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The Huffington Post
IMPACT... Feel
The Sticker Shock Of Someone Who Lives In Poverty
Sarah Ruiz-Grossman
Editor Caution: Language... Imagine if instead of $4.88 per gallon,
your milk suddenly cost $24.40. It hurts, right? Well, that’s how
buying everyday necessities can feel for families in poverty.
An ad campaign called Poverty Line Prices, launched last month by San
Francisco Bay Area nonprofit Tipping Point Community and ad agency
Goodby Silverstein & Partners, shows how the cost of basics, such
as bus fare and milk, would feel if you were living on the poverty
line, according to a news release.
For instance, if a gallon of milk costs $4.88, that’s about 0.02
percent of the annual income of someone living on the poverty line in
the U.S, defined as $24,257 per year for a family of four. The ad
multiplies the milk’s price by five, so it eats up the same proportion
of a typical income in the San Francisco area of about $121,000 per
year after taxes (the city’s average salary is about $107,000, reports
the San Jose Mercury News). Suddenly, a gallon of milk costs a whopping
$24.40.
The goal is to make people feel just how much buying everyday items
would hurt if they were living in poverty.
“Every day, more than one million Bay Area residents are forced to
choose between putting food on the table and paying the rent, buying
medicine and paying for school books,” Daniel Lurie, founder of Tipping
Point Community, says in the release. “Lack of financial resources is
just one of the many challenges facing those living below the poverty
line.”
About 13.5 percent of Americans were living in poverty last year,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And in San Francisco, the rising
cost of living has left many families struggling to get by.
On an interactive website built for the campaign, you can enter your
own salary to see how much the price of everyday items, like toilet
paper and medicine, would increase if they were to reflect the
proportion of your income these purchases would consume for someone
living in poverty.
Entering a salary of $50,000, the price of toilet paper about doubles
from $3.46 to $6.54, and the price of rent goes from an already pricey
$3,440 to $6,548 per month.
The group took the experiment one step further by conducting it live in
a grocery store in the Nob Hill neighborhood and filming it. As items
are rung up at the cash register, the totals are inflated to reflect
the five times higher cost of items for people living in poverty in the
area. Needless to say, customers are outraged.
“I mean, I come here all the time,” one woman says in the video. “That
tea is not fucking $25.”
“Fifty dollars for soup!” another man says. “That’s a fucking joke.”
The video cuts away to a black screen with some harrowing statistics:
“For Bay Area families living on $24,300 or less, this is what every
day feels like, in every store,” the video reads. “Because when you
earn five times less than average, basic needs are five times harder to
afford.”
The video ends with a link to the Tipping Point Community website. The
group funds nonprofits in the Bay Area that work on issues including
education and housing. It has raised more than $100 million since 2005
to support 600,000 people in need.
See the videos and enter your salary to see what it’s like for people
in poverty to buy milk in this article
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