Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/07/visiting-what-may-be-the-most.html
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A: “Why not save money by buying frozen orange juice?”
B: “By the time I carried it to my car it WAS frozen orange juice.”
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on the other hand, this store wouldn’t even exist if someone wasn’t willing to pay that… who shops here? oil execs with enormous expense accounts? i guess i should watch the video…
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People who want to make it through the winter without contracting scurvy?
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i jumped the gun. everything is expensive but really only about 2X normal… it would suck to have to be in that position but watching the video i could imagine being able to feed a single person on like 15 bucks a day. even then you’d still have to pull some of the tricks i have had to when i was broke. pad out your diet with ramen and rice and other dry packaged foods…
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I guess it helps a little that Alaska is also the only state where all residents get thousands of dollars in free money from the government each year just for living there.
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Barrow (aka Utqiaġvik)
Try Utqiaġvik (the city formerly known as Barrow)
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“Do you honor competitors’ coupons?”
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$2000 isn’t really “Double your grocery bill” money though.
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Surprisingly, a bottle of Laphroaig is only $40 at the South Pole.
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8 grand a year for a family of 4 certainly ought to put a big dent in the food bill at least.
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My parents did took advantage of this. They had 4 kids (only planned on three, suprise twins at the end), and wound up leaving the state before the oldest was 6. From my experience feeding kids, they would have been underwater on the deal had they stuck around much longer, and they weren’t paying Barrow prices.
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while the cost of flying the goods in surely make the prices higher, I guarantee price gouging and taking advantage of supply/demand, only store in town, and that they say the people living there are on the higher part of the income scale contributes to the higher prices. I’m sure the owner is one of those higher income folks.
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I guess I’ll have to cross them off of my list of dream retirement locations.
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I thought the title might be exaggeration, and was expecting to have to mention Barrow.
About 1966 my father went North to collect zoology specimens. Soon after he returned, a visitor came for supper, he was Inuit, though at the time the word was still “Eskimo”. I thought he was someone my father met up north,but I was only six, so I don’t really know. It seemed a big event, we didn’t have many guests.
In more recent years, I’ve come to see that the man must have lived through the change. The north was Europeanized later and he was probably old enough to have seen the change from a nomadic life to living in European houses.
I really don’t know how people live up there, they’ve been moved to a European way of living, but the houses aren’t great and there aren’t enough of them. They were convinced to move to European food, but the cost is high. I couldn’t live up there withiut a monetary supplement.
We have a lot of homeless Inuit here, people who came down for medical reasons or because there was no room, and got lost. That’s the fallout from insisting they live like Europeans. They may have had a hard and simple life, but it was adapted to the environment. Those traditional sealskin boots my father brought me were great in winter.
The CBC here in Canada started a show on Sunday entitled “High Arctic Haulers”. The first episode was about a shipment to somewhere around Hudson’s Bay, I’m not sure if it’s all about that. But you have to get your order in early, and there’s always a chance it may not get there, and it’s expensive, but cheaper than air. I know Barrow gets its supplies the same way.
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My assumption here is that likely some people will live off the land as best they can and will supplement their needs with items bought at the grocery store. For those that are able to mostly get most of their diet from the land won’t get hit as hard as someone that has to buy the majority of their food from this grocery store.
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It’s the same across the north. Canada does it a bit differently, but it’s still scary prices.
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After viewing the video I theorized that the people living in Barrow might somehow not be as overweight as elsewhere in the U.S. Nope. They’re about the same.
Found this:
“Barrow Health Profile”
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There’s hope.
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As someone who has spent a lot of time in various remote arctic communities, I’m glad this is getting some wider recognition. It’s clear from the comments here that most people don’t know who lives in these communities - while there are a few well-paid government officials and resource industry types, the majority of the population is First Nations and living at or below the poverty line. Living conditions are dire compared to areas to the south, and communities struggle with poverty, food insecurity, and substance abuse.
It also doesn’t help that do-gooders in the US and EU completely eliminated one of the only exports from the region by incorrectly conflating sustainable seal harvesting in the north with brutal and unnecessary seal culling by fisherman in Newfoundland and Labrador.
If you want to learn more about life in the far north a good place to start is “Angry Inuk” by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709536/) or “Living Arctic” by Hugh Brody (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Arctic-Hunters-Canadian-North/dp/0295970022)
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