The CEO of Panera Bread attempts to live off food stamps for a week
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
I just don't understand the rationale behind this. It's not like there is a big misunderstanding about the poor living an awesome life. What's missing is the slightest shred of empathy for them.
But she didn't understand,
she just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
cos when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.
-- Pulp, Common PeopleHe actually fails to create a properly nutritious and tasty diet. And writes about it. And that's without additional constraints, in "easy" mode. I think that's very illustrative.
I've seen quite a few of those comments on HN. I recall one commenter, even, claiming that the obesity problem in the US proved that welfare payments were generous if not over-generous, because "our poor eat like gluttons".
The more evidence against idiotic viewpoints like that which accumulates through experiments like this, the better.
The poor are derided by politicians and the media alike.
However, there has been a growing campaign regarding the 'cost of living crisis'.
Food, shelter, water and transport are beyond the means of too many people. For no good reason. Inflation is not a market effect. It is nations purposefully stealing from the poorest.
(I might be the commenter you are referring to, I certainly take both the positions you've described. I've observed that I get an extremely emotional reaction when I cite statistics on this topic and I'm curious what evidence would be sufficiently persuasive.)
Note that "healthy diet" means more than "enough calories".
"As I said in my initial post, you won't hear me claim that my experiences from the upcoming week represent an authentic representation of food insecurity in America. My goal is merely to help bring awareness to the issue and spark deeper conversations about food insecurity and possible solutions – discussions that organizations like Feeding America are driving every day."
I'm pretty sure he's well aware of all the luxuries he has at his disposal that others who rely on food stamps don't. He's not shooting for an authentic representation because he just can't. Even if he were to give away all of his wealth, he'd still have many luxuries (such as friends and family to look after him) that some folks in dire situations don't.
This isn't to say that there isn't insight to be gained from running this experiment, though.
In Ron's case, you're probably off a couple or three of those bank figgers.
Go start a company and then make some good jobs - pay your customer service people well and you will reap it in.
Well yes, that's pretty much the definition of news: reporting uncommon events. "You never read about a plane that did not crash".
Science 30 August 2013: Vol. 341 no. 6149 pp. 976-980 DOI: 10.1126/science.1238041 Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
That's his first mistake. Many (most?) people on food stamps can't afford a car. When you have little money for food, and you just got off the late shift of your second job, you have an even longer trip to the store, costing you more money.
Many of these people also may live in food deserts, where the most common type of store is a liquor store, followed maybe by a payday loan place and a gas station, or a bar. That's where I live anyway.
The closest grocery store is a very poorly maintained Aldi, and some people I know take a cab there and back once a week so they don't have to spend an hour or more traveling by bus.
In Florida (where I lived before Baltimore) it can take two and a half hours by bus to travel what takes around 20 minutes by car, but there the grocery stores are plentiful because of the immense urban sprawl.
In Baltimore and DC, there are literally almost no grocery stores in large swaths of the city, and not a lot of bus lines, because why would buses run often to places with no commerce? Some heavily traveled lines are between a half hour and an hour late, regularly.
--
This[1] is a map of food deserts in DC, which doesn't include Prince George's County (where most of the gentrification is pushing lower-to-middle-class [almost entirely black] families that can't afford living in DC anymore). Note that children are highly affected. There have been studies showing the lack of nutrition for children severely affects their development.
This[2] page from Baltimore City Planning lays out the numbers, in which 1/3 of Baltimore neighborhoods lie in a food desert (we're not as well off as DC's metro-accessible gentrified and developed areas; our metro is a joke). It's much easier to find Ramen noodles than it is a piece of fruit, or non-fried foods.
Walmart has been trying to break into DC and Baltimore for years, and is coming very close, partly on the argument that it would lessen food deserts. But the reality shows that they are pushing hard for long, large flat parking lots and super-centers, which 1. increases car traffic to an already congested urban neighborhoods, 2. removes store space and convenience for small businesses, which in turn 3. reduces the number of small businesses available to sell healthy food to locals, because they can just get everything at Walmart.
This results in no additional relief for the majority of residents in food deserts, while reducing the number of small businesses that could have provided better food service, and making traffic worse for public transit (which is already stressed).
The USDA had a map of food deserts from 2010 but it's not working for me. Maybe someone can download the data from here[3] and plot it in some JavaScript library?
--
[1] http://dcentric.wamu.org/2011/05/mapping-d-c-s-food-deserts/...
[2] http://www.baltimorecity.gov/Government/AgenciesDepartments/...
[3] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-a...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
1. Do I walk the 45 minutes each way (carrying groceries on the way back) through dangerous neighborhoods and probably get mugged or worse? (Baltimore is among the 10 most dangerous cities in America)
2. If I have a bike with a basket, do I bike and take the same risk? (People get mugged off their bike frequently here)
3. Do I wait the 80-120 minutes round trip for the bus? (This is often preferable to walking the dangerous neighborhoods, not to mention you can put your bags down)
4. Do I take a taxi, once per week (or less if you buy in bulk) to the store to save time and hassle?
The young women I know in the area who live in a food desert often take the taxi option as it's just less of a risk and they don't want to spend the time and hassle of other options. You spend more money to be safe and get things done after a long day of work.
Anyway, my point was that when you have a limit of about $30 per week for groceries, you probably can't afford to take a cab there and back.
Which is why it's complete and utter bullshit.
You sleep in horribly shitty conditions, where noise is a constant problem. You do this day in and day out and with poor nutrition, lack of heating/cooling, and a shitty mattress. All in a attempt to save up for a car, insurance, maintenance costs and gas?
Yet it's just about budgetary constraints. Right you are sir. Right you are.
> My goal is merely to help bring awareness to the issue
He's not trying to do some kind of "poor simulation," and to accomplish his goal, he doesn't have to. Even by just doing a simple exercise like strictly limiting his food budget for a week, he has brought some light upon the difficulty that many people face.
It's ridiculous to think this raises any sort of awareness to the real issues that poverty presents. It's trite and ignorant to think anything otherwise.
Raising awareness is not the same as getting people to even begin to understand the issue, it's just making people realize there is an issue.
You're wrong.
Not living by some extreme set of constraints omg I have to give up everything does not diminish what he is trying to accomplish. You're just adding your own parameters to his experiment.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf see table 2.1
Similarly, 73% of the poor own a car.
I guess the budgetary constraints the poor face are not as severe as you seem to believe.
Reeks of "Hey, look at me (and my company)!!!"
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf
Also, most poor people (78%) don't have even one job, let alone two (nor are they even looking for one).
First of all, that isn't right from the data you linked to. 59% of people below the poverty line don't have a job or aren't in the labor force(Table 6). Secondly, it turns out that not everyone in a family is a wage earner so there is no way to extrapolate from that data point to how many are just living off welfare.
If you look at table 1 in the bls report you can see that those in poverty & and in the labor force without a job were 17%.
In the past I've corrected for the fraction of children. It makes no real difference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441
The fact of the matter is that peterwillis's description of the poor is simply inaccurate for most poor people, most of the time.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/food-stamps-militar...
So there's really very little a rich person can do to walk in the shoes of a poor person- because even if say, Bill Gates gave away ALL his fortune and got himself into crippling debt or something- at least some people will recognize that he's Bill Gates, and treat him differently for it.
No simple solutions to offer here, just saying dis shit is complex.
Jarvis Cocker wrote quite a good song in that vein:
I'd rather see more people learn to do trades, than become "smarter" and likely have even less of a chance of getting a job. We have more than enough "smart" people already.
He can expect $25 an hour. He is competing with $10 immigrant labor, not because they have an equatable skill set (he has a covered cab full of his own tools and is an ultimate DIY) but because the people hiring don't want to pay for quality. Note that the climate of construction radically varies based on locale, but in central PA it is always stuck at the bottom.
And he is capable of electrical, plumbing, roofing, framing, cabinetry, etc. All those professions are stuck at rock bottom because their target demographics are all getting consistently poorer. As the middle class dissolves, consumer grade high skilled trade labor dies. You can't all be building some rich guys back yard amusement park, and most busnesses contract with a trade firm for their construction rather than freelancers. My father has gotten a few industrial gigs, which were always consistent pay sources but also only paid barely minimum wage and usually hired immigrant or just-graduate workers who mess everything up and do shoddy jobs.
So it isn't that simple. If all the poor people got educated in a trade, they would still have no one with money to pay them, unless they got into one of the 3 or so degreed professions that are actually seeing hires (all stem, plus law, and maybe business administration from an Ivy League). And if they were to self teach through online tutorials or other library resources, nobody would look at them for a lack of credentials even if they site their own personal projects ,because they are not "professional" jobs.
So unless you mass migrate these poor people to where money is (and for lack of anything else there is plenty of money even if it is locked up in economic loops outside the ones those in poverty occupy) they could have all the skills in but you would have to effectively hit the reset button on their economic engine when none of them could buy or rent land anywhere to farm or mine.
I watched "Dirty Jobs", great show. I agree a lot of jobs don't require much in terms of IQ, creativity, or rationality, but as you move up the scale of which jobs pay the most, you'll find they do start to require such things that commonly go into 'intelligence' definitions. You'll find counter-examples (like programmers that shouldn't be let anywhere near a computer, or CEOs who don't know a thing about their own business), but fewer and fewer. Bringing this comment back momentarily to the predictive power of intelligence, I would bet that a high IQ compilers programmer can learn to competently do any construction work job (many of such jobs use tools and methods that required high IQ people to come up with...) while a mid or low IQ construction worker couldn't learn to competently do compilers programming. In other words, having higher intelligence makes it a lot easier to change job fields, not just find and work at any job at all. (If you can find me someone with an IQ less than 110 who can understand this and create their own reference implementation without referencing the existing one http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/labor-of-division-episo... I'd be interested in meeting them! It's possible they could change my view on a lot of things.)
I'd rather less people learn to do trades, because trades are the target of two big factors for job displacement: the first is from humans who will do the same work (maybe less quality, maybe not) for less (immigrants, foreigners, starving students, people who just got fired and were living check-to-check so will do anything...), the second is from automation when even the cheap workers are too expensive. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... is a nice comment on the question of whether and how much automation is hurting the jobs market. I would like more companies to get back into the role of educating their workforce and being more willing to accept people with little or no real experience, but I can only see them doing that if either they can get guarantees of working there for X years with the option to fire them at any time, or if the universities are producing so few people capable of working that the companies are forced to educate or otherwise not have anyone to do the (presently expensive to automate) work.
I also don't think we have nearly enough "smart" people already. There are other benefits besides wealth that a more rather than less intelligent average populace receives. So it's worthwhile on those grounds as well to improve a nation's average IQ. Other forms of intelligence enhancement include wiring up computers with internet directly to the brain to allow for even easier access and processing of human knowledge. I'm currently reading What the Dormouse Said, one of the first interesting bits of info was how Doug Engelbart was motivated to augment human intelligence with technology while John McCarthy wanted to retire human intelligence with better AI. I like both approaches but ultimately I'm in the McCarthy camp, though I think a stepping stone may involve R&D of intelligence enhancement through DNA changes. Humans are roughly 4% different genetically from chimps, is there some sort of super-human that could be made that's some small % different to humans yet confers the same breadth of intelligence capabilities over humans that humans have over chimps?
Edit: One other thing I kind of wanted to bring up, is that I do see a lack of empathy among better-off folks for the lesser-off folks. I don't feel much empathy for a lot of lesser-off folks myself, especially ones that consistently make poor decisions in addition to being poor. (There is a question of how much is really "their fault" if you suppose that making good decisions is impossible without a certain level of intelligence...) But I think a lot of it is simply "no one likes a whiner" and a perception that it's the poor people whining when the well-off social justice warriors complain 'on behalf' of the poor. "Dirty Jobs" is a good show if only just to see how those people are just like other people, just like yourself perhaps in some ways, and in fact aren't whining all day about "I have to clean this and I'm being paid this little? How will I feed my family? Gosh life is so hard and privileged people suck."
The system is great for what it tries to do, help people in need. But in my opinion we have gone far too far in trying to remove the 'stigma' of being on aid. Instead of heading in to town to collect our stamps you get an EBT card with money automatically added to your account each month. It's too easy to take the money. When we were on aid we needed it. But having to use those colored pieces of paper in line at the grocery store while everyone else watched was a huge motivator to get out and get a job.
I ate better for those 7 weeks than I had all my adult
life to that point.
Instead of heading in to town to collect our stamps...
But having to use those colored pieces of paper in line
at the grocery store while everyone else watched was a
huge motivator to get out and get a job.
I know arguing with you is useless, but it's this "I worked hard, I got mine, so fuck you" attitude that's making everything worse for the poor. Have some empathy.
For every person trying hard and working to improve their life, there is usually a matching person not giving a damn and enjoying the freedom that not having to work gives them. Do they live in a nice house and drive a nice car? Nope. But they live as well as any college student in any fair sized college town, and had Playstations and X-Boxes long before I did.
But thanks for projecting 'your' issues on me. I never once said I got mine so fuck you. Not even close to that.
I would love to see statistical evidence of this phenomenon. The unemployment rate for labor force participants (which you need to be to collect welfare) is 17% so I'm not sure how you get from there to 50%. Out of ALL people living in poverty 59% don't have job which isn't surprising considering a lot are young or elderly or performing other familial responsibilities.
As for living as well as any college student in any fair sized town I have a hard time understanding how that could possibly be true.
Do I know enough to have a statistical standard? No, but I know enough to let me know that the system is completely and totally broken. The solution is NOT giving even more aid. The solution is to stop requiring people be so dirt poor to get it that they give up. Rather than saying oh - you have too much money / asset / whatever to get get help and forcing them to choose selling their only car or getting help, give them enough help to bring them to a minimum level of security.
If that level is $500/wk and they can go out and EARN $300/wk trying to get ahead, give them $200 more to feel secure in the effort they are making. What we shouldn't be doing is forcing them to zero and telling them at any effort short of $500/wk ends all aid. That is a system designed to create and maintain a 'poor' class of people for very obvious reasons.
Denied because she owned a car and house. I wouldn't be eligible because I own a car.
Which is ridiculous, because that just means she has to sell one to eat. It means that she has to choose between entering that destitute poverty cycle or starve.
She never got the stamps, but has had fleeting employment since.
I've tried this for a few months. It's hard to do just the rice and beans. We modified it by adding salsa, shredded cheese, and tortilla shells to make burritos out of everything. It's probably an extra $20-$30 per month to do that.
Google "frugal living" etc too.
I tried to survive with food stamps for a while when I lived on the streets as a teen. It was impractical for actually supplementing my survival. When you have nowhere to live, you have nowhere to cook.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130914223744-25...
I would have rather read this at the end of the challenge, so there would be some sort of perspective on things.
"The distinctive ripping sound of someone biting into a fresh apple; the maracas-like percussion produced by a canister of Planters’ peanuts; even the change in a person’s voice that occurs when they speak with a lifesaver in their mouth – I was hyper aware whenever those around me consumed. At about 6:25 p.m., I even broke down and paid 40 cents to a colleague for a small handful of peanuts, and soon after, handed over a dime to another for an Atomic Fireball. For those keeping score, I’m down to $5.05 remaining to supplement the groceries I bought at the start of the Challenge."
It reminds me of a trip I took with some friends where we had planned all of our meals as military MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat). We figured that we were very clever for having the military do our nutritional research for us. After a few days of almost exclusively eating these wretched things, I found that I could smell cucumbers being sliced over a mile away. Obviously, things like bacon and hamburgers frying were much stronger even than the cucumbers. I had the same experience as Shalch describes that I found myself marking time until the next meal, and I imagine that I was getting a lot more calories than he is (I was probably burning more too), because we brought some extra food and coffee, and weren't limited by our budget.
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000059478&cy...
I should note that the latest Farm Bill attempted to decouple SNAP funds from the agriculture parts of the bill, which historically was the only way to protect SNAP benefits from being significantly slashed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/07/13/republi...
So, while this is a commendable action on his part, there are individuals inside his company funding candidates and a party that advocates elimination of the entire program, because of supposed moochers and "young bucks" who go and buy steaks, abusing the system. Perhaps he can lead by example and help change some attitudes inside his company.
EDIT: The political donations are from individuals in the company, instead of from a PAC the company controls. There are however, other organizations that Panera may be a part of (The Chamber of Commerce comes to mind) that also have poured a lot of money into Republican coffers.
This swamps any political donations by any of the employees of the company.
This nit doesn't even qualify as microscopic. It'd be better if you just skipped picking it.
Edit: re: your edit, why would you criticize them over organizations they may be a part of?
It is the classic HN desire to be contrarian reaching new lows.
I don't think a $30/week grocery budget is unreasonable at all, with a bit of ingenuity (and, critically, proximity to the aforementioned vendors; food deserts turn this whole thing on its head).
On a per-calorie basis, almost all fresh fruits and vegetables are insanely expensive - someone on $30/week could perhaps afford an occasional banana.
Recently my local Trader Joe's was selling onions at $1.09 (or was it $1.19?) per onion. Per onion!
TLDR, heaven forbid you are rural poor.
He may not have many bean soup / bean salad / crockpot recipes.
Also, there are other food programs where he lives (assuming it's indeed Boston): http://www.massresources.org/food.html
I was provided this information by a girl who volunteered at a soup kitchen. She told me they often harvested this source of still perfectly good bread.
I never checked independently, so if anyone has any idea this is false please let me know.
Here is the article (don't know much about the guy that wrote it, political orientation or so, but it's an eye opener) -
http://blumenauer.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&tas...
One thing that stuck with me was the "car" situation. I didn't drive a car because of my choice (not money), i live in LA, but when our son was born I had to take driving lessons. It kind went well for us, since we can go now to Costco more often, than Whole Foods across the street. Also cutting down to paying taxis, or waiting too much for the bus has a benefit (if only LA's transit, or Santa Monica's one was a bit better).
What do you think about childcare subsidies? If a government gives poorer parents a rebate or a discount (functionally identical to a voucher) on care services or education, is this patronising because the government isn't trusting them to spend the money wisely? Does this infringe upon their agency, or cost them essential self-respect?
A more realistic challenge would be given a weekly budget but make the challenge to last say.. a month or so. But for obvious reasons it won't be as easy to pull off :)
Have you tried to live on SNAP when you don't have to? Though so, given the guy a break.
Look, not saying it's easy to be poor.
Just saying the Panera CEO is doing this to raise awareness about the low minimum wage. He's incapable of living as a poor person, of course he has luxuries -- namely the knowledge of how to escape poverty.
Do we need a raise in the minimum wage? Sure, I guess. But more we need to empower poor people with skills that build the confidence to get themselves out of being poor.
I have a family of 4 and budget $500 for groceries and personal care item plus $120 for eating out.
Please respond to this thread with your household size and budget.
For reference, max monthly SNAP allotment: Household of 1: $200 Household of 2: $367 Household of 3: $526 Household of 4: $668 Household of 5: $793 Household of 6: $952
If you are incapable of getting a minimum wage job, you are either lazy or disabled or mentally ill. Heck, I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage.
I hate to say [[citation needed]], but I really think that if you're going to make an absolute statement which completely dismisses a massive source of suffering, you need to prove it in some convincing way.
"I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage."
...and therefore all people, disabled or not, can find minimum-wage work?
Logical fallacy.
I just looked up op craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.
If you have any skills, there are even more options.
"if you're going to make an absolute statement which completely dismisses a massive source of suffering, you need to prove it in some convincing way."
So far you have said
"I just looked up op craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs"
and
"I know disabled people working for much more than minimum wage."
Neither of these anecdotes comes close to being proof, or even significant evidence, that
"If you are incapable of getting a minimum wage job, you are either lazy or disabled or mentally ill."
I just looked up on craigslist, and there are tons of postings for unskilled jobs, such as delivery, servers, greeters, waiters, busboys, hosts, runners, coat checkers, etc.
If you have any skills, there are even more options.
If your talking points were true, there would be no job postings in such numbers.
In fact, there's a shortage of unskilled labor, particularly in farming, where they need harvesters, pickers, pruners, packers and can't find nearly enough.
http://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/maripos...
Think about $300K jobs - there definitely aren't enough for everyone, but they do exist. Do you see many 300K job postings? Nope, they get taken so fast, there's no need to post them.
I don't think a two week farm job at harvest time is much use to the average member of the urban poor
Here, a Bereau of Labor Statistics estimates we will need 3 million more unskilled laborers (jobs that do not require a high school degree) this decade.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/about/projections-overview.htm
This pretty much destroys your narrative.
How does a projection that in the next 10 years we'll need more unskilled laborers prove that right now there are enough jobs for everyone?