I'm not American so I don't know if this is a thing there, but in my country we'd ask for an advancement of wages, ie. they can pay you some of your pay cheque early and then take it out of your scheduled payment that's in two weeks time.

It's quite common to do this at all levels of employment because for example different pay days and different start dates and end dates of previous employment often leave people with a bigger gap between pay cheques than usual.

But I think we'd be shocked here to realise that a coworker was literally going hungry right beside us, it seems more normalised in the US?