Monday, Jul. 27, 2009 | 07:45 AM
For thousands of people in the central San Joaquin Valley, a tomato costs at least a dollar. So does a single roll of toilet paper. That's the price of being poor.
It's a well-known but unsolved paradox: Poor people often spend more than their middle-class neighbors for groceries.
That includes milk, bread and fresh fruits and vegetables that are grown right here in the Valley. The poor also pay more for staples like toothpaste, diapers and light bulbs.
They have little choice. Traditional supermarket chains, which offer weekly specials and bulk-rate prices, don't often build in low-income urban neighborhoods or farm towns. And many who live in those communities can't easily get to a larger city.
For the Valley's working poor, the "grocery store" often is on the corner or at the nearest gas station, where a six-pack of beer may be cheap, but a gallon of milk is not.
Even those lucky enough to live near a supermarket often leave without the food they want because they can't carry it all home on foot or by bus.
Take Kristine Sevilla. She lives in southeast Fresno, just two blocks from a couple of discount stores, including FoodMaxx. She makes the trip by bicycle several times a week, looking for bargains.
Sevilla, 37, doesn't own a car. She's unemployed and gets $310 a month in welfare for her 11-year-old son. She also gets $190 in food stamps.
She's a careful shopper -- but price is only one consideration. "I have to look at how much everything weighs," she said. "I've had groceries in bags break on me on the way home."
Poor people know that paying $1 for a tomato or $4 for a loaf of white bread at a convenience store means spending twice what they would at a supermarket. But their next chance to shop at a supermarket could be weeks away, said Connie Schneider, nutrition adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension in Fresno.
"When you're hungry, you're looking at something to fill a stomach," she said.
Food policy experts say this is a problem not just for the poor, but for all taxpayers.
Inadequate access to healthy food increases the risk of obesity and chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, straining health-care resources, the experts say. Children without proper nutrition become sicker, stay sick longer and miss more days of school. Academic performance suffers, which leads to higher dropout rates and to more adults without the skills necessary to secure well-paying jobs.
When a head of lettuce is $1.99 and a box of Raisin Bran is $5, families can't afford to eat healthily, said Margarita Rocha, executive director of Centro La Familia, a Fresno nonprofit that serves low-income families.
"If a tomato didn't cost a full dollar, then they could buy two tomatoes or three tomatoes," Rocha said.
"Or they could buy that one-half gallon of milk they need for their children."
Spending more
In the best of times, people in the Valley are among the poorest in the state. And now, recession is pushing even more into poverty.
At least 20% of the people in Fresno County live in poverty, and in Tulare County, it's nearly 24%, according to the 2007 U.S. Census. It's not much better in Merced, Madera or Kings counties.
For some, food pantries, farmers markets and community gardens help with the food bill. But most must economize at grocery stores.
They buy cheaper cuts of meat, less-expensive produce. Even so, food takes a bigger bite out a poor family's budget than that of a more wealthy family.
The poorest 20% of households spent 20% of their income -- $2,005 annually, on average -- on food at home in 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The wealthiest 20% of all households spent 3.3% of their income -- an average of $5,265.
Poor people "tend to spend a larger share of their income on food because you can only cut back so much," said Phil Kaufman, a senior economist at the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That's because for many, a trip to a supermarket is out of the question. They must walk to the nearest corner store. About 7% or 8% of the households in Valley and in other urban areas of California don't own cars.
Nationwide, 4.1% of the population -- or 11.5 million -- are low-income residents living in low-income areas more than a mile from a supermarket, according to the USDA.
A 2006 study by a University at Buffalo marketing professor concluded that prices at corner markets are on average 15% higher than at supermarkets. The study, which echoes others, compared prices on 15 foods at stores in the poorest neighborhoods of Buffalo, N.Y., to those in middle-income and high-income areas.
Tamara Sanders tries to stay out of the convenience store near her home in southwest Fresno.
"They charge an arm and a leg for something I know I could get across town for a lot cheaper," she said.
A roll of toilet paper, for example, is $1.29, she said. "And it's not Charmin."
The mother of five is on a tight budget. She works part time for Fresno Metro Ministry and is going to college. But occasionally she shops around the corner instead of making a car trip across town to a supermarket. This past summer, one trip to the convenience store was for a tub of vanilla ice cream.
It was a bad experience.
"At the bottom, it's green and yellow," she said. "The owner said it melted and froze back up."
Sanders said she left without the ice cream, which the owner put back on the shelf.
Convenience is costly
There's no shortage of convenience stores in low-income Valley neighborhoods. Fresno County has one of the highest concentrations of such stores in the state.
According to a 2008 California Center for Public Health Advocacy study, convenience stores make up 34% of Fresno County's retail-food outlet market.
Supermarkets constitute 12% of the market, produce stores 3%, and farmers markets 1%. Fast-food restaurants make up the rest.
While their prices may be high, owners of independent convenience stores say they aren't gouging their customers. Transportation and low volume drive up their costs.
Because larger chain and discount warehouse grocers in the central San Joaquin Valley are concentrated in cities, residents of many rural areas and some low-income neighborhoods rely on independent grocers or convenience stores.
View Major chain grocers in a larger map
Take the Lassen Market in Five Points, where Chung Gong has been selling groceries to farmworker families for 58 years at the dusty intersection of Highway 145 and Mount Whitney Avenue.
He doesn't apologize for his prices: $4.99 for a gallon of milk, $3.99 for a loaf of bread, 99 cents for a roll of toilet paper, $11.49 for 22 diapers.
"They're not the best prices," he said. But the store saves people a trip to Fresno or Kerman.
He travels the 30-some miles to Fresno to buy most of the perishable food he sells.
A small wholesaler delivers some products. But he can't get many food distributors to serve his store. They don't want to drive 20 miles to sell $20 worth of bread, "so they don't deliver," he said.
Gong, 79, sold meat in a 20-foot meat case for nearly half a century. Now, dry cereal and other foods are stacked in front of it. He can't sell enough meat to have it delivered, he said. On a recent morning, the vegetable case holds a 5-pound bag of potatoes, two bunches of bananas, eight onions and a small box of garlic.
When all the produce is gone, he goes to Fresno, he said. "You can't buy six tomatoes and make it a special trip to Fresno," he said.
Gong wouldn't disclose his profit margin. But "right now the store is not making any money," he said.
In west Fresno, the Two Way Fruit Stand on California Avenue is busy. The warmer that holds barbecue ribs and chicken, tamales and corn dogs must be refilled at least 10 times a day, said Rashid Mansour, an owner.
Mansour said supermarket prices overall are 20% to 30% lower than those at his market. But "they're like 10 times our size, and they buy in bulk," he said.
Most of the customers at Two Way are low-income and reach the store on foot, Mansour said.
Although it's in an urban environment, the nearest supermarket -- Food Maxx, a discount food warehouse -- is about a mile away at Fresno and C streets. "But they can't walk there, especially in the heat," Mansour said.
Many of the customers come for produce -- collard greens, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, apples, green peppers. "We cater to what the community wants," he said.
The price on the collard greens, 99 cents a bunch, is lower than the supermarket price, Mansour said.
But customers pay $1.99 a pound for tomatoes at his store on a day when supermarkets advertise roma tomatoes on sale for 49 cents a pound.
A lack of choices
Nationally, low-income neighborhoods have far fewer chain supermarkets than other areas, a 2006 University of Illinois study found.
Black neighborhoods had only half as many supermarkets, and Hispanic neighborhoods had one-third the number of supermarkets as found in predominately white neighborhoods, according to the study.
The distribution of grocery stores in the Fresno area shows similar patterns, with a scarcity of big-chain supermarkets in some areas and an abundance in others.
Save Mart, for example, has 17 stores in Fresno and Clovis, but just one is south of Olive Avenue. Vons has six stores in the Fresno-Clovis area, with just one south of Olive. Both those stores are on the same intersection, near Kings Canyon Road and Clovis Avenue.
There are economic reasons for supermarket locations, according to real estate experts.
Stores like Save Mart and Vons do well in middle- to upper-income areas, said Mike Mele, a leasing agent with Grubb & Ellis/Pearson Commercial in Fresno who has worked with supermarkets.
Discount grocery stores like Food 4 Less and FoodMaxx make money. But there are not many of them. Save Mart, for example, owns two FoodMaxx stores south of Olive.
Grocery stores catering to the Hispanic market also have moved into some low-income neighborhoods in Fresno, but they also are few. Vallarta Supermarkets opened a store at Chestnut and Butler avenues three years ago. Fiesta Foods Warehouse opened about the same time at Tulare Avenue and First Street. Fiesta bought the store from Vons when the supermarket chain closed it in 2004. Fiesta has a second store at Willow Avenue and Kings Canyon Boulevard.
The low-income areas in the southern parts of the cities are underserved, Mele said. "They're definitely in need of more grocery stores," he said.
Grocery stores are very picky about where they locate because the stores operate on much thinner profit margins than other retailers -- typically 1.5% to 2%.
"The general public doesn't realize the volume has got to be there in order to capture all those pennies," said Save Mart spokeswoman Alicia Rockwell.
Vons owner Safeway declined to comment.
Real estate experts say it's unlikely the Valley will see supermarkets popping up in poor neighborhoods or farm towns any time soon.
It can cost a grocery chain $5 million or $6 million to open a new store, Mele said.
"In today's economy, to buy the real estate, to build the building and to stock a large grocery store requires a lot of money," he said. That's probably why some areas lack such stores, he said.
It's a similar story in many of the small, isolated Valley cities that lack a large chain store with a wide food selection.
Although Save Mart has locations in medium-sized cities such as Selma, Sanger, Kingsburg and Coalinga, it doesn't have any stores in small cities like Huron or Firebaugh.
Vons has stores in Madera and Oakhurst, in addition to Fresno and Clovis, but no other small cities in the Valley.
Even for the poor who live within a short bus ride or walking distance of a major supermarket, choices are limited.
Sevilla, who bikes to stores in southeast Fresno, rarely puts fresh produce on her take-home list.
She and her son both are overweight and should eat more fruits and vegetables, she acknowledged. But produce is expensive unless it's bought in bulk, and that's too heavy and cumbersome to carry home.
"I just do the best I can do," she said.
On a recent trip to Food Maxx, three bags of groceries dangled from her handlebars, including a bunch of bananas. Left behind in the store: a 5-pound bag of apples, and a watermelon she wanted to buy.
