I used to choose between eating lunch and riding the subway to work, because I would count my loose change in the morning or the night before, and I often had only enough money for one or the other. I was working three jobs because I had degrees in anthropology and economics that were wholly useless without any related experience. I also had years of retail under my belt but the NYC market only valued “New York Experience” so my little mall in South Carolina didn’t cut it. Back then, the minimum wage was about $8 an hour and I wasn’t being paid much more than that.
Bed Bath & Beyond: $10.50
Bath & Body Works: $9.00
Uniqlo: $11.00
On some days, I would work all three jobs. A typical day of travel and expenses started with waking up around 4am in the deepest parts of Bushwick off the J-train where I shared an apartment on Schaeffer with three roommates and one bathroom for $850 a piece. I would shower, eat a bowl of cereal, and check to see how much money I had left in my account. I could almost never pool enough money to buy a Weekly or Monthly pass, so I pretty much paid for every trip. At two dollars, each subway ride was two items off a dollar menu, so I had to budget accordingly. I hopped the J train around 5am so I could make it to Soho by 6am to do visuals at Uniqlo before they opened. After a five hour shift, it was on to my next job.
I got off at 11am and I needed to be at Bath & Body Works on 23rd Street by Noon. Anyone who has ever worked retail knows that the end time on your schedule is not the time you actually leave the building. There’s always a customer interaction that pulls you in a bit longer plus all of the things you do after you clock out that counts as “stealing time” if you do it while you’re on the clock. You need to pee, but you’ve been holding it because you already took a 15 minute break. You have to place your walkies and headsets a certain way, put your nametag and smock a certain way, change into your street clothes if you had to wear something specific, etc. I usually left around 11:15, and I needed to eat. With my salary, I couldn’t really afford Tupperware or containers to make food and take it to work, and I needed to eat on the go anyway, so I usually bought something to eat during my walk to my next job.
The subway from Uniqlo to Bath & Body Works was about 8 minutes, but I usually walked the mile and a half so I could save those two dollars for later (or save them for a literal rainy day). I would eat a burger and fries from McDonald’s or something on the way. On rare occasions I would splurge on a $7 salad from the deli.
Once I got to Bath & Body Works I had a few minutes to sit down, send a text message or two, and then hit the salesfloor. There’s nothing taxing about selling lotions and sprays and I had done it in college, so the job wasn’t stressful. I don’t really care when white women get upset about receiving inconclusive information regarding the status of White Tea & Ginger coming back for June Sale. I would work another five hour shift until 5pm, with a 15 minute break to pee, and then it was time to hang up my apron and make my way to my third job of the day.
This trip saw me most likely to take the subway. By 5pm, I had already been on my feet for ten hours and I would have to power walk to make it 2.5 miles uptown before my 6 o’clock shift. Jumping the turnstile during rush hour was a recipe for disaster because cops are very good at hiding in crowds. Plus, 23rd street on the 4/5/6 is a busy station and they like to put cops in busy stations. If I took the subway I’d have to pay the fare. I could try to sneak onto an M15 bus up 1st Avenue without paying (it’s much easier to get on a bus using the backdoor than hop a turn style) but the subway was so much faster — I could get to Bed Bath & Beyond and sit down for awhile before my shift at 6pm. Still, there were times when I simply didn’t have the extra money, saw cops in the subway station, and the bus was running late so I opted to walk.
Along the way I’d grab a chicken & rice or a couple of kebabs from a street cart for dinner.
Bed Bath & Beyond on the Upper East Side had its challenges because the people who shopped there were poor people who didn’t know they were poor. We had so many older white customers who perhaps had a different standard of living in the 1980s and were still chasing the finer things while pinching every penny. Due to the generous (ludicrous) return policy (which is part of the reason they are out of business now), customers would bring in used anything from appliances to cookware to sheets. We had an endless supply of latex gloves at our disposal to handle possibly soiled fabrics from customers trying to squeeze a dollar so tight a booger came out of George Washington’s nose.
Closing shifts at retail were unpredictable. We closed at 10, but then we had to count the money and put the store back together. A 6pm shift needed to end by 11pm, or else you would be forced to clock out and take a break due to OSHA regulations, so we tried our best to get all of the 6pm folks out first while the 7pm or 8pm people stayed later to do the grunt work. Sometimes I would clock in at 6 and a manager would say “hey, we had some call outs, can you stay later?” And of course I said yes — I needed the money. So my 5-hour shift would be extended to 8 hours with 30 min for lunch (but not too often, because if you work 32 hours a week for too many weeks in a row, the company is forced to upgrade you to Full Time and offer you benefits, so that was simply unacceptable). I would leave between 1:30 and 2:00 am, exhausted, up since 4am, tired from being on my feet, and having walked 4 miles just to commute between jobs along with all the walking done in laps around the stores.
When I trudged down the stairs at 59th and Lex to catch a Yellow or Green train downtown to connect with a J that would send me back to Brooklyn, I almost always hopped the turnstile. There was no one around, my feet hurt, and I needed that two dollars to get me back to work the next day and feed myself between my three jobs.
Today, I rarely take the subway. A few times a month I might meet friends in another part of the city, but since I moved to Wall Street, most people just visit me down here. They either work here and stop by after (or during lunch) or they pass through here for some reason or another and we can have drinks or brunch or a movie. I can do all my errands down here and my office is around the corner from my apartment building.
But when I see the NYPD in a shootout over $2.90, when I see the NYPD bullying people for accepting a fare from another kind rider who tapped them in, when I see the NYPD throwing hundreds of officers into the subway, spending millions of dollars to recover a fraction of that amount it takes me back to working three jobs and just trying to make it from point A to point B without being arrested. If the NYPD wants to punish someone for the MTA’s budget deficit, they should go parade around Kathy Hochul’s house and ask her where our congestion pricing went.
Policing poor people is never the answer that resolves anything but is always the first tactic because we live in a country where being poor is a moral failure. If you’re poor, you must not work hard enough. If you’re poor, you must have some moral failure in your life. If you’re poor, you deserve to suffer.
The poor are working harder than any of the rest of us and if they need a free subway ride, we should all look the other way and let the MTA find the money elsewhere.
Leave a Reply