Don't forget non-perishable. If you're already having a hard time affording groceries, it really hurts to throw away wilted veggies or moldy fruit.
By cook, I don't mean "can add one box of prepared goods to another box of prepared goods with a can of prepared goods on the side", I mean buying meat, veggies, fruit, and grains and cooking a dish from home, mostly from scratch.
edit: 13 million Americans are in food deserts. If the problem were that small, it'd be similar in size to people who are addicted to substances other than alcohol. This is affecting almost everyone. There MUST be another, bigger solution.
Guess how they get most food? All that super-cheap rural land.
What are you suggesting they do instead? Scroll tiktok?
>and extreme hours
This is not the problem in rural communities.
I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceries, including the long term health effects of regular consumption, and interpreting early death as a cost rather than savings. For me I think ribeye would end up being cheaper than Doritos.
Someone who bothers to input everything they eat into an app (basically calorie counting) probably already has enough intuitive sense of what's "healthy" that they don't need an app that they should eat beef rather than doritos.
Just like $50 shoes that last 6 months and $200 shoes that last 10 years, when you’re poor, you often have to chose the less expensive, short-term option because the more expensive, far far better option is literally out of reach.
Walmart has plenty of shoes and work boots for about $50 that will last more than 6 months unless you really abuse them. They don't look great but they're functional and reasonably durable.
Just taking a second to think about this, since we're in the context of groceries, here's another example: the bigger box of cereal will be cheaper per pound and last longer, but you have to pay more up front for it. Another example closer to the boots metaphor is comparing the longevity of cheap, used cars vs new cars.
Even outside of consumer goods, poor people are not able to hire accounts to find, um, ways to minimize your tax bill, or have the money for investments or even savings etc. Even middle class people who may be able to afford a mortgage that is less than their rent might take a while to save up for a down payment (and hopefully the housing market hasn't gotten too much worse in the mean time).
It is unrealistic to expect the vast majority of humans to prioritize the long term in every single decision they make, especially if they have a dim view of the long term.
It is logical to want to enjoy life in the present, even if it will hurt in the long term, if you are being brought down by other aspects, such as stress about income volatility and belief in low probabilities of upward movement, etc.