alt Hacker NewsYes, that’s exactly my point. My family has been poor. You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.
The effect of money is the opposite of this. You use it to save time. The poorer you are, the less your time costs effectively and the more things you do yourself, like going to the grocery store, no matter how far.
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> The poorer you are, the less your time costs
Personal time is a highly constrained resource: finite, non-renewable, non-storable and mutually exclusive. You can’t simply value someone’s personal time based upon their paid time. (Though people love to do this anyways…as if a poor person’s life time is objectively worth less than a richer person’s.)
Poor people often have less time available, less supply, than others due to longer transportation times as well as having more chores that they must complete by themselves.
For example, a person can be making $15 / hour and only have 4 hours of available waking personal time per day. If during those 4 hours they must complete all personal and household chores, as well as find some time for recuperating, then they would likely value those 4 hours as much more than $15 each.
Or considered another way: the value of the first hour in a day is not worth the same as the last hour. That last hour is valued according to the tasks that must be accomplished during that time and what is lost if the tasks are not successfully accomplished. And when under stress, the value can change drastically.
In rural America their often is no bus.
In the city I grew up in they had no busses until a local company paid for the first one simply to get the poorer employees to work reliably because it was impacting production.
There are still many places in America where you either walk or you own a car, period. When the car breaks down and you need parts.. you walk. Worse there are no sidewalks. When the snow is a foot deep you risk frostbite and hypothermia.
There's limitations on how much you can carry on the bus.
Poverty is nothing if not diverse. You can't judge what others are dealing with based only on what was true for your experiences.
Instacart is a SNAP/EBT vendor, so clearly they have low income customers. Some people prefer online shopping because of the stigma of using benefits in-person. For others without reliable access to transportation, delivery might be the most reasonable option. Public transit also takes time that might be better spent with family, or at your job.