‘Check Day’ Brings Cycle of Boom, Bust to L.A. 90011 : Economy: Like many poor areas, it perks up as welfare, Social Security funds arrive. But month’s end can be harsh.

A few days a month, Tanya Jackson’s cash-strapped neighborhood near the Harbor Freeway experiences a brief but profound economic resurgence.

Long lines form at supermarkets and banks. Stores, now stocked high with extra merchandise, hire additional help to handle the rush. Check-cashing businesses turn a huge profit. Street vendors, sensing the upsurge, hawk everything from leather belts to cotton candy.

It’s a “check day”--the first and third of the month, when hundreds of thousands of families throughout Los Angeles County receive their welfare, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income checks in the mail.

Neighborhoods drained dry by hardship perk up as tens of millions of dollars flood a normally withered pipeline, triggering reverberations that will last more than a week. Suddenly there is money to pay bills, buy groceries and enjoy smaller necessities so often forgone during the last week of each month.

Each check day, thousands of lives play out the parable about the profligate grasshopper and the thrifty ant: Those who greet this day with a plan stand a better chance of making it through the month; those who succumb to impulse--who head for the restaurant or the liquor store or the dope dealer--will not. The choices are expected to grow more difficult if Congress approves a Republican plan to cap welfare spending.

For Jackson, 30, an unmarried mother of three who last worked as a store clerk before being disabled, check day means it’s finally time to wash the laundry.

“Sometimes the dirty clothes just get backed up because you have to stretch your money,” said Jackson, who on May 2 had five oversized washing machines humming at the Joy Coin Laundry at Broadway and 59th Street. “I only brought half the clothes, too.”

A legion of shoppers, brimming with pent-up energy and newfound cash, hits the streets with an itinerary, some now able to pay a neighbor $5 or $10 to drive and wait for them at each stop. They congregate at places like the Vermont-Slauson shopping center in South-Central Los Angeles, packing the parking lot, moving from Kmart to Boy’s to fast-food restaurants to the drugstore.

By day’s end, said a Kmart sales clerk May 1, amid the morning tumult that she knew would grow far worse, “the place looks like a hurricane hit it.”

The criminals come out, too. More purses are snatched, more people are killed, more narcotics are sold on the first of the month than any other day, residents and police say. Mail carriers and their trucks become a target: One Watts neighborhood no longer gets home delivery on the first of the month, and Los Angeles County is preparing to stop distributing all checks by mail by the end of the year. Many people stay home on the first to avoidthe crush and the potential of being victimized.

Debra Smith, 29, a mother of two who lives on a monthly $600 check, carefully plans her gantlet, paying rent and other obligations, carrying her purse even more warily than usual.

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“By the time the first comes around, I already know in my mind what I have to do--the bills I have to pay, the food I have to buy,” said Smith, who has been trained for work under a program for welfare recipients but has yet to find a job, and on check day was pushing a shopping cart in a well-stocked Ralphs supermarket. “I don’t have time or money to waste.”

Quiontico Riddick, 25, who has the same number of children and the same size check, said she would not stop for gifts.

“I have to give my landlord $400 for rent and I have to spend $100 on utilities,” she said hurriedly in between stops. “That doesn’t leave much; I’ll have less than $100 to cushion me until I get food stamps.”

Riddick and Smith live in Los Angeles’ 90011 ZIP code, a hard-pressed section of South-Central bordered by Long Beach Boulevard on the east, Main Street on the west, Washington Boulevard on the north and Slauson Avenue on the south.

Nearly one out of three people in the ZIP code receive an infusion of government cash at the first of the month--$9 million in checks for a community of 100,000. Nearly 20,000 welfare checks and 5,000 federal disability payments under the Supplemental Security Income program come on the first of the month; more than 6,000 Social Security checks come on the third.

The high proportion of residents on welfare is a testament not merely to the area’s historic poverty but to the steady deindustrialization of the Los Angeles area. Once the local economy was fueled by manufacturing jobs. But those jobs vanished as industries pulled up stakes and moved out, leaving few opportunities behind. Today the monthly rhythm of boom and bust is the community’s economic heartbeat.

The first stop on check day is the check cashing agencies and banks, where lines often stretch like those for rides at an amusement park.

Outside one of 90011’s most important businesses, Nix Check Cashing on Vernon Avenue, Dorothy Cooper set up shop on the hood of her car on May 1. She had a stockpile of gifts: African American dolls, bath oils, salts, perfumes and decorative baskets for Mother’s Day.

“It’s a sweet location,” she said, pointing to the crowded check cashing agency next door. “Everybody don’t turn you down. Someone always stops and spends some money.”

There are seldom credit cards to extend payments, no checking accounts or ATM cards to make bill-paying convenient. Bills are paid by cash or money order; leftover funds are often put in money orders which can be cashed by the recipient as needed. When things are really tight, food stamps are readily traded in for cash at about a third off. Harold McIntire, vice president of Food 4 Less, a supermarket chain with a store in 90011, structures delivery of supplies and worker schedules to meet the crunch that hits when welfare payments arrive. Those with money play this to their advantage: The last day of the month--before the rush, when the stores are freshly loaded--is the best time to buy. Those without money sometimes complain that some stores raise prices when welfare money is flowing.

For all the barbs about the purposelessness of welfare recipients, the byword among check-day survivors is discipline.

“I’ve become a Payless person,” said Elisa Woods, 33, a mother of three who lives in a neighborhood adjacent to 90011. “I go searching for the deals, the swap meets, the secondhand stores. That’s where I go.”

It wasn’t always that way. Five years ago, when Woods was hooked on drugs, she often didn’t care how she spent money as long as her habit was satisfied.

She would go on splurges, she said, buying drugs for herself and lavishing gifts on her oldest daughter until the money ran out. It never lasted long.

Recently the daughter, now 13, made a joke: “She said, ‘Momma, sometimes I wish you were still on drugs. You gave me more money then,’ ” Woods said. “She laughed, gave me a hug and said ‘I’m sure glad you have changed.’ ”

Now, the mother said, “we cut coupons together. I’m trying to teach her the value of a dollar. I’m teaching her and she is teaching me.”

Landlords structure rents around the welfare calendar, and mom-and-pop grocery stores extend credit to help their trusted customers bridge the gap between the end of the month and the arrival of funds. This can be risky business. Zeron T. Yohanes, a liquor store owner, no longer does it.

“Once a woman just couldn’t pay me back; she owed too many people too much money,” Yohanes said. “She couldn’t budget her money and it all caught up with her.”

The vibrations of check day can be felt as it approaches. Near the end of the month, as money runs out, more people begin turning to neighborhood churches that distribute food to the needy. More borrow money or sell their food stamps.

Even little children understand the cycle. Tanya Jackson’s 10-year-old son, Deon, knows when his mother can or can’t afford money for little things. So do his friends. One day when they had money for ice cream and Deon didn’t, they teased him.

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“They told him, ‘Your mother can’t buy ice cream because she’s on welfare,’ ” she said. “It hurts, it’s cold.”

The end of the month reveals how many young welfare recipients simply do not know how to make their checks last, said Pastor Ernest Woods, whose Ebony Missionary Baptist church dispenses food to the poor.

“You can’t feed your children steak or take them to McDonald’s every day and expect to make it through the month,” he said. “Instead of eating for a week at a fast-food restaurant, they have to learn to buy some meat, a sack of potatoes and rice and eat each day. They have to learn how to manage their money.”

Felipa Salgado, a 28-year-old mother of seven, sat quietly while the pastor delivered a brief sermon Wednesday morning, and then was ushered into a back area of the church where officials distributed used clothing and an assortment of donated foods, including broccoli, potatoes, bread, milk and bananas.

“The food helps my check last longer,” said Salgado, whose $490 welfare check barely covers rent, gas and electric.

During the first week of the month the number of people seeking donated food is usually down, but last week the numbers were a little higher; many recipients complained that their checks had been stolen in the mail.

Los Angeles leads the nation in postal robberies, many in and around the South-Central area. The rash of mail thefts prompted the Postal Service earlier this year to ask residents in more than a dozen neighborhoods to keep a protective eye out for mail carriers on the first of each month--and the service canceled home delivery on that day in one five-block section of Watts. Since the beginning of the year, postal inspectors have manned a task force to prevent mail thefts.

Nevertheless, on May 1 there were a dozen break-ins and robberies, including one on 68th Street and Avalon Boulevard just outside 90011, in which a truck with mail for residents on two dozen blocks was stolen by gunmen.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Social Service announced plans to reduce thefts by stopping mail payments and requiring recipients to pick up their checks at 70 designated check-cashing outlets that contract with the county. The electronic system would be the same as the one in place to distribute general relief checks.

None of this will change the feast-or-famine dynamics of check day.

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After a hectic day, spending more than half of her check on bills, Debra Smith went home on May 1 to the comfort of her apartment. She made it safely. A couple of months before she wasn’t so lucky--someone stole her check before she could pay her bills and she needed her mother’s help to make it through the month.

“I still see the guy who took my purse,” she said. “He waved at me. He had the nerve to wave at me.”

She put away the groceries: bread, assorted meats and vegetables, milk, soap powder and toilet paper. It cost $88.64. She added that to the rest of her bills, the electric, the phone bill and the rent. There was $120 left to wash clothes and buy her daughter a little something. “This month it’s my daughter’s turn to get a pair of shoes,” she said. “I’ll get her some socks too.”

Each month, she said, she puts a little money away for her and the children.

“I try to do something special with them twice a year, like go to Disneyland,” she said.

Then, if there is anything left, she takes a plunge and buys a lottery ticket.

“When you don’t win, that’s money wasted,” she said. “I dream about winning, getting a house, moving away from Los Angeles. It’s something I think about.”