Far From the Land of Dot-Com Millionaires

It’s a long way from the new prosperity to the checkout line at the 99 Cents Only store in Pico Rivera, where Betty Edwards was scanning bar codes the other day. Six-fifty an hour. Eight hours a day, shifting your weight so your feet don’t throb too much by nightfall. Watching the day tick by, little by little. Punching and scanning. Scanning and punching. Neatening up the displays of M&Ms; and beer nuts. Politely reminding customer after customer that checks aren’t accepted, that it’s cash and credit card only. Distracting yourself politely while the poor ones fish through their coin purses, as poor folk will, for the exact, final penny. Talking quietly when their credit cards get electronically declined.

“Oh, the declines,” Betty Edwards sighs in a voice full of been-there. “The last couple of months, we’ve had a lot of declines.” By this she means the holiday season, which was a rip-roaring record setter, for reasons that don’t entirely follow the money. Nationwide, Christmas spending was up 36%, to an average of $1,558 per shopper, according to the American Express Retail Index. Not necessarily the average among Betty Edwards’ shoppers, but--she smiles, scanning bags of 99-cent pinto beans and bottles of 99-cent dishwashing detergent and boxes of 99-cent votive candles--”they spent plenty.” You don’t need to have the money to feel the fever that’s out there. Baby billionaires! IPOs! Bonuses! Options! Game show millionaires on TV!

That latter world, of course, doesn’t collide much with Betty Edwards’. You don’t see much of the super-rich when you’re a 33-year-old single mother living down the street from the 99 Cents Only store with your two children and your mom and dad. Scanning and punching, breathing that sugary-dusty air that seems to have been the smell of five-and-dime stores forever, she says she never got around to college. Last year, she spent the whole year paying down her credit cards, just so she could charge them up at Christmas again.

“Now I gotta work to pay ‘em back down, little by little,” she laughs, taking a crumpled bill from a fat man with “Pico Union” elaborately tattooed on the back of his neck. “This is my life, just working to pay my bills little by little. Just like a lot of people nowadays live.”

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That sort of living, it should be noted, hasn’t gotten much attention lately. Though the rich have never been less visible in person, all eyes have been riveted on their new prosperity. And why not? Imagining the rich getting richer has always been more fun than watching the poorer stay poorer. (What do they buy with those billions? What do they tell their children? What if they are children? At what point does that much money start to feel like Monopoly money? At what point, if any, do they feel trapped by inequality?)

But eventually, inquiring minds turn to the folks in the cheap seats. At what point will they tire of hearing about some lucky guy’s latest shipment of good luck? At what point will they pick up on the fact that, little by little, a door has been closing? At what point will deferred dreams and “little by little” cease to be good enough?

This week, for instance, in addition to the Christmas shopping statistics, two studies were released by, respectively, the government and a pair of Washington, D.C., think tanks. They confirm, yet again, that the rich are still getting richer, the folks in the middle are still in the middle and the poor are further than ever behind. The think tanks parsed the question in terms of geography, finding that California’s income gap is the fifth-worst in the nation. (New York’s is the worst.) The government sliced it, not only by income, but by net worth. Turns out the inequality gets even more unequal when mortgages and credit card debt are figured in.

And yet, so unreal is this boom, so out-of-sight is the money, that people at Betty Edwards’ end of the picture--the end with the single mothers and unskilled labor--can’t quite wrap their minds around the distance that has grown, little by little, for so long. Megamergers and market gains--like the four-for-three stock split announced by her employer Wednesday--are just somebody else’s game show jackpot when you can’t afford a computer, let alone a dot-com on your business card, let alone a business card.

“I don’t know about millionaires,” she shrugs pleasantly. “I get up, go to work, come home, feed my kids. I don’t feel rich, but I don’t feel poor.” She scans five six-packs of 99-cent cola. On the other side of the register, far from the new prosperity, a dark-haired nanny hands over the last, crumpled bills, the exact, final pennies in her change purse. “Have a nice day,” calls Betty Edwards as the tiny woman trundles off into the workaday evening, as the sleek, automatic door slides closed.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.