Across from the traffic circle that connects uptown and midtown Kingston, the line for food often stretches around the block at People’s Place. It’s the largest food pantry in Ulster, run by an organization with millions in annual funding serving more than 18,000 hungry residents countywide. You pay what you can. If you can’t pay, you still eat.
At their “Community Cafe,” there are all types of people on line for breakfast and lunch, Monday through Friday. The food is more than nourishing — it has a reputation for being quite tasty.
The people in line for free food can often see fashionable visitors and locals milling around with their dogs outside of Camp Kingston down the street. Open since late 2023, the retro Catskills camping-themed café is one of the most popular breakfast and lunchtime meeting spots among a more well-resourced segment of the city’s population. It’s famous for mouthwatering sandwiches like the Sambal Tofu Banh Mi ($16.50, can be made vegan).
One can see the extremes of Kingston’s two food economies from this corner: one economy for tourists and higher-income locals, and one for those just scraping by paycheck to paycheck — if they’re scraping by at all.
Food price inequality
In a two-block area of North Front and Wall streets in uptown Kingston, there are five Cobb salads to choose from. The cheapest costs $13.50. The most expensive, $19.95. They are both relatively the same size, though the latter has higher-end ingredients.
A midtown deli offers a BLT for $6.75. A few blocks down the street, there’s an artisanal BLT that goes for $15. Joe Beez on Broadway will make you an entire BLT sub sandwich for $10.50.
Take the hot dog, that questionable staple of American cuisine. Dallas Hot Weiners, a longtime local favorite consisting of blended meats, can be had for $3. Mickey’s Igloo’s Rondout Ripper is deep-fried and all-beef, coming in at $4. Shortie’s in New Paltz slings gourmet glizzies starting at $6; toppings are $1–$2 each. Contrast that with national chain Five Guys, which offers unlimited free toppings but charges $6.65 for the base dog. The newly opened Blue Duck Brewing Co., with its built-in Phoenicia Diner Canteen, will charge you $10–$13 for a dog — but it comes with fries.
A bagel with cream cheese, tomato and lox at Sunrise Bagels costs $10.25. At Fantzye Bagels across town, the menu indicates a price of $16.50.
For those with the dough, the artisanal option is a no-brainer. With some exceptions, the more expensive options typically have significantly better ingredients, more complex flavors and are executed with finesse. Those establishments sometimes pay better wages to employees. But what happens when one compares similar products?
Hass avocados were recently on sale at the Hannaford supermarket in the town of Ulster for $0.89 each. At the boutique neighborhood market Village Grocery and Refillery, each avocado (organic) will run you $3.25. Clearly, one retailer has an order of magnitude more buying power than the other, and organic goods have a healthy markup. But to many hovering around the poverty line, it begs the question: Are there people really willing to pay $3.25 for a single avocado?
Then again, there are people who will pay $5 for a large order of McDonald’s fries. Fast food chain fortunes have largely been trending downward as lower-income consumer budgets are being stretched to their limits.
What if we compare apples to apples? Eschewing corn syrup in plastic for real sugar in a glass bottle, a Mexican Coke at Phoenix Grocery & Deli costs $2. Uptown at the newly opened Golden Hour Grocery, the same exact product is $6. (They have plenty of other more reasonably priced wares, but soda was not among them.)
One could spend days comparing products being sold among consumers in the city’s forked food economies, but it isn’t hard to see the gap at a price glance. One side is testing the ceiling of what consumers are willing to pay; the other is testing the ceiling of free food aid, discounts and deals. More and more local residents are watching their grocery bills and restaurant checks very closely even as the tourism sector booms.
It’s not just People’s Place keeping less-resourced stomachs full. Kingston has a plethora of other pantries and food fridges that are regularly stocked by a phalanx of dutiful community helpers — not to mention many religious, civic and community institutions that are similarly duty-bound to help feed the community.
Kingston generously feeds the disadvantaged masses at the same time it charges $17 for a cocktail. How did we get here?
Losing our appetite
The COVID pandemic scrambled every step of the food supply chain and reset prices. Restaurants and grocers, already surviving on razor-thin margins, saw costs jump for labor, ingredients, insurance, utilities and card processing. Supply bottlenecks and whiplash demand kept prices high even as logistics improved.
Kingston has long drawn New York City refugees. The pandemic turned that trickle into a surge, and housing costs spiked. Visitor spending snapped back as society reopened, fueling a wave of cafés, bars, boutique markets and other high-priced, Brooklynesque ventures. Not since the IBM boom of the ’50s and ’60s have so many arrived with stars in their eyes and cash in their accounts.
Higher-income demand plus rising operating costs propped up a tier of experience-driven offerings. At the same time, many residents — especially the 1 in 7 in Ulster living at or below the poverty line — leaned harder on budget options and community meals as living expenses soared. Tourists and transplants boosted the overall economy but also hardened a split: a bigger premium market alongside an expanded safety-net and low-cost market.
According to Moody’s, in the second quarter of 2025, the top 10% of earners accounted for 49.2% of consumer spending in America. The middle still exists, but if you track business openings and closings, you can see it thinning.
Costs for essentials like housing, food, health care and child care continue to outpace wage and job growth. Warning signs of a potential recession are mounting. Credit card debt has reached record highs (alongside national debt), with delinquency and default rates climbing steadily, particularly among lower-income households. Auto loan defaults are also rising, and savings rates have dropped sharply from pandemic-era highs. Retail spending has softened, and consumer confidence indexes have declined in recent months. High interest rates have made mortgages, loans and credit more expensive. The number of unemployed surpassed the number of job openings recently. AI threatens to augment and replace human labor in a wide swath of industries.
Everyone still has to eat.
That Kingston — like many other areas — operates two separate food economies is not a moral judgment; it’s a fact. And it’s a fact community members wrestle with every day — some more than others. The price of your meal reflects which city you live in.
Join the family! 
