Anytime I go down South, my first task when I get off the plane is to proceed directly to the nearest Waffle House. It’s not haute cuisine, it’s not that nutritious, and I can make waffles and eggs in the comfort of my own home anytime. Still, as a child of the Deep South who grew up road tripping with my parents all over the area (we were a bowling family travelling to tournaments), Waffle House was a staple of my childhood, and a lot of the flavors we grow up with are the flavors we still connect to as adults. Nobody does a soft, sweet waffle like they do. Nobody does a fluffy omelet like they do. When I was visiting my dad last month and helping to take care of him after his accident, I spent a lot of time at the Waffle House. The food always tastes the same, you can find one anywhere, and they’re always open.

Except this trip, they weren’t always open.

There’s a Waffle House about 10 miles east of my cousin’s house, where I was staying while I was down there. We went together once for breakfast. The next week I was going to stop by on my way back to her place from the hospital, but they were closed. When I pulled into the parking lot and opened my door to get out, a guy in the car at the end of the row opened his door and said, “We closed! We ain’t got no cook right now!”

I’ve never seen a closed Waffle House. I made a sandwich for dinner instead.

A few days later, I was on my way to visit another cousin further north, and Google Maps said there was a Waffle House on the way right off the interstate. When I got there, the restaurant was dark and all the chairs were on the tables. There was nobody inside and nobody in the parking lot. They looked very closed, so I went to Bojangle’s next door and got a breakfast biscuit..

The Friday before my flight back, I decided to go to Waffle House again. There’s one 7 miles west of my cousin’s house near the rehab facility, so I was going to stop by on the way to visit my dad. When I got there it was open, but half of the restaurant was roped off with all of the chairs up on the tables. The girl who took my order said they didn’t have enough people right now to open the whole restaurant.

That was three Waffle House locations in the span of a month that were having trouble staying open. When I got back to NYC, I made jokes about the country being royally screwed because if Waffle House is closed, we’re in real trouble, but I was only half-kidding. Waffle House is an actual barometer for the health of an area, but it’s usually mentioned in reference to a natural disaster or a hurricane.

If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad…

— Craig Fugate, Former Head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

(cont. WSJ)

FEMA never formally adopted the Waffle House Index as an official measure of a disaster’s impact on an area, but along with other chain stores with a high level of disaster preparedness (like Wal-Mart and Home Depot), you can gauge the severity of the damage based on how these types of businesses are faring during and immediately after a crisis. For Waffle House, there’s a stoplight scale.

(cont. Fox News)

Because the South is an area prone to weather disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes), Waffle House employees undergo disaster preparedness training. There’s also a hierarchy of employees based on who needs to be in the restaurant to keep it open and who cannot work based on location or family commitments, and emergency staff is on call during disasters. In addition, the Waffle House supply chain depends on local warehouses stocked with at least a week of non-perishables in the event of major transportation disruptions. (x) You may not get scrambled eggs, but you can get hash browns right after a hurricane. Because all of those variables are taken into account when a location announces itself as red, yellow, or green, it’s an on-the-ground barometer for the local population’s recovery.

“The Waffle House test doesn’t just tell us how quickly a business might rebound — it also tells us how the larger community is faring,” Dan Stoneking wrote on the FEMA Blog in 2011. “The sooner restaurants, grocery and corner stores, or banks can reopen, the sooner local economies will start generating revenue again — signaling a stronger recovery for that community.”

(cont. WaPo)

So what does it say about the state of the country that Waffle House is no longer reliably open? They’re the first to rebound after a severe tornado or a Cat 4 hurricane. They stay open during floods and freak ice storms in the South, but I had three highly uncharacteristic encounters in less than a month. For the entirety of my childhood driving back and forth across the Deep South with my parents, we never pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House and found that it was closed. We’ve been to locations right by the interstate next to podunk nowhere towns and locations deep into the metro areas of big cities like Atlanta and Birmingham. We’ve been at 5am, so my dad could “Get us out on the road before too much traffic,” and at midnight, walking next door for a late dinner after checking in at a roadside motel. They were never closed.

The economy isn’t doing well and neither are everyday folks. We’ve just lived through a pandemic where we watched the richest Americans increase their wealth to evermore unfathomable heights while the rest of us watched our savings wiped out by employment instability. Billionaires are going to upper sky for ten minutes at a time while we can’t pay our rent. This is coming on the heels of being forced to sit still for the better part of a year, which was a first for many segments of the population. People who work multiple low-wage jobs to make ends meet have never had the opportunity to sit still. They got to breathe, take up a hobby, focus on themselves, and actually see the disparity in the country. They don’t want to go back to the grind of being exhausted and mentally drained while seeing news reports of the rich burning money for fun.

The Waffle House can’t recover from the disaster of COVID not because of an interrupted supply chain or damage to its locations. The Waffle House can’t recover from COVID because we the people are broken. The Waffle House Index is struggling to keep its locations at Green because the United States itself is still on Red and can’t recover without a full-scale redistribution of wealth and a complete upheaval in how we think about labor, wealth, and worth in society.

If you get there and Waffle House is closed, that’s really bad. It’s really bad here.

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I woke up to this tweet making the rounds.

A few hours later it’s already gone, and so is the rest of his account, because some people don’t like being confronted with counter-positions to their terrible opinions.

That’s beside the point though. I just wanted to take a moment to try explaining to this corner of the internet what it’s like to be poor and using transit in a metro area like DC or NYC or SF because a lot of people are just genuinely unaware of what it’s like. I lived it for years (I’m still poor for the record, but not Sleeping on a Mattress on the Floor in a Glorified Closet in a Building Where They Make Crack and Meth in the Basement kind of poor like I was) and a lot of people who get up in arms about fare evasion aren’t thinking about the people who evade fares.

Let’s get this out of the way: people with money jump the turnstiles too, in much fewer numbers, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve seen groups of white kids on the Upper West Side in (ugly) designer clothes hop over the turnstile to catch the train because they never take the train and they don’t have a Metrocard and can’t be bothered to do it “just this one time” with their friends on an outing somewhere. I’ve seen professionals wearing relatively expensive office gear run to catch the train and hop over the turnstile because if they stopped to refill their card they would miss their train.

I never see tweets about them. I only see tweets from white people in gentrified neighborhoods playing Captain SaveAMetro being “concerned” with a public entity losing $2 because someone didn’t pay their fare. Do I know for sure that’s what Andrew was referring to? No, but I do know that a few years ago, Columbia Heights was named one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in the country(x) and the Black population went from 58% in 2000 to 43% in 2010. (x)

Anyway, most people who jump the turnstiles aren’t doing it because they’re lazy and they’re not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because they have no other choice. Being poor is making calculated decisions with every penny you have. If you live in a metro area where public transit readily available think about the last trip you took to Target or a similar destination.

If you have your own car, you drove. That’s a luxury that the vast majority of poor people in densely populated areas do not have. We can’t afford a car and we definitely can’t afford to park it.

If you have enough disposable income, maybe you took an Uber. That $15 -$40 round trip (or more!) is two packs of toilet paper or a groceries for a week of dinner. Yeah it’s faster and more convenient, but if that’s not money you can afford to spend, you have to take public transit.

If you have a Metrocard you took the train both ways. That’s the cheapest option and that’s what most of us are left with…unless you don’t have enough to pay for both ways. Being poor means being creative and there were many times I figured out ways to avoid paying twice. In NYC, you can transfer from the subway to the bus for free and vice versa if you use your Metrocard within a couple of hours of swiping. This in place for people who don’t live in transit-heavy areas. If you live in Red Hook and work in Manhattan, you might need to take the bus to the train so you don’t have to walk a mile to the station and you shouldn’t have to pay twice for that. It inadvertently benefitted poor people, because cities don’t do anything for the express purpose of making life easier for poor people.  I would take the train to Target, do my shopping as quickly as possible, and then swipe my card again to take a bus home within the 2-hour transfer window. It would sometimes take me an extra hour to get home, but that’s money I could use to buy lunch the next day.

Another NYC hack from back in the day: there’s a free transfer between 59th/Lex and 63rd because the city wanted to make it convenient to go from the F at 63rd to the NQRW/456 at 59th, but the stations are four blocks away. If I could get what I needed from Target at Bed Bath & Beyond instead, I would take the train all the way into Manhattan and get off at 59th, go the Bed Bath & Beyond on 61st and First, shop as quickly as possible, and go back into the system at 63rd/Lex and take the F for free. I didn’t live anywhere near an F train so sometimes the trip home would take an extra half an hour but, again, I saved enough money for lunch.

If you’ve never paid for a McDouble with quarters, you’ve never had to think about saving $2.50 whenever you can.

So why was I buying McDonald’s instead of cooking? A few reasons.

I lived in an apartment with three other strangers, and nobody had pots and pans. I was working for barely more than minimum wage so I wasn’t able to actually save enough money to buy anything. I used my paychecks on bologna and ramen and made that stretch for a week because that equivalent cost in nutritious food would last for one meal, maybe two.

And I didn’t have time to cook. I worked three crappy jobs to make ends meet, so my day regularly started with waking up at 5am so I could be on the train by 530am and at my job before 7. I’d work from 7 to Noon at the first job (all shifts were less than 5.5 hours because any more than that and the job would have to pay you for an extra break or — god forbid — bump you up to fulltime and give you health benefits) and then hoof it to the next job. I’ve had jobs that were technically close enough to walk, so I would walk the twenty blocks to the next job if the weather was nice enough. If it wasn’t, I’d have to pay money (that I hadn’t budgeted for) to get to my next job, but more on that later. Let’s say the weather was nice. My shift started at 12:30 so I had thirty minutes to walk a mile and eat something. What was I going to eat that wasn’t crap? I can’t afford a $12 salad. I don’t have leftovers from the dinner I couldn’t afford to cook. Lunch was hitting up Wendy’s or McDonald’s for something cheap that I could buy with extra laundry quarters and then I’d clock in for my next 5 hour shift. Clock out at 5:30 and hoof it over to my 3rd job before 6. Same food situation. Same walking or train situation. Another five hours and then I’m on the train home around Midnight. I get home at 1am and, even if I had enough money for a fridge full of groceries, when would I have time to cook them?

I just want to paint the picture for people who’ve never been poor that this is what daily life is like when you are barely scraping by. If you feel like you’re living paycheck to paycheck, but your day is an 8 hour shift in an office Monday – Friday, you don’t actually know how exhausting it is to truly live paycheck to paycheck. You probably haven’t actually lived paycheck to paycheck if you’ve never worked in a place where half the employees got these out of the vending machine on their break:

If your job doesn’t have these in the vending machine because they know their workforce is underpaid and stressed for time, you don’t need to be commenting about fare evasion.

So let’s get back to why someone would evade the fare.

If I just left my job in Soho and I need to get to my job in Chelsea, I could walk for 20-30 minutes, but it just started pouring rain. If I pay for the train, I can’t afford my 4 for $4 to power me through this next shift. I can’t call out because I need those hours on my next check in order to afford my rent, and that’s assuming I wouldn’t be fired for calling out anyway. So I jump the turnstile.

If I’m at home on my day off but one of my jobs calls me to come in, I could decline because I don’t have the subway fare, but that would mean missing out on an extra $50 in my check a couple of weeks from now. I could use some of the lunch money I allotted for the next few days, but what will I eat? Maybe I’ll just pay for a trip to work and then plan to walk back (something I did regularly back in the day — walk home for 3 hours after a shift because I couldn’t afford the fare and the weather was nice) but if work was exhausting or the weather was bad, I might hop the turnstile to come home.

If I’m out of a job but I get a job interview, I don’t want to walk there because I’ll be sweaty, but I need to go, because I need a job. I’m hopping the turnstile.

So maybe we should be more concerned about the reasons people hop the gate than whether the metro is getting their $2? And let’s be clear — they’re not out any money when someone evades the fare. If they didn’t have the money anyway, then no money was missed, because their options were riding for free or not riding at all. In both scenarios, the metro makes no money. And the cost of running a train is exactly the same whether it’s full or empty. So when you get upset about fare evasion, what are you really upset about? That poor people are getting something for free that you had to pay for? Take a beat and think about why that bothers you and then mind your business.

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Trevor Klee, he admits, is a “terrible employee.” But he’s great at working for himself — and at taking tests.

So the 25-year-old entrepreneur started a thriving business of his own. As a test prep instructor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he brings in $100,000 a year tutoring people for the GMAT, GRE and LSAT. “It’s one of those weird skills that turned out to be really monetizable,” he tells CNBC Make It.

Klee is the first to acknowledge he’s benefited from both luck and privilege: “Growing up in a family that talked a lot about money was a definite advantage,” he says. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m good with money, but I’m playing life on ‘Easy’ mode: I’m a single guy with no dependents and I make a pretty solid income.”

Here’s a look at how Klee earns, saves and spends his money, and how he gives it away

(cont.)

He’s 25 years old and makes $100,000 a year paying $825 rent.

When I was 25 I made $30,000 a year paying $900 rent.

I don’t understand who these articles are for.

Gen X & Baby Boomer media is about making millennials feel shitty about not being exponentially more successful and more educated than they had to be at the same age to maintain the same standard of living. Y’all had my salary with a HS diploma working at Auto Zone. Go away.

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