Mainers speak on food access and community: Jamie and Tracey

Jamie

“Every month about $25,000 in SNAP EBT transactions happen at our store. Every dollar spent in SNAP equals about $1.54 in estimated local activity. Regardless of what your politics are, when money turns around and puts more money in the economy – that’s a slam dunk. So do that math — the $25,000 we’re not helping move out into the community could be a net of $38,000 of economic activity that’s lost in our region.

It’s a huge ripple effect. The food comes from a distributed network of people, from the stocker in the grocery store to the truck driver delivering it to the farmers who grew it and their farmworkers who are probably on SNAP. It’s an economy, just like everything else. It takes a lot of money to make food happen, and all of it is done on a razor-thin margin. It’s not just free money coming out of nowhere going nowhere. All of these dollars touch lives.

The support networks that help connect people with food, like Good Shepherd Food Bank and Waldo County Bounty, are telling us people are needing more and there are less resources to help. It’s really challenging, and the lack of communication and clear vision causes a lot of chaos and stress. We’re wasting a lot of time just trying to navigate these challenges, and wasting time means we’re not doing other good and useful things. We’re just trying to navigate bureaucracy now.

It’s an increasingly harder space to be in, as an independent grocery store. Once upon a time, Belfast had about seven different, independently owned corner grocery stores. Now that number is about half what it was. Most of the economic engine is going into one company: Hannaford, a multinational based in the Netherlands. While their profits are benefiting shareholders overseas, independent grocers are all local businesses. Our members, our workers, our board of directors all live locally, shop locally, and keep their money circulating in the local economy.

Oftentimes, people are just looking at the cheapest item available, and that’s the only metric they’re using. The reality is: there is no cheap food. Somebody’s paying a price at some point along the way, whether it’s the environment that’s taking the hit, or workers in another country getting a substandard wage, or workers at the Dollar General who are underpaid and undervalued. If you only look at what you pay at the end, you’re not seeing the whole picture.

We’re a rural community, so services are harder to get to, and that requires a lot more travel or less choices. Everything is usually just a little more complicated. We’ve had a big influx of people since COVID. On one hand, it’s fantastic because Maine needs new people. The more economic activity in Maine, the better. But on the other, it’s driven property values sky high. The housing crisis, which was already a thing, is even more difficult now. And though our business is actually doing really well, we still need great workers. And if workers don’t have anywhere affordable to live, that affects everything else.

Maine can be a challenging place to live. We all choose to live here because of so many wonderful things, but many of us have chosen to do with less. We have less access to some services and resources, but greater access to the beauty and the splendor and all that good stuff. Some people move here and think they can get a one-for-one big city experience, when in reality it’s a give and take. That’s one thing that’s great about Mainers in general. We do more with what we have. Let’s all get together to make this work for everybody, because that’s what Mainers are doing.”