Can’t Get This at the Grocery Store Last Tuesday, it was 93 degrees at 1 p.m. Protected by only a yellow umbrella, 78-year-old George Smith doesn’t care much about the heat; he just wants to make some money, an increasingly difficult thing to do selling produce. “You know really what a box of tomatoes cost? I hate to tell you... $28,” Smith says. “Ain’t much more than 28 tomatoes in there. I looked at a box, a bushel box, and you know that was over $47... for peanuts.” Smith, an Edgefield, S.C., resident who picks up produce from the Columbia market and brings it to Fairway Square each day, says gas prices are hurting everyone, including him. “All the money I make I have to put it back in the produce and gas,” he says. “Just swapping money.” It’s the same story he hears from the farmers. “That man tells me watermelons are going on up. I says you can’t go up
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OBSERVE
REPORT Ill-informed speculation from a perpetually curious sort.
George Smith
Dixie Belle Peaches, Inc. has set up miniature jails up and down Washington Road in an apparent effort to diversify their portfolio. Rumor has it inmates will be housed in the mini-clinks to ease jail overcrowding.
no higher,” Smith says. “He says it’s because of the weather, raining, this that and the other thing or another. It ain’t all what they say it is. They just got it with the prices where a poor man can’t make nothing.” So what’s a produce enterpreneur, trying to turn a profit, to do? Smith doesn’t have a good answer, especially since the people he’s trying to sell to are convinced they can get better prices at the grocery store. “I paid $4 for that watermelon. I’m trying to get $6 That one is $8… weighs about 35 pounds,” he says, pointing
out some of his stock. “And the people say, That’s too much. I’ll go somewhere else.’ They ain’t got them that big at the grocery store for $5.” Smith has been at the same spot for several years now and remembers making a good living up until about two years ago. Since then, however, it’s all gone slowly downhill... or uphill, depending on how you look at it. “It’s all went on up,” he says. “Everything’s done went out of sight.” Everything... including the temperature. METRO SPIRIT 6.2.11 37