Inspired by this thread here
What are foodstamps and how are they used? I imagine that a user gets a monthly catalogue of some sort of discout coupons that they give to a market.
Seems to me to be a sort of extra smackdown really. Correct my perceptions please.
It’s a program from the US Department of Agriculture
http://www.fns.usda.gov/fsp/
Most people don’t use individual coupons anymore, but rather a debit card. Saves time on handling and reduces fraud.
It never was coupons. The original program had a kind of script money. You went to a store and purchased groceries. Then you gave the store a couple of ten dollar foodstamps, a five dollar foodstamp and three one-dollar foodstamps for a $28.00 order. It didn’t matter what you purchased as long as they were permissible items. i.e. no cigarettes, liquor, non-food items, etc.
Today’s debit cards do the same thing in a single transaction. Just like debit cards are used in place of cash.
Foodstamps were always the equivalent of cash. The only difference was the restrictions on how you could use them and the places that would accept them.
Like BobT says, they are usually a type of debit card now. The old kind looked lke foreign currency IIRC correctly. The user had a book that he/she tore them out of to give them to the cashier. The cashier could give $1 denomination food stamps as change but their were no food stamps coins. Regular coins were as change for quantities under a dollar. This led to some food stamp receipients buying a single piece of candy with a $1 stamp, receiving the change, and then repeating until they had enough real money to buy something like cigarettes (yes, I was a supermarket cashier for three years and it happened frequently. We required that food stamp users walk out of the front door and come back in before they could get in line again). There was also a thriving black market the physical food food stamps. People that got them could sell them for 50% face value or less for cash to people that specialized in the redistibution. That is a big reason why the debit card system is popular.
I don’t know about now, but the paper food stamps did have a fairly big stigma associated with them. Other customers always glared at the spenders purchases. It wasn’t a very socially acceptable thing to be on if you were failry young and able bodied.
They are a little more valuable than cash in some jurisdictions. Sales taxes for food didn’t apply to food stamp purchases. Where I worked a the time, there was an 8% tax on all purchases, including food, that food stamp users were exempt from.
At my dad’s store, people would often offer him premiums on the food coupons (that’s what I thought was printed on them but I could be wrong) to buy beer or cigarettes, but he wouldn’t give in.
Sometimes people would try to get the change by buying a pack of gum, which my father wouldn’t go far either since you can’t (or shouldn’t eat that).
We had a special deposit slip to take to the bank for food stamps.
I believe that you could give out $1 coupons as change only. If we got a higher denomination one, we would immediately cancel it before sticking it in the till.
Was/is every grocer in the US obliged to accept food stamps? How about milk at the corner store?
To add to the black market, yes quite a few stores in my area have been in trouble for “laundering” them (ie switching them for cash). But the smart people did something a little different. We had a guy that came into our store near the beginning of every month and bought quite a bit (a few hundered dollars worth) of seafood, mainly shrimp IIRC. Seems like that shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s a food item, and there’s no rules against it AFAIK. Anyways, one day one of our employees saw him selling the seafood out of the trunk of his car a few miles away.
What no one has yet described is the noble concept, which was to help both [ol][li]the poor to eat, and the farmers to get paid for their products.[/ol]All at the taxpayer’s expense, of course.[/li]
Food stamp recipients had to qualify at a government agency by showing they were poor enough. They then paid cash for a book of stamps, and the face value of the stamps was slightly greater than the cash they paid. Since most (all?) markets accepted stamps in place of cash, shoppers could make their meager money go farther.
I don’t remember the exact amount paid per $1 of food stamps, but I think it was about 2/3 of the face value. Not a terrific deal, but worth the effort if you are poor or a starving student.
I think the did, indeed say “food coupons” on them. But everyone said foodstamps. In modern times, no one ever bought them; they were mailed free by the local AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependant Children) to their participants.
When I was in the military, there were enlisted, military families that qualified and received food stamps.
There’s also a program called WIC (Women-Infants-Children) that still uses coupons for very specific items. Pisses me off whenever I’m behind them, because it’s not a fast process to match up items with all of the coupons. How come there’s not an anti-express lane? FWIW, it seems like a good program with less potential for abuse.
I don’t believe every store had to accept food stamps/coupons. I think you had to be approved by the USDA first, but it was pretty much just a matter of sending in a form. You needed special deposit slips for the bank.
And now, you would need to have a debit card reader.
I worked as a cashier, and WIC coupons, unfortunately, were not automated the way food stamp purchases are. If the cashier was decent at their job, it wasn’t a big deal, but it was irritating when someone would have three different WIC purchases, especially if they didn’t separate them on the conveyor. (I’m sure there’s some rationale behind people receiving several coupons rather than just one, but I don’t know what it is, since a single coupon generally has several different items on it.)