Car Tires: New, Used or Rental?

Rochelle was going to meet me at my house for an interview at 9:30 a.m. First she had to drop her kids off at school and buy a tire for her car. Nothing goes smoothly in Rochelle’s life so I expected I would hear from her telling me she would be late. She texted me at 9:00. She would be an hour late. She texted me slightly before 10:30 and spilled out the more complicated problem: She had bought a tire the day before, but it was “messed up,” so she had gone back to the tire store to get it replaced. I suspected it was even more complicated than that, and it was. She had bought a used tire. The store did not have another used tire to replace the defective one, and she didn’t have enough money for a new tire. She asked me if I knew any place to buy tires. I did, however I buy new tires. I suggested we meet at a Goodyear tire store near my house. That was about a twenty-minute drive from where she was.

This is a blog about poverty. The real tire problem was that though Rochelle badly needed a tire, she couldn’t afford one. Her solution was to buy a used tire from a store she had never dealt with before. The price of the “messed up” used tire had been $75. Rochelle met me at the Goodyear store. She had been refunded her $75, but a new tire was going to cost $165, inclusive of labor and tax. Rochelle didn’t have that much money. I said I could give her $60 for that day’s interview and the next interview, but she would still be $30 short. Rochelle had recently had her thirty-eighth birthday. I decided I would make up the $30 and call it her birthday present. The tire problem for today was solved. That was problem #1 of the day.

The next question, problem #2, was when would the car be ready. Rochelle had to pick up her fourteen year old daughter from school at 3:30. The car would be ready “by the end of the day,” said the Goodyear employee. The car wasn’t ready until slightly after closing. By then it was rush hour. What was a twenty-minute drive without traffic became a forty-five minute drive and the daughter had already been waiting at the school for two hours. I could have driven Rochelle to pick up her daughter at 3:30, but then it was questionable if we could get back to the tire store before closing. Then Rochelle would have no car to transport her children to school and herself to work the next day. So I decided it was better to wait until the car was ready before picking up the daughter. Rochelle’s daughter could watch her brother practice for that evening’s school football game. So her daughter had to wait, which upset Rochelle, but she finally had a new tire.

Rochelle’s life isn’t easy. Everyone hates buying tires. They are expensive and some people can’t afford them. For that reason there is a market for used tires. They can be safe to buy if you know and trust the dealer, but buying them can be dangerous if you don’t. There are also tire rental stores for people who just want to have their car pass the required state safety inspection. Poverty presents problems on a daily basis that many people aren’t even aware of. This is Rochelle’s life.

Rochelle Becomes An Essential Worker

Everything changed on March 20, 2020 when Covid-19 started running our lives. Rochelle had a job that interacted with the public; It couldn’t be done from home. She had become an “essential worker.” Rochelle had scheduled a reunion in March with family members in Dallas. Even though it was strongly suggested that one not gather in groups, Rochelle went ahead with it anyway. She didn’t seem concerned at all. I, on the other hand, isolated. Very quickly the grocery store Rochelle worked for limited the number of customers that could enter their stores, set up plastic partitions between customers and cashiers, and started limiting their store hours so that the stores could be sanitized during closed hours. In June 2020 all employees received a $2.00/hr. pay increase; Hazard pay for working as an essential worker during a pandemic. Sick days were increased and employees were told not to come in if they were ill. Nevertheless, essential workers were in contact with a lot of different people and had a high risk of contracting Covid-19. Rochelle often had her mother at home. Her mother was on dialysis and not in good health. And there were still two children at home. COVID infection was a constant problem. Her children were being taught virtually.

In December of 2020, just before a COVID spike, I did have lunch with Rochelle at an outdoor location near her new apartment. She had wanted to see me because she had some exciting news. It had been about a year since we had seen each other in person. The news was that she had been promoted to the lead employee at her store’s curbside pickup department. She got a pay increase again. She was excited about it. And proud. She still didn’t want to move back into management, but this was a supervisory job. It made her know that the company was pleased with her work. It was great news.

Covid-19 vaccines started to be available in December 2020. At first they were hard to get for most people. I asked Rochelle if she were going to get one. “No, I’m not sure they are safe; They were developed too fast,” said Rochelle. “I think I’ll wait about a year before I get one.” She stuck with that decision even though I sent her all sorts of information about the safety of the vaccines. I discussed how I and all my friends and relatives had received the vaccine when we managed to sign up for one in January/February 2021. I asked her to talk to her doctor. Soon her store’s pharmacy was a location people were going to for their vaccines, but still she refused. I told her her mother’s life was at a high risk without the people around her getting vaccinated. I sent her article after article encouraging her to change her mind. Nothing worked. And because of that I was also unable to see her. I was vaccinated at the end of January and by the end of February Rochelle was the only friend or relative I had who was still unvaccinated.

Rochelle and her children got vaccinated in February 2022. A year after she was first able to get it. Just like she had said. She waited a year. People are still reading this blog six years after I ended it. Some people want to know how Rochelle is now doing. They have become vested in her journey. I told this to Rochelle and she suggested maybe we should start interviewing her again. I talked to my anthropologist sister Jessie and we decided I should interview Rochelle about twice a month. This time the pay will be $30 per interview plus lunch. If all goes as planned she will be in my living room this coming Monday. “Lots has happened,” said Rochelle. I saw her about a month ago but “lots” can happen quickly in Rochelle’s difficult life.

Changes and More Changes; And Teenage Rebellion

Rochelle moved to a new apartment in January 2019. It is much further from where she works. Her old apartment was falling apart and was in a high drug use neighborhood. Her two younger children moved to new schools and her elder daughter, Kalinda, started running away from home not long after the move. Kalinda was sixteen and finally moved in with her boyfriend in his mother’s apartment. Through all the turmoil Rochelle could not focus on her job. When her position was eliminated, she stepped away from management and started working in the grocery store’s curbside pickup department. Luckily her pay remained the same. “I just couldn’t concentrate on my job responsibilities with all the problems I had with Kalinda,” Rochelle told me last week. It was our first interview in six years. Since the store was turning towards self-checkout, and COVID hit soon afterwards, this turned out to be beneficial in the long run.

Kalinda enrolled in a high school which allowed her to attend classes around a work schedule. She had been hired at a fast food place. Rochelle was not going to support her daughter if she lived away from home, though she gave her some money now and again. The daughter’s life became one of fighting with her boyfriend, fighting with her mother, attending school usually, and working at her job. Somehow she did manage to graduate, and somehow she did manage to get a driver’s license. She has not gotten pregnant as of this post, though her mother told me she was not using birth control. “I don’t think she can get pregnant,” Rochelle told me. I asked why she thought that to be true. “Her cycles aren’t regular,” she answered. It is those thoughts that caused Rochelle to become pregnant with her second child. She too had not used birth control.

Though no longer on food stamps, or SNAP as it is now called, Rochelle was still on Section 8 housing vouchers. She was having a hard time making ends meet due to her still huge debt payments. Though Rochelle’s hourly pay had been increasing steadily, so had her debt. She decided to take a second job to supplement her income and hired on with a delivery service whose parent company was the grocery store she worked for. I warned her that it was wear and tear on her car and that she would be responsible for paying her own taxes on that income. She didn’t care. She needed money.

These are the major changes that happened in Rochelle’s life from the time of my last real post in 2016 until the end of 2019. I would see her for lunch now and then and she would sometimes call me on the phone or text me. Things hadn’t really gotten better and Kalinda’s rebellion had made her life much more stressful. When 2019 ended, her eldest daughter was living with her unemployed boyfriend, her mother was still on dialysis with her health declining, and Rochelle was working two jobs trying to make ends meet. She was often in tears. And none of use knew of the COVID challenges ahead.

Still Moving Forward- One Step At A Time

It has been over a year since I have posted anything about Rochelle. I stopped interviewing her on a weekly basis so there was less to report, and her life has calmed down somewhat. Her car has continued to work, but more importantly she has remained employed at the grocery store chain; she is moving forward and upwards in the company. Just a week ago she graduated from their management training school. It was a 12 week program made for upwardly mobile hourly employees. The company has a more advanced management training program for those employees who are ready to go into salaried executive positions. This program is usually reserved for those with college degrees, but Rochelle tells me that one can also be accepted if one is already working for the company and shows great promise. She hopes for that in the future.

Upon graduation Rochelle was promoted from supervisor of cashiers to manager of cashiers; she received two raises and was moved to a new store. Her new store is small with fewer employees than she is used to, but this makes her a big fish in a small pond; she may be able to effect positive change more swiftly in a store like this. According to Rochelle, the store does need some changes and many of the managers are new, including the store manager. Just in the short time she has been there she has seen areas that need some tweaking and is working towards implementing needed changes.

I had a congratulatory lunch with Rochelle a couple of days ago; now she is a person working in a career with goals for the future. She has come a very long way since I first started interviewing her. She seems excited about her future.

Rochelle still doesn’t make much money, though she has had many raises. Three children are expensive for everyone. Nevertheless, her paycheck is paying for more of her expenses. She no longer receives food stamps, and for reasons other than her income, she no longer receives disability for her eldest daughter. Her daughter was born with seizures at birth but has been seizure free for two years. Rochelle purchased health insurance for herself through her company in January and is contributing to their retirement program as well. She does, however, still receive section #8 housing vouchers, and her children’s health insurance is still covered by Medicaid. Though Rochelle is earning more, losing the food stamps and the disability payments makes it so she really is not living on more money. Rochelle’s on going goal has been to break the poverty cycle her family has been caught up in for generations. She is successfully moving in that direction. I am very proud of her and she is proud of herself.

Rochelle Moves Ahead

Two weeks ago Rochelle told me she had been chosen to start classes to be a trainer for the grocery store she works for. I had been very concerned when I had talked to her about a month or so before because she was sounding very negative about the store and her job as a cashier supervisor. She has held that job for almost a year. I had seen Rochelle lose interest in jobs before and instead of talking about promotions and a desire to move ahead, she had now been talking about wanting to change stores to get away from her boss. “I think she likes Hispanics better,” Rochelle had told me. Somehow something changed, however, and the boss she disliked talked to her and suggested the new position. “You’ll be able to be out of the store, you’ll get to meet new people; I think you have a future with our company,” her boss had told her.

Rochelle interviewed for the position and got it. She’ll only be a trainer part-time and will still do her cashier supervisory position part-time as well. She is excited about it and starts her training for the position in two days. We went out to lunch recently; she was again positive about her work and was no longer talking about changing stores.

I don’t see Rochelle as often as I used to when I interviewed her weekly, but we usually see each other for lunch about every 6 weeks or so. She recently received another raise and seemed pleased about that.   Though her pay is still low, she says it is more money than she has ever earned. Her children are doing well in their new Charter schools, her car is working, and she has a new job position to look forward to. She still can’t make ends meet, but her life is better this year than it was last year and the year before. This week the children are on Spring Break from school and Rochelle suggested she bring them over to my house for a visit. I think I’ll suggest we all go out to lunch.

I have been asked to update how Rochelle is doing since I haven’t done so in about 6 months. Life is still tough, but it is better.

Charter Schools

 I’ve had lunch with Rochelle twice since we stopped having our weekly interviews. Her children have started school for the fall season, and now all three are enrolled in charter schools. The 12-year-old daughter attends a separate charter school from her two younger siblings since she is now in middle school. Somehow I hadn’t heard about the change for the younger ones; when Rochelle mentioned it as we were having lunch on the first day of school, I was quite surprised.  The eldest, Kalinda, had been quickly pulled from her regular school a couple of weeks into the school year last fall. She had started the 6^th grade in middle school and had received threats of violence via Facebook . Rochelle had expressed concern about this middle school well in advance of her daughter’s attending it.  6^th grade at the new charter school had gone well for Kalinda last year, though she tested at a lower level than was average for 6^th grade. She was put in a class that met her education level and she completed the year with no other problems. This year she is enrolled in volleyball as an after school activity.

Work is still going well for Rochelle. The grocery store was hosting a major visit by corporate bigwigs a few weeks ago, and Rochelle got very stressed when she was asked to participate in the “walk-through” of her area of responsibility. I told her this was her chance to shine and she would do fine. She had never been in any situation requiring managerial responsibility before, so this was very new for her. She had seen visits from high-level managers at the department store we both worked for several years ago, but those “walk-throughs” had not really been a concern for people in sales positions.  When we met for lunch I asked her how it had gone; she went into great detail, telling me what she had been asked and how she had answered the questions. She was quite proud of herself, and it sounded to me as if she had done a great job. The experience has built her confidence and allowed her to put another plank in the platform she can use for future advancement.

Rochelle now has another car. It was purchased from the same place she had bought her previous car, though that one had been a true lemon. With no credit, Rochelle had no choice. This time, however, she did ask them why so many customers were on record as having bought bad cars from them. She did not tell them about all the problems she had had with her previous purchase because she was trading it in toward her new car. The fact of the matter was that the car dealership had already received far more money from Rochelle than the car had been worth, at a 24.99% interest rate, and the dealership was more than happy to sell her another one at the same inflated price and interest rate. People in Rochelle’s situation are the people who make up this dealership’s customer base.

I’ve told Rochelle to call me for lunch and a visit every few weeks so she can let me know how she is doing. Rochelle, herself, had suggested that it was probably time for the interviews and the subsidy that went with them to come to an end. They had begun as a way of supplementing her minimum wage job at the group home, and then the subsidy was increased so that she could afford to take the job at the grocery store that had a better hourly wage and much more scope for advancement, but that was not initially full-time. Now that the job is full-time, and Rochelle has received several raises and promotions, she felt that she should stand on her own two economic feet. We did, however, decide to continue a portion of the subsidy, to be deposited monthly into Rochelle’s first savings account.  Rochelle has a job, a car, possibly even a career to move forward with. Things are somewhat more hopeful than they were when we started the interviews two years ago. But now, her daughter’s teenage years are quickly approaching. I think this is going to become a real challenge for Rochelle.

Preventing Teenage Pregnancy: Breaking the Poverty Cycle

I have been interviewing Rochelle for well over a year, and I wondered how her thinking about teenage pregnancy had changed over that time. I wondered if there had been any change at all. Her eldest daughter just turned 12 this month and is in middle school. When we first discussed it, Rochelle had said she thought her daughter was too young for a conversation about sex, even though Rochelle’s own sister had a baby at 14 and Rochelle had a baby at 17. Her daughter was 10 at the time. Over the last year and a half I had brought the subject up a few times, but it never went very far. Rochelle said she knew she needed to have “the talk,” but either thought her daughter was too young, or she thought the school would handle it. Her answer to the same question was very different when I again raised it a couple of days ago. We have only two more interviews until our agreed upon interview period is over, and I wanted to see what she now said.  “I think everything will be fine,” she told me. “My children have adult supervision at all times. My sisters and I didn’t; and we had a mama who was bringing different men home all the time. I don’t do that; I’m raising my children better than that,” she emphasized. “Anyway, black people just do things differently from white people,” she told me. In Rochelle’s world, having a baby or several babies while still in your teen years is more common than not. She talks about wanting to break the cycle of poverty that her family has experienced for generations, but still doesn’t seem to understand how becoming a teenaged mother has contributed to this cycle. One hundred percent of her female relatives had become mothers while in their teens. One hundred percent of her relatives that I am aware of are living in the culture of poverty. Her eldest sister is not on government assistance, but her family of six, plus a relative’s baby, live in a cramped two bedroom apartment.

“Adult supervision is good and needed,” I told her. “But it is not enough. What will happen when your children start dating?” “They don’t date now,” Rochelle said. I told her I thought she was also uncomfortable about having “the talk” with her daughter. “Yes, I am uncomfortable,” Rochelle said, “The school will handle it.” “That didn’t stop your sisters or you from becoming pregnant,” I replied. “But I’m supervising my children, and I don’t bring men home like Mama did,” she repeated. “If you are going to break the cycle of poverty in your family, you’re going to have to stop teen pregnancy in your family,” I said. And then we moved on to other subjects such as how her job is going.

Her job is going well. Next week she will graduate from her work sponsored management-training program. She had given her “final exam” which was a five-minute presentation of what she had learned and how she was going to use the knowledge going forward. In that presentation she held up a magnet I had given her, which said: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”   Several of the managers who were watching her presentation came up to her later and said they loved the quote. “I think I did good,” Rochelle said. She is comfortable talking about her progress at work, but not about the subject of teen pregnancy. A year and a half ago she could just think it wouldn’t happen to her children, but now, with her daughter reaching puberty, she is still so uncomfortable with the idea of discussing sex with her daughter that she cannot bring herself to deal with the problem. Clearly, despite Rochelle’s hard work and impressive successes at work, the power of the culture she grew up in continues to exert its influences.

College Ahead

“Danyell’s going to college,” Rochelle told me several months ago. Danyell is her eldest sister’s first child, who was born when her mother was 14. Rochelle’s sister dropped out of high school, had another child with the father of the first, then married a man and had three more children. She is recently divorced from the father of the three youngest children. Danyell is going to first go to the local community college and then her plans are to transfer to a state college thirty miles away. Yesterday was graduation day and Rochelle and her family went. Rochelle is the only one to have graduated from high school in her immediate family; now the eldest cousin of Rochelle’s children has graduated from high school and is going to college. Danyell’s mother has had a stable job as a receptionist at a pediatric center for many years and her ex-husband also has had a stable job. He had been living with the family since the two older children were young. It seems to have made a huge difference in the lives of the children. Though now divorced, he is still a factor in this family’s life.

This week I will ask Rochelle about the graduation and what her children thought about it. When I first was learning about the family dynamics I thought Mary-Jane, the eldest sister, would have been the one to have had the most difficult life. She wasn’t because she had a stable job and was not a single mother. Five children isn’t easy for anyone, especially when the first was born when the mother was only 14, but she has made it work so far. Currently she is not on any public assistance and hasn’t been since she married the father of her youngest three children. Having a help-mate in the family has made all the difference in the world.

Can Poverty Be Solved?? One Reader’s Thoughts

I have now been interviewing Rochelle every week for  a year and a half; my last interview will be done the week of June 28th of this year. I’ve known Rochelle for 12 years, and she will remain my friend; she isn’t really looking forward to the weekly interviews ending because the time has provided her with the ability to discuss her problems.  A reader’s comment from a year ago has stayed with me and now, as this project comes to an end,  I think the comment needs to be given its own page.  Rochelle has a better job now, a possibility of job advancement, a better sense of how to work towards solutions to problems, but the strangle hold of generational poverty is so huge that I too often can’t even think about where to begin with helping her.  Magic wands don’t exist. How can she possibly move forward when everything is against her?

 

Submitted on 2013/05/13 at 11:51 am
This one has grabbed me and won’t let go. I read the whole site and have to tell you that I can’t read it any more. My reasons are not complicated, just difficult to put into words. I’ll try. I know Rochelle, or at least I know dozens of rochelles. The details of their lives are etched on my brain, and those details never change. The same lifetime gets replayed. I can’t help any of them, except in minuscule ways, but revisiting the particulars leaves me feeling deflated, crushed even, and I just can’t do it. Years ago Jim and I decided that our charitable donations would no longer go to organizations providing direct help to people, because we actually believe these “escape valve” non-profits just allow the country to ignore the depth and breadth of its cycle-of-poverty problem. So we only give to public policy organizations that seek institutional change. That’s what I mean by minuscule ways. Even if Rochelle were all of a sudden my daughter, I would have no idea where to begin to make her life right. She needs counseling, mentoring, quality childcare, a good job, reliable transportation, debt relief…and a new set of habits so that she doesn’t have to keep asking why bad things happen to her when at least some of them are the direct result of her doing things without thinking them through first. Money alone wouldn’t solve the problem — if it would, that would be the easy way out. And if Rochelle has come this far with absolutely no positive influence in her young life, can we at least hope that her own kids will fare better for having an intelligent, thoughtful mother? Maybe, but there’s no guarantee. So I can’t read this any more for the same reason I wouldn’t go out in the desert sun without a hat — I know when something can harm me, and I have to protect myself.

The Nightmare of Poverty

The ultimate terror for white people is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis.  People speak of getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare.  The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here.  They ought to get off that highway.  The nightmare isn’t in their heads.  It’s a real place.  There are children living here.”

 Jonathan Kozol, St. Louis Dispatch, 1991

 

 “She told me the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life was when her parents divorced three years ago,” Rochelle told me last week, punctuating the statement with a loud laugh. She was talking about a conversation she had had with a co-worker whose position is one step up from hers.  The woman is 19, married with no children, and attends the state university.  Her husband has a job with the same grocery store and also attends the state university.  Rochelle had a very hard time understanding how a parent’s divorce could be the worst thing a person could have gone through.  “I’ve never even had a father,” Rochelle said.  “I don’t even know who my father is! I’ve lived through my house burning down and a little baby dying in the fire when I was 11.  I’ve had no Christmases when I was growing up, or birthday parties, or food.  She at least has two parents.”  For Rochelle, the divorce of one’s parents didn’t seem to compare with many of the events of her own upbringing.  How could divorce have had such a strong impact on her co-worker?  Rochelle keeps her difficult life to herself, so she didn’t say anything to the woman.  She saved her amazement for me.

About 15 years ago I drove my friend, Dick, through an old and very poor neighborhood of Laredo, Texas.  Laredo is a border city on the shores of the Rio Grande, where a huge proportion of the population lives below the poverty line.  I thought it was something Dick most likely had never seen, and I thought he needed to see it.  I’ll never forget Dick’s comment:  “No wonder they all vote Democratic,” he had loudly exclaimed.  Dick is a Republican and even called Social Security “the dole” when he was eligible to receive it.  That was as close as Dick ever came to seeing the nightmare of poverty, but he still doesn’t understand it, and he sure doesn’t want to get closer to it.  This, of course, is a great part of the problem when searching for solutions to poverty in our country. We can’t fix what we refuse to see and understand.

If you are new to reading this blog, I suggest you go to some of the very first posts so you can better understand Rochelle’s life.   The earlier blogs set the stage for the future ones.  They depict a life that happened right here in my town.  Not all that far away from my house, on the other side of the tracks, or in this town’s situation, the other side of the interregional highway.  Life is different on that side of town, as Rochelle’s conversation with her co-worker points out so dramatically.   Poverty won’t find solutions until more people understand how this nightmare of poverty develops and continues.  And lest we comfort ourselves with the thought that poverty is simply a fact of life that can never be eliminated, let’s rethink that notion.  For one thing, poverty never existed until cities developed; it is not a natural human condition.   And for a second thing, poverty has been all but eradicated in some countries, notably in Scandinavia; if a society has the will to eliminate poverty, it can be done.