Reply #45: Air mattress sales way up [View All]

[cut.your.crap]

I went to visit my 22 year old nephew. He shares a small 2 bedroom apartment with two other young men. Every one of them sleeps on an inflatable air mattress. There's no beer in the 'fridge. None of them smoke. These are two things I typically think of when I think of poverty and what drains the poorest in our society.
The place is clean and very spartan. They pay $900 a month ($300 each) to live there and this is cheap for the market.
All of them work full time for $8-10 per hour. All of them go part time to community college. Not one of them owns a car. There's only limited bus service in my city from 7am-5pm weekdays and nothing weekends. They do a lot of walking. My nephew has a cheap $75 bike too.
They aren't dumb. They aren't minorities. They all come from lower middle class backgrounds. I struggled when I was young, but NOTHING like this.