Nobody Ever Says They Cannot Afford It

 

Cedar Valley News
July 14, 2026
Nobody Ever Says They Cannot Afford It
By George Khan

The tell is never the conversation. It is the order.

A man has come to my counter on Fridays for eleven years. Half a pound of roast beef, sliced thin, and a quarter pound of the good Swiss. Then one Friday this spring, he asked for a quarter pound of the beef, and no cheese, and he made a joke about his doctor and his cholesterol, and he laughed, and I laughed, and we both knew.

I have stood behind this counter for thirty-one years. I know when a family is in trouble long before the neighbors do, and long before anybody prints a word about it, because I see it in the paper on the scale.

The good ham becomes the cheap ham. The pound becomes the half pound. Friday becomes every other Friday. And then one week the man does not come at all, and he does not come the week after, and when he finally does, he is very cheerful about how busy he has been.

Nobody says the true thing. Not once, in thirty-one years, has a person at my counter told me, I cannot afford it this week.

They say they are cutting back. They say they are watching their weight. They say the wife has them on a new diet. They make a small joke, they pay, and they carry the smaller package out to the truck.

Here is what the news tells you this summer. Beef costs nearly thirteen percent more than a year ago. The cattle herd in this country is the smallest it has been in seventy-five years. And groceries, in survey after survey, are the thing Americans now worry about first, ahead of the rent and the gas.

I will tell you plainly: I do not know why the beef costs what it costs. I am not a cattleman. I am not an economist. I have no opinion worth your time about whose fault any of it is.

I only know what it looks like when it arrives at my counter.

It arrives dressed as embarrassment.

It is the thing the surveys never catch. In a town this size, being short of money is not a statistic. It is something you hide from the people who know your name. From the woman at the bank who was in your daughter’s class. From the man slicing your ham. Hardship in a small town wears a clean shirt and makes a joke about cholesterol.

My mother, who opened this deli with nothing, understood it long before I did. She never once offered a person charity across this counter. I asked her why, when I was young and sure of myself, and she looked at me as though I had learned nothing. Because you would be handing him his shame, she said, in front of the whole store.

Here is how she did it, and how I do it now.

The scale runs a little heavy on Fridays. The end of the roast, the piece nobody buys, is going to waste, and would he take it off my hands. A sandwich arrives with a soup he did not order, and I am sorry, we made too much.

It is a small dishonesty, and the kindest sort. It lets a man walk out with his dinner and his dignity both, and only one of the two can be bought back.

And if you are the one buying less this summer, hear me. There is no shame in the smaller package. I have been nearer the edge than anyone in this town knows. Take the soup.

This is what I would ask of you this week.

Somebody near you is quietly buying less this summer. You already know who it is. Do not offer them money, and do not ask them how they are managing, because they will lie to you, and you will have made them lie.

Just make too much for supper. Call them up and say you cannot possibly eat it all, and would they do you a favor. Send the extra home with them, and never mention it again.

Feed them, and never let them know they were fed.

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Has somebody ever fed you without letting on? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the beef prices cited here, and the American cattle herd standing at its lowest level in roughly seventy-five years, are real, per the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.