For a family of two living in Fayetteville, Arkansas making less than $24,000 a year, their monthly budget is nearly half of what the Internal Revenue Services considers to be the proper standard of living.
For Lisa Terry, 23, and her husband, their household rent is $200 less than the median for Fayetteville, and they live pay-check-to-pay-check.
“I make minimum wage working at Waffle House, and my husband works in Facility Management at the University,” Terry said. “We consider ourselves working poor. Thankfully my husband gets paid monthly, and we use that paycheck on bills, food and gas.”
Terry and her husband eat “cheap food like spaghetti, and ramen,” and she said that she is lucky because Waffle House allows her to eat one free meal for every four hours she works.
Waiters and waitresses in Washington county and the Northwest Arkansas area make roughly 20 percent less annually than the national average wage.
“The minimum wage for waitering in Arkansas is $2.63, and Waffle House tries to compensate if your tips don’t make up the difference to $8.50, but it’s not nearly enough to get by,” Terry said. “If I’m able to work around 35 hours a week, I’m lucky.”
She has tried to get other jobs, but always ends up back at Waffle House, where she has been working since May of 2016.
“I had to drop out of school because of a medical issue,” Terry said. “Whenever I go apply for other jobs nobody wants to hire someone who wants to work as many hours as me. They want to hire high school or college students who only want to work twenty or so hours a week so they don’t have to pay them benefits.”
Nineteen percent of individuals between the age of 18 and 34 are considered below the poverty line in Washington County, which is 5 percent higher than the national average for that age group.
Lisa Terry, 23 from Fayetteville, Arkansas
The standard housing budget for a couple in Fayetteville is 97 percent lower than the standard set by the IRS, while the monthly food budget is 54 percent lower than it should be.
Although these occupations pay barely enough to get by, 2.5 million individuals fill the positions nationwide, and a little over 4,000 individuals are employed in these positions in Northwest Arkansas alone.
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