The Cheapest Places on Earth: West Virginia
Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, April, 2000 by Bob Knotts
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To many, West Virginia remains a hardscrabble state scraped raw in the quest to transform coal into money, a place where miners cough up black dust and farmers break plows on rock-embedded fields. This is the popular image and to some extent it is true even today. The coal mines and the rocky farms still exist in pockets and patches, along with the people who work them. The difference now is that visitors must search to see the truly impoverished face of West Virginia.
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Nevertheless, it should come as little surprise that West Virginia is one of the cheapest places on earth. Though desperate poverty seems relatively uncommon these days, the state lags behind the national average in weekly wages, dramatically in some industries: more than 38 percent in computer programming services, for example, and more than 27 percent in millwork. The coal business that had been West Virginia's ...
