A family banks on its human capital

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile

HAYDEN, Ala. - If you drove north from Birmingham a couple of Saturdays ago on a syrup-sticky morning and stopped at a certain Waffle House along the way, you could have overheard all the talk you wanted about the Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers. But while you stirred your grits amid a sea of red, blue and orange jerseys, you also might have heard this conversation at the cash register:

“Seven dollars?” a 30ish male customer sputters in disbelief as the waitress rings up his breakfast. “I was thinking five.”

“I know, Sugar,” the waitress says, frowning in sympathy. “It’s everything. Two eighty-five for the waffle, two thirty for the bacon, a dollar thirty for the coffee. … You buy a gallon of milk lately?”

Sitting in his modest but comfortable mobile home in the pastoral hills of Hayden later that morning, Ken Hamaker put his thoughts about what he considers the declining fortunes of America’s middle class into similarly plain language.

“We live in a society today where you can work a full-time job and not put food on your table,” says Hamaker, leaning forward in his chair. “That’s sick!”

Hamaker, a native and nearly lifelong resident of Alabama who could pass for a decade younger than his 38 years, has bought milk lately, watching it go from $2.69 a gallon a few years ago to $4 now. The 8-ounce blocks of cheese he buys have shot from $1.69 a year ago to $2.49.

“I went to the grocery store yesterday and spent $200,” says Hamaker, who earns what most folks would consider a good living as a computer systems manager for a retail chain. “I got nothing.” Increases in the price of food are mirrored in his bills for insurance, utilities, gas and health care, but not in his wages, he says.

Hamaker, who has little respect for either major political party, blames an insatiably greedy corporate power structure for his declining purchasing power. And he accuses neo-conservatives of using divisive political issues like abortion and gay marriage to distract average voters from the raids on their pocketbooks.

“If you have a store with a cash register and I want to get into it, how do I do it? I confuse you,” he says.

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