Lunch Break

High noon inside a local Publix supermarket in Miami looks something like this at the ready to eat food counter. The food here is excellent, well prepared, hot and delicious albeit a bit too much on the bad side for your health. Neighboring office people come here to buy food for their hot lunch. A typical lunch meal here would cost US $ 10 - 16. If you want to add a serving of soup from the canisters you can see on the left, it will cost you more.

Now let's see... if you are basically an unskilled worker earning Florida's minimum wage currently set at US $7.67 per hour, you would need to labor for 1.5 hour to pay for your daily lunch. At this rate, you need to work half a day just to feed yourself each day.

Extrapolate that simple example and it can be seen why a family needs two wage earners or a single parent family needs two jobs just to get by in this economy.