Shared Air

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

It seemed sadly appropriate that I thought of that quotation about rich people and then mangled it for this post’s headline about the below article. Sad and appropriate because the original, a dialogue claimed by Ernest Hemingway between him and F. Scott Fitzgerald, never happened. But the false version just sounds better and seems plausible. So the misperception lives on and we blithely ignore the less glamourous truth. Snipped below, the Washington Post offers a pretty startling article, almost more alternative weekly-esque in the writer’s sardonic approach, telling what money traps the poor must navigate

Poverty 101: We’ll start with the basics. 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.)