Lexington Herald-Leader, June 1, 2008: Food and gasoline: Soaring prices hit the poor hardest
By Karla Ward
KWARD1@HERALD-LEADER.COM
Rising fuel prices. Rising food prices. Carol Sanders knows all too well they can take a very human toll.
Sanders, of Lexington, had been living in a three-bedroom apartment with her three children — an 11-year-old and 8-year-old twins. But in late December and early January, she said, making the $500 monthly rent and paying her other bills too became overwhelming.
Sanders, who is raising the children on her own, became homeless and sent the kids to live with her sister.
“I didn’t want them to go through the struggles that I was about to go through,” she said. “It really took a toll on me and the kids.”
When the economy takes a tumble, the poor are often the first to feel the pain.
Representatives of several local social service agencies said they’re seeing more clients seeking help in an environment in which gas and grocery prices are soaring.
“The economy is affecting the low- to moderate-income individuals a great deal more than it is anybody else,” said Johnny Cantrell, chief executive officer of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Kentucky. He also oversees the organization’s offices in eight Midwestern states.
Many families, Cantrell said, live on budgets of just $500 or $600 a month, meaning increases in the cost of food and gas make a big dent. “Anything is going to wipe that budget out,” he said. “And that’s what we’re seeing.”
The consumer price index for food rose 5 percent last year, the highest gain in nearly two decades.
And gas prices have risen from $3.20 a gallon a year ago to an average of $3.95 Thursday, according to the Oil Price Information Service.
“There’s no evidence that wages are growing … in terms of keeping up with inflation,” said James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research.
So higher food and gas prices reduce people’s ability to cover other expenses, such as utilities and clothing.
“It has a ripple effect throughout their budget,” Ziliak said.
Sanders doesn’t have a car, but rising gasoline prices are still hitting her hard.
She earns $6 an hour working through a temporary employment service. The temp service provides transportation to and from the job, but the cost of the ride recently went up to $4 each way, or $8 a day.
That means she’s at work more than an hour every day before she even pays the cost of getting there and back.
After taxes and transportation costs, Sanders said her take-home pay is about $230 a week.
She is now living in an efficiency apartment and paying $100 a week in rent. And she’s putting aside $100 a week in hopes of saving up enough to reunite her family by the time school starts this fall.
That leaves her $30 a week for food. And with grocery prices rising drastically, it doesn’t go far.
Sanders said she hasn’t bought milk in two or three weeks because the prices have gotten so high.
Melissa Keeley is also trying to make her grocery dollars go farther when shopping for herself and her son, Bobby Hissong.
She’s a cook, but she can’t afford to provide the kind of meals at home that she serves up for the customers who come to the restaurant where she works.
Last weekend, she said, she made a stew with a bouillon cube and some vegetables that were about to go bad. She and Bobby ate it for three days, Keeley said.
“That’s how far you’ve got to stretch it now,” the single mother said as she waited in line at the God’s Pantry Food Bank at Broadway Christian Church Tuesday.
She began taking the bus rather than driving to work to save money on gas about two months ago.
“You’ve got to make a decision whether to put it in your gas tank or your mouth,” she said of her $875-a-month income.
Keeley is already attending culinary school in hopes that it will help her get a better job and earn more money. She said she’s also thinking of getting a second job. The only problem is, she worries about spending so much time away from Bobby.
“I’ve got to do something,” she said. “My 13-year-old son says, ‘I wish I could get a job and help you.’ … He sees what I’m going through.”
Problems caused by food and gas prices can be magnified in rural counties.
“The rural areas are going to suffer more in the current environment,” Ziliak said.
He said people in rural areas have to commute farther to work, which means they have higher fuel costs, and there is some evidence suggesting that groceries cost more in rural areas as well.
The poverty rate in rural Kentucky was estimated at 22 percent in 2005, as opposed to 13 percent in urban counties, according the the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
Rick Baker, administrative assistant for operations at the Leslie Knott Letcher Perry Community Action Council, said the agency has seen an increase in requests from people struggling to make ends meet.
Many need help paying their electric and natural gas bills. Often, he said, folks will let those payments slide because they have a more pressing need: putting food on the table.
Baker, who also sits on the board of Hazard Community and Technical College, said the school has even lost some students to the downturn.
“They’re having to drop out of school and go back to work,” he said. “People don’t realize the impact that it’s having.”
But just finding work also has become harder for some folks.
Patrick Douglas, who had dinner at the Catholic Action Center on a recent Sunday evening, said he had been doing construction work as a day laborer five or six days a week.
Now, he said, “you’re lucky to get out once or twice a week.”
“There’s really not a lot of work now,” he said. “It’s slowed down a lot.”
And the safety net is not as strong as it once was.
With grocery prices up, food stamps don’t go as far.
Ziliak said many families are using their benefits up after only two weeks.
Normally, he said, food stamps are not adjusted for inflation until the fall, although there is talk in Washington of making a midyear adjustment to help people cope with rising grocery prices this summer.
“I try to stretch my food stamps as far as I can,” said Sabrina Phillips, who said she gets $298 a month to help feed her family of three.
The family has switched from Kroger to Save-A-Lot for groceries, started buying bread at a bakery outlet and begun scouring the Sunday paper for coupons and sale advertisements. Even so, their food stamps usually are used up before the end of the month.
On Tuesday, Phillips was in line at God’s Pantry.
So was Kym Gray, a single mother caring for three children, including one with spina bifida.
She got to the food bank early in order to get the best selection, and when it came her turn, she perused the shelves, choosing carefully.
“I look for things that we’re out of at the house,” she said. “We don’t have any sugar at the house. We don’t have any coffee at the house. We don’t have any oil at the house.”
And if they didn’t have those items at God’s Pantry?
“We’ll do without,” she said. “That’s all we can do.”
Gray said she’s cut out the little forms of entertainment — going to the discount movie theater or to McDonald’s — that she and the kids used to enjoy.
“A lot of times when we do go, they eat. I don’t,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Karla Ward at (859) 231-3314 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3314.