A pile of menus sat, untouched, at a table filled with Jesup Federal Correctional Institution employees at Alec’s Sports Bar. A waitress, who wandered over occasionally to fill a round of water glasses lined with lemon wedges, seemed to intuitively know not to ask if anyone needs a soft drink or a plate of chicken fingers.

“I’m not usually a water drinker,” Hannah Gariepy, a teacher – and eight-year employee – of the federal prison pointed out, “But I was thinking, what’s free?” Her colleagues erupted in laughter, all of them agreeing. One has a salad in her car. Another ate before coming to the bar.

Jesup in southern Georgia feels like an archetypical blueprint of a small American southern town, dotted with a Dollar Store and a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. Everyone knows everyone, the same few family names have shuffled in and out of local politics, and most days, its clean streets look deserted.

But now this sense of desertion is different. For Jesup, like many other communities across America, is in the grip of a partial government shutdown affecting 800,000 American workers. And Jesup will feel the hit eventually as a large chunk of its economy relies on the federal prison – one of the town’s major employers.

In one of the town’s bars, colleagues from the federal prison – which employs more than 300 people in Jesup and the surrounding Wayne county – fretted over cancelled doctor’s visits and now impossible requests from children to buy video games. These workers are all now working without pay.

“We’re not rich,” someone said, as colleagues continued to join the group. But sometimes it seems they are alone in their ever-expanding worries as the now-longest ever shutdown grinds on.

Yet non-federal workers in the town say they have yet to feel the full bite of their fellow citizens’ hardship.

Hannah Gariepy sips glass after glass of water at Alec’s Sports Bar in Jesup, Georgia. It’s all she can afford as a federal prison employee during the shutdown, she says. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

“I hope they budgeted,” the owner of Alec’s Sports Bar, who goes by his initials AB, shrugged after the group left his all-wood bar, lined with televisions turned to Fox News and sports. “It’s still too early to tell,” he added, when asked if Jesup’s population of 9,754, a population that has dropped nearly 5% since 2010, has felt the effects of the unpaid employees not spending any money.

The town will feel it eventually, Melvina Barnes, a reintegration and re-entry officer at the prison who lives in Jesup, concluded. “Before the shutdown, I ate out every day in Jesup,” she added, sitting across from Gariepy. Just yesterday, she spent $100 on groceries. “The milk was six bucks,” she grimaced, admitting she has just $278 left in her bank account.

But so far, outside those directly affected federal workers and their families, many in Jesup say the shutdown remains at a distance. Some have not even heard of it at all.

“We really haven’t noticed anything, as far as an impact [of the shutdown] on the citizens,” the city manager, Mike Deal, said from behind an enormous wooden desk strewn in his office on tree-lined West Cherry Street, seemingly the town’s main road.

Only one person has called in this morning, thinking if it went any longer he might be late on his water bill, Deal said. But we’ll work with him if they’ve been good paying customers, he added quickly. It’s the first phone call his office has received from a prison employee.

A few blocks over, a sign in English, Spanish, German and Italian welcomes customers to Cafe Euro. Christian rock blasted over the speakers. A line formed for sugar-laden smoothies and frappes. One of the employees behind the counter said she hasn’t heard about the shutdown. I think it’s fine, she mused, because no one is talking about it. In Jesup, she said, that’s a big indicator if something is important or not.

Other residents agreed. A cashier at the Piggly Wiggly did not know what the federal shutdown was exactly. Neither did an incoming shopper. Next door, at Surcheros, a Tex-Mex fast-food restaurant many of the prison employees say they frequent, noticed a slow lunch rush on the first unpaid payday for the prison employees. Yera Moye, who is ringing up customers said she didn’t know exactly why. She also had not heard about the shutdown.

The county administrator tried to put the implication of the shutdown in Wayne county’s perspective. “My county, if you look at it, is very rural,” Ed Jeffords explained, pointing to a map across from his desk. A lot of people leave the county for work daily, or sometimes, permanently. He suggests the economy has needed revitalizing for years. For example, he added: “My kids can’t afford the lifestyle we gave them without leaving town.” His son plans to move to Orlando.

Just outside Jeffords’ office, shuttered storefronts and near-empty stores on the town’s main drag lay empty as the evidence of the flagging economy in Jesup – a trend that started long before the shutdown hit the town’s main employer. The same group of teens circle three blocks for two hours one afternoon. The Strand dinner-movie theatre, showing Aquaman, The Mule and Vice, sees a few stragglers going in and out for tickets one afternoon.

Downtown Jesup, with a number of shuttered storefronts and near-empty shops. Photograph: Khushbu Shah/The Guardian

It’s a well-known fact that a few families in town own the majority of the wealth, Hank Tucker, a senior correctional officer and the president of the prison employees’ union said. Right now, he and his colleagues spend their dwindling savings on gas money to make their commute to the prison. That can’t last, though.

“In two weeks, federal employees won’t be able to afford to show up to work because they won’t be able to pay for the gas to drive there,” Tucker said.

Detta Dyal, who owns Shear Designs around the corner from where the group has convened, attends to her lone customer. As she brushed out her clients’ blond hair, she shrugged when talking about the shutdown. One of her employees’ husbands works at the prison, she says, but I’m sure she’s fine, she added.

“I watch Fox News so I know about the shutdown,” she began, continuing: “I don’t know the impact on her but I’m sure she’s fine because I saw on the news people are getting extensions of mortgage payments and kids are getting free lunches.”

The lack of understanding in the wider community hurts those workers laboring for nothing.

“For the public to not know, to not care, to be so completely oblivious, to think we’re undeserving, that our very livelihoods, that our children that go to school with their children, that our family members that go to church with their families, are somehow less deserving for the service that we do is like a slap in the face,” Gariepy spat out, exhausted from the multiple 16-hour days she has worked in recent weeks, even during the shutdown.

But she thinks her fellow citizens will notice their plight soon enough as the shutdown rolls on with little end in sight.

“Two [more] weeks will absolutely crush federal employees,” she said, as the waitress refilled her water glass.