If you can't afford transportation you're limited to what you can walk to. In the area I live you cannot bring more than one bag with you on public transportation and it takes almost an hour to get across town on the bus. It would be cheaper to buy marked up food from a gas station or drugstore than pay for a taxi ride or waste half a day riding the bus.

Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.

I can confirm that. I live near a block of apartment homes that are populated by lower income residents. There's a CVS and a gas station/cstore within walking distance, but the grocery stores and department stores (Target, Walmart) are all more than 2+ miles away. The buses are infrequent and expensive.

Anecdata: I have money and property and plentiful transportation (three vehicles for the two of us). Live miles from town.

I drive to one or more grocery stores infrequently to get what I want. Buy quality food and freeze/store it in my large house. Garden provides some more. Waste is composted and feeds the gardens.

Meals cost me a buck or two to prepare from my plentiful stock. All because I can afford to. Food is a negligible fraction of my budget.

You don't have to be wealthy to do that, but you do have to have the storage space and to shift your mindset in a more long-term direction. It's also a lot of work. I grew up relatively poor, but in a rural area, so we had enough land to put in a garden, and we slaved away all summer and fall picking and processing food that got stacked up in the basement cold-cellar and in the freezer. We also bought meat in bulk, either a half or a whole beef from a local farmer, so you had to plan for that lump sum expense and, again, have the freezer space ready to take hundreds of pounds of meat when it went to the slaughter house. We'd also try to shoot a deer or two each year to supplement that, and catch a mess of trout that we'd can up. Then there were the trips to the pick-your-own berry fields, where you'd pick a hundred pounds of strawberries, and then have to freeze them or turn them into jam, and the trips to the orchards where you could pick grain sacks full of the dropped apples for a dollar apiece; then you had to go home and sort out the bad ones. My aunt had a Sam's Club membership, so a couple times a year we'd go with her and load up on staples - again, you've got to save up for it, and then you have to have the storage.

You can do that kind of thing when you are relatively settled and have roots and connections in a community, and the know-how to do all that home-making. We didn't have any money, but we were rich in a lot of other ways. If you are isolated and precarious, living reactively day-to-day, it makes something that is already hard nigh on impossible.

You're also handsome, charming, and incredibly humble.

Whether or not he meant to his comment illustrates the problem perfectly: those with the means to do so can eat healthy food and absorb the cost/time/distance inherent in that, those that cannot will suffer and chose whatever they can get. Good healthy food at a sustainable price is hard to come by in the US. There are food deserts everywhere. Good food is treated clearly as a lifestyle luxury. Let them eat cake indeed.

My point exactly

I get where your comment is coming from, but I think they acknowledged that their situation is somewhat privileged. Quote: "All because I can afford to."

It's the old adage about it being expensive to be poor, only in reverse.

Yes, actually. But I didn't want to bring it up.

Also, “proper” grocery chains are often much more expensive (with lower quality items) in poor areas where residents can’t afford transportation. In those areas, CVS might not a terrible choice.

Kroger used to be so bad in our neighborhood that we drove 30 minutes (past upscale krogers) because their business model of abusing stranded populations was abhorrent.

Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t get a bus ticket. All it means is you are deliberate in your shopping and planning.

You plan your trip to take advantage of transfer tickets and such. Sometimes you walk a mile or two or you bike or you bum a ride from someone.

Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.

Sure it’s not ideal and I prefer being able to shop ad hoc at my leisure, no doubt. But when I had to I made do.

> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan

Chronic stress (such as from financial stress and working multiple jobs) actually does severely impact your executive function and decision-making ability. It's hard to make dispassionate decisions when you're exhausted and scared. There's been studies about it.

Obviously it's possible to overcome that, and some people are better at it than others. But the burden is real. When you're coming off a double shift, it's really hard to make the decision to spend an extra 45 minutes walking round-trip, or two hours hopping on and off buses, when you could just hit the Walgreen's near your apartment and get home to your family.

> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.

obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?

trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.

It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.

Unless you don’t have a fridge, when you have to make a two hour trip for food, you’re gonna make sure you got just about everything for the whole week. There might be some milk or egg runs, but in those cases one might pay a premium once in a while.

We’re not making two hour trips every day after work for food. No poor person I knew did that when I was poor. I did it mostly on weekends when there was lots of time.

There’s a weird misconception about poor people here. I’m willing to bet the vast amount of people on SNAP have a car and a job. Being poor doesn’t require an abject state.

Plan for the worst of poverty. Not the best.

No it doesn't.

But being poor DOES mean lowered efficiency with respect to an astonishing number of steps involved to achieve the desired outcome.

And when you have enough of these lowered efficiencies at one time and they begin to compound like interest...

Not always a pretty picture.

> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t

it kinda does though.

The effects of financial stress on your mental wellbeing are pretty well documented and can manifest in ways such as inability to focus/concentrate, chronic fatigue, spotty memory from stress etc.

I think because if someone does their grocery shopping at a drug store, then they probably live in a food desert which are typically in lower income areas.

This is known as the poverty tax. People in poverty pay more for necessities than people who are not in poverty because they can't easily get to places where they can buy more for their money.

Anecdotally, the areas in the USA that most lack proper grocery stores tend to be low-income urban neighborhoods.

Because drugstores tend to be a replacement for grocery stores in food deserts.

Being in a "food desert" where there are no grocery stores nearby.