see one side, that says- If I am forced by the government to give my earned money to someone else to assist in their sustenance, then the least they can do with that money is buy healthy food; rather than unhealthy food that can lead to someone else paying their medical bills too.
The other side says- those poor may not know an apple is healthier than a can of soda, or may knowingly choose less healthy foods as a matter of convenience and/or personal preference. They may feel they need to buy unhealthy food to stretch their food budget. But once money is given to them it is then their money. Can’t they spend their money as they see fit?
Do they use tobacco? Do they drink alcohol? Do they have pets? Do they have more kids than they can afford? Those are all legitimate questions for people receiving taxpayer assistance. Although to me, there is no clear-cut answer to those questions. Do those poor have the privilege to make any decision they want with someone else’s money, without the responsibility that goes with their choices? Should they?
This is the same principle as loaning money to a friend. If we aren’t paid back as quickly as we hope, then we look closer their other expenditures. We sometimes think- hey, you could pay me back if you hadn’t spent on this or that. Once someone else is living on our money, then we want to guide their expenditures. The difference being that loaning money to a friend was a choice whereas “gov’t assistance” is taking taxpayer’s money by force. If those in government feel taxpayers owe money to the less fortunate, then once they receive it, do the less fortunate owe something to taxpayers?
The food challenge defined a few pages back is misleading. JandL helped clarify that it is intended as a supplement. It is not intended as the only source for food. So whether or not I can feed a family of 4 on 75 cents (figuratively) is not really relevant.
I like your way of looking at both sides, @younghoss, and asking questions even if they can’t be entirely resolved. I think when we become polarized too much we miss the complexity…and also miss opportunities for creative thinking that could lead to some solutions that try to encompass the concerns on both ends.
One thing that might be missing from your description of the situation is a question some might have going in a different direction…are these supplements really something GIVEN to the working poor, that should really belong to someone else (the taxpayer?) or is this money they actually DESERVE for lack of adequate compensation or awful life burdens they have had to shoulder. I know this is going in a very socialist direction and I’m not proposing I have the answer to this and don’t want to start a poitical controversy here…I struggle with it myself…just saying it is another voice in this issue. As it has been pointed out, the working poor are often/usually doing the most tedious and thankless jobs that others don’t want to do…but often these jobs are critical to the running of our society. Maybe the problem is that people doing these jobs are just not compensated enough and some middle-class/upper-middle and wealthy are being compensated more than their share in comfortable jobs and good insurance…
There is a perspective, as inthegarden has pointed out, questioning if society owes(by law) to the less fortunate. Donations and charities are voluntary and different than forcible taxation. The “compassionate” thing to do, or the “right” thing to do, or the moral thing to do when it comes to federal taxes can be limited by our Constitution. Something that may feel “right” may not be provided for in the Constitution. Since Feds are supposed to be bound by the Constituion, does it provide for taxing some to give away to less fortunate? Does our Constitution provide that if an individual is working in a “tedious and thankless job” as inthegargen says, the rest of society must be taxed to give him their money to offset? That is civics, not politics. My post did not try to address the legality of federal government forced charity, but rather the practicality of it as it stands now.
But to answer your question specifically, inthegarden, yes. Taxes are forcibly taken from earners and the left-over money(after paying bureaucrats to handle) is then given to the poor. That question was easy. Do they “deserve” compensation is a stickier one. Does our Constitution provide that taxes can be collected to give to those that work tedious jobs? So the bigger question you may be asking, inthegarden, is not just “what feels right?” It is also- Is what feels right AND is provided for in the Constitution?
Rather than debate the legality, I’d prefer to look at the practicality of current policies and laws.
@MotherOfDragons you “understand” but apparently despite coming from desperate circumstances, you also along the way 1)had food/nutrition education 2)the ability to buy healthy, nutritious food 3)the ability to get to the sources of this food, 4)places to cook this food and preserve leftovers and more. Your posts, whether intended or not, come across as very judgmental against poor people who do NOT have all of those things-not everyone working 12-hour shifts is doing it to pay for college- they are working to keep a roof over their kids’ heads, and then leaving for a second job right after. Some of those same people don’t live near a real grocery store and dinner might actually be something you, as an educated and financially set but once-poor person would never allow to pass your lips.
It’s really not about soda not being sustaining vs a slice of bread, for crying out loud. It’s about being able to BUY bread in the first place! I do see people walking home from the nearest grocery store, laden with bags, and I do see people carefully adding up their healthy purchases at that same store before handing over their EBT card. But you have to know WHAT to cook to buy and eat healthy. You have to get to that store, have the time to cook the food and be able to stretch it enough to feed all your kids or to last several days. And that’s assuming you have a working stove and refrigerator. Believe it or not, some landlords aren’t ethical. They don’t provide working appliances or fix the ones that exist when they break.
Question-when you were homeless, did you eat at the shelters where you stayed? Did you carefully analyze the nutrient value of each item or did you eat what was served because that’s what there was? How did you learn what the proper foods were? What did you or your family do when (if) you lived someplace with no grocery stores? Or no working stove? What kinds of lunches did you bring to school? What did your parents do to cook healthy nutritious foods if they were both working full-time and then some?
You don’t have to answer the questions, I’m not that interested in your exact experiences. But all of those questions are things that have an effect on whether the poor people you’re judging can do what you seem to expect of them.
Thanks, @younghoss, excellent points…I’m learning a lot in this thread and I’m not taking a position here…in fact, I tend to be of the “no soda” camp…was just pointing out that that is another voice in the overall philosophical debate …the conscious or unconscious paradigms that morph into the different opinions that people have, leading to their opinions about the particulars (i.e. should soda be made purchasable through supplemental programs.)
Someone who (even subconsciously) sees supplements as just compensation for other things may be more likely to think soda (or any other consummable) should be included in SNAP, for example, whereas someone who thoroughly views it as part of a forced taxation might argue more in favor of limitations, whether for altruistic health concerns or practical fiscal reasons (higher health care costs for taxpayers). I’m talking about people’s mindsets that then inform their opinions, not the legalities. But I do find it very informative, what you remind me of the Constitution, etc.
Good grief, we are talking about soda, not the nutrients involved in every speck of food spent by EBT cards. It’s pretty well documented that soda isn’t good for anybody and is a prominent factor in the rise of obesity in our country. I see nothing wrong with prohibiting it from being purchased with EBT cards, just like liquor and cigarettes. Large bottles of water (about the same size as a 2 liter bottle of Coke) are about a dollar at my local Safeway, so I don’t buy the argument that soda isn’t as cheap as other beverages.
sseamom touches on some good points, but how far back do we go?
Sseamom cites soda bought instead of bread. She backs up to ask did they have money to buy bread? If not, why not? So we can back up to say how much money did they have? Then we can back up to say how much assistance did they get? Then we can back up and say why were they in such a spot? Bad choices? Lack of education? Unforeseen circumstances? Did they have poor parenting? Only one parent?
How far we go back is tough, and there is no correcting history. That is why I am torn on the right thing to do/expect of those that get a portion of my wages.
Asking GENERAL questions I don’t know the answer to, I’d ask does a family of six deserve more or less of my money? More because of more mouths to feed, or less because maybe they should not have chosen to have 4 kids. What about a single mother? What if she was never married? Should I be forced to support her choices? What about a smoker or pet owner? Do they deserve my money for food when their tobacco/pet money could instead be paying for their own food?
These questions mirror my post 153, where I see both sides and not sure where I fall.
If my money is taken by force, should I have a right to have a say in how it is spent? Or should I just trust the Feds to make right choices when they trust poor individuals with my money?