At Java Jacks in the riverside town of Tappahannock, Va., the sausage is savory, the beignet-like jacks are sugar-dusted and you have your choice of t-shirts. You can get a brightly-colored one with an image of the cafe and its slogan, "Come in, We're Awesome," or you can go for something darkly funny that says "Coffee Makes Me Feel Less Murdery."
"We started by selling just the t-shirts of the building. And then we'd gotten a couple of the sarcastic shirts for the staff and the customers were trying to buy them off of our backs," owner Jeans Owens laughs from behind the coffee bar. Java Jacks started in 2006, in what was once someone's little one-story home on the main road through town. The atmosphere is cozy and friendly, with pictures of smiling customers and staff taped to door frames and to the wall.
Owens and her husband took over the business about eight years ago. "What we were interested in was being our own bosses," she says, "and something that could set us up a little better for retirement."
But their first years running the cafe have included the pandemic and inflation: lots of expensive bumps for small business owners.
"Our coffee prices went sky high," she says. They're up over 30% since 2022. The cost of beef is up, so is the cost of sausage and paper products for takeout orders: "To-go boxes. You know there was a time we were paying 12 cents for those," Owens says. Now, it's nearly 30 cents. And to-go cups? "The cup, the lid, the straw used to cost us all together maybe 3 cents." She says it's now more than 20 cents.
The cafe's electricity bill has also recently jumped. "Normally, I'm paying $450, $500 a month," she says. "I'm paying over $1000 now."
Owens says Java Jacks has a loyal customer base and she's been committed to doing whatever she can to keep menu prices affordable, including keeping some meals at $10. She says she now goes to Walmart early in the morning to get milk and juice rather than purchase them from a supplier. She goes to a local grocery store for fresh fruit. She also regularly checks prices between three suppliers and switches between them, depending on which one has the lowest costs.
It's not just Owens' habits that have changed, it's her customers': she's noticed more senior citizens sharing orders. "We had like maybe one or two when we bought [Java Jacks], but now we'll have multiple tickets a day that are split." Some customers are adjusting how they tip her staff, too. "They tend to be tipped very well just because we're a small atmosphere," Owens says. But when the price of gas shot up, the tips got smaller. "When [gas] came back down, we started seeing that trend change," she says.
Owens feels she's handling the increase in costs as best she can, though she is having to increase menu prices. But the biggest stressor for her right now is finding and keeping staff, a situation that's also rooted in affordability. Owens has another coffee spot across the river in Warsaw. She's been short-staffed between both locations for months at a time. Rents have increased in this rural area, where the median income is around $50,000 a year. She says she's had to help employees find places to live and she's even put them up temporarily in a motel. Transportation is another problem: some workers don't have cars or are squeezed too much by current gas prices. "We have about five employees right now that we carpool to work," she says.
All of this means Owens has had to take shifts in the kitchen, putting off her front-of-house duties and paperwork to her evenings and days off. She says it's the same with other local restaurant owners: they're working themselves to the bone.
Owens won't discuss midterm politics, even though what she's learned about the lack of housing and transportation in the area has prompted her to run for the non-partisan town council. Tappahannock is in the eastern part of Virginia's 1st Congressional District, where the race between long-time Republican incumbent Rob Wittman and Democrat Shannon Taylor, the commonwealth's attorney for Henrico County, has been tight. Owens says whoever wins, she wants them to understand what small businesses like hers are dealing with these days. "We're struggling," she says, bluntly.
Jameka Campbell, who works across the river in Richmond County, thinks politicians are out of touch with the today's economic reality.
"I think they need to get like Cardi B and go back to the grocery store and actually shop. ... see what those prices really look like, versus having someone else go out and purchase for them," she says.
Campbell is raising two children and working two jobs at Menokin, a historical site originally owned by Francis Lightfoot Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner. She's an office manager there, as well as the community and outreach director with the nonprofit Just Harvest Va, which maintains gardens at Menokin. The goal is food sovereignty, Campbell explains, helping BIPOC communities with education and training around growing fresh food. "We make a way for you to be able to provide," she says, "so farm to table, we give you the instructions on how to cultivate your own land, how to cultivate the land around you."
Campbell says she has learned a lot about the economy of growing and cooking your own food from her grandmothers. She's also got a not-so-secret superpower: she's mastered the coupon deals at Walgreens.
"It's very neat. It's organized. The people are friendly," she says of her favorite one, in Callao a few miles away from Menokin. "My goal is always to only come in here once a month and spend $100," for household supplies, she says. She uses the Walgreens app to clip, save and track. She watches the sales and when there's a good deal, she'll stock up.
Take her favorite laundry detergent: $4.99 for a small 27.5 ounce jug, perfect for her high-efficiency washing machine. "It's usually 'buy one, get two free,'" she says. So she'll triple her buying power when it's on special and buy in bulk. Also, she says, "you can earn $4 Walgreens cash rewards when you buy four more select items" like Secret deodorant or Gillette shaving cream and razors. She's also strategic at the register, checking out in batches so she can apply rewards from one transaction to the next. She makes sure to spend the rewards the same day.
On a recent trip, she got two 12-pack rolls of toilet paper, facial tissues, Lysol, dish detergent, disinfectant wipes, some laundry detergent pods, two boxes of disposable bathroom cups, three laundry scent boosters, toothpaste, a toothbrush and mouthwash. She spent $60.04 cents and saved $27.71.
Enough for a meal or "a quarter tank of gas," Campbell says.
In addition to her personal budget, Campbell says she's keeping her eyes on the candidates this midterm election and doing her research. "I'm going to look at what they've done in the past," she says, "then also do a deep dive on essentially, like, 'What properties do you own? What does that look like? Where do you live at, for real? Do you have, like, the house in the Hamptons, or are you living rurally?'"
And if the people in her district are not actually representing her the way she thinks they should, "then they have to go," she says. She'll make a decision on who to vote for closer to election day.
For right now, Campbell says she's doing ok. "I'm not rich. I'm not poor. I'm in between. And you know, it could go either way," she adds. "On any day, I could hit the lottery and be the richest person in the county I live in. I could lose both jobs in an instant and be the poorest person in the county that I live in."
Throughout Menokin there are reminders of the enslaved in art installations, historical artifacts and a recreation of a slave dwelling. Sometimes, when Campbell feels the strain of high prices, she thinks about the enslaved people who once farmed Menokin. "If they went through all of that," she says, "I think 'I can do this.' And I go do it."
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