A thread over in the Pit caused me to wonder about this question:
What are you allowed to buy with food stamps? What are you not allowed to buy?
Some of the posts in the Pit thread described families buying all sorts of junk food with food stamps. I was under the apparently erroneous impression that food stamps could only be used for certain foods, like bread, milk, and cheese. So, what’s real deal?
Food stamps can be used to purchase food items. No paper/plastic, cleaning items. No pre-fixed foods, like it the supermarket also sells sandwhiches that are already made up.
no bottle deposits.
no alcohol
no tabacco
no drugs (either over the counter or prescription)
CAN be used for chips, pop, frozen tv dinners etc.
WIC coupons (Women, infant and child) can only be used for the items specified (usually milk, juice, cheese etc.)
AFAIK, you can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes. Anything else is fair game in the grocery store (I used to have a roommate who got them). There was an easy way around that. Anything under $1 they gave you cash back. He’d buy something for 10 cents, get 90 back. repeat this 3x. Then take the $2.70 and buy cigarettes. :rolleyes:
I had a roommate that got food stamps from his mom for his food. One day, we needed milk, and it was before my payday. He gave me $2 in food stamps. Ugh! I hated to use them, but I was thirsty.
The Food Stamps program is overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Here’s what the USDA Food Stamps brochure says:
The link is http://fns1.usda.gov/fsp/MENU/apps/facts.htm
Dr. J pretty much covered it.
Just one more point: A year or so ago The Food Stamp people went to a “debit card” system where your account is credited monthly. So the “buy a 10 cent pack of gum and get 90 cents in change” ploy doesn’t work any more; there’s no change.
I always thought the hot foods prohibition was kind of screwy. The grocery store deli can bake you a cake, and you can buy it with food stamps. But you have to wait for it to cool off!
The whole reason behind foodstamps is that the government interferes with food prices to raise them. This supposedly helps farmers and is good for other reasons but means that some poor ppl can’t afford food that they would be able to afford if the government didn’t interfere. So to get around that argument against artificially high food prices, they invented food stamps.
I was on foodstamps the last year I went to college. If it were not for them, I would not have been able to finish college and graduate and become a taxpayer. My husband and I worked every hour we could and still did not have enough money to buy groceries. I see nothing wrong in accepting and using food stamps.
Thanks for the responses so far.
Wring’s response clears up a good part of my confusion. At the Shop-Rite, some items (like cheese) are labeled “WIC Approved Item,” or some such. I didn’t know WIC coupons and food stamps were two different things.
I have another related question: Is the dollar amount of the food stamps given to a family usually so high that they can “afford” TV dinners? In other words, what is their incentive to buy rice and beans if they can not use the food stamp money that they saved toward something else that they need?
Let’s see GB, in 1998 a woman with one child in California got $479.00 in cash grant & 60 bucks in food stamps [this is an actually example). That is for one month. Try living on that dude.
handy,
Your figures are misleading. The two programs you cite are not the only two available. There’s also HUD which pays for rent, HEAP which pays for heating bills, WIC which pays for food for pregnant women and kids under a certain age. And others that I don’t remember offhand (or never heard of).
Having said that, I don’t think anyone can live especially wealthily living solely off government programs. But the poverty is not nearly as dire as advocates would have you believe. (And this leaves out the possibility of cheating, which is thought to be widespread).
It seemed pretty dire to me when I had to go hungry and could not prove I was poor to the satifaction of anyone offering help.
Many times before i finally graduated college, we were one illness, one accident, one unexpected bill away from being without a home. In one case we could not make our $185 rent payment and the only reason we did not go homeless was we discovered that we had been paying for the hot water for both apartments. The landlady compromised and let us use out deposit for a last month’s rent and gave us 2 weeks rent free. Shen knew we kept the place in great shape.
I have experienced malnutrition firsthand. My tongue has bled because I had to rely on polished rice for most of my meals.
Poverty is dire, whereever and whoever is experiencing it. Yes, there are programs available, but they are not as easy to enter or even find out about as you might think.
lee:
I would suggest that your experience is not fully reflective of the welfare situation in that you are not, evidently, a career welfare person. There are many who are, who have in many cases been brought up with the system. These people have long since made it their business to find out what the programs are and how to enter.
I believe you can food stamps to buy seeds to grow fruits and vegetables also. At least you could back when my dad had a store before he closed it in 1991.
He was very vigilant on what he would use food stamps for and some customers got ticked off when he wouldn’t let them buy cigarettes.
I know somebody who used to get food stamps. You can use them to buy candy bars, but not coffee. This I don’t understand. As everyone knows, caffeine is one of the four major food groups (sugar, fat, and alcohol being the others.)
To turn food stamps into beer and cigarettes, you sell your stamps to someone at half their face value and then use the cash to buy your beer and cigarettes. I’ve lived in a number of poor neighborhoods and I’ve seen this done at least a couple of dozen times. But this was back in the '70’s. If they’re using debit accounts instead of food stamps nowadays, I’d think that would lick the problem.
Or maybe you could just agree to buy X dollars worth of groceries for your “friend,” who would pay you 1/2X dollars for the groceries. Then you’d have your cash for tobacco and alcohol.
There’s always a way to abuse the system.
I thought the four basic food groups were pizza, beer, cigarettes and pot.
When I was 19, my girlfriend’s father collected a LOT of foodstamps by claiming his two daughters and his stepdaughter as dependents, when none of them lived at home. He would sell them to me for 50 cents on the dollar, and I would use them to buy soft drinks to stock my Coke machine with. I made HUGE profits, over $200 a week in the summer.
People still sell their food stamps even though it’s now a food debit card (they call them Lone Star Cards in Texas). It requires more trust these days, you pay the person with the card for the amount you are going to use (50 cents on the dollar) and borrow their card. You bring back the receipt and the card when you are done shopping. It does require a bit of trust if the other person is paying for less food credit than you have on your card, but it does go on.
I was on food stamps at different times in the 1980s. I can tell you that single non-disabled men did NOT get anywhere near the amount that mothers or even single women did. I believe I got maybe $150.00 worth per month in 1988. And unless you were really fond of beans, rice, and macaroni & cheese it was tough stretching out a food budget.
As far as what you could buy at the store, the guidelines mentioned earlier were the rule, although it depended on what store you went to. A few were snotty about letting me buy food items they considered luxuries. Some would not let you make a purchase of less then one dollar. About the weirdest thing I remember was being told I could not buy a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice with food stamps.
Lots of people are really snotty and judgemental when you use food stamps. I remember buying rice, peanut butter and jelly, white bread, frozen veggies, cheese, cocoa, sugar, powdered milk, some generic sandwich cookies, ground beef, ham, mushrooms, cheese, potatoes, dry pasta, chicken, and onions and still getting nasty remarks about my purchases.
When I worked as a cashier in the States (about seven years ago), you wouldn’t believe how many people tried to get me to let them pay for cigarettes with food stamps! Often it was the same person, more than once! If our supermarket had sold alcohol (but since it was in PA, you could only buy it at People’s Republic of Pennsylvania licensed stores), no doubt people would have tried to buy that with food stamps too.
About the amount of food stamps issued per month–I remember one woman buying about $300 worth of food, then handing over a huge stack of food stamps. I still remember having to tear them out of the packets. Was that her whole monthly supply?
Food stamps were OK to deal with, but the WIC checks were a pain in the neck. The cashier is supposed to tick off everything on the check, notify the customer when they have failed to purchase something on the list, check ID, and inform the customer when they are claiming something that is not on the list. The last always led to arguments because if, for example, someone had bought a 400-gram jar of peanut butter instead of a 300-gram jar, you were not supposed to allow them to buy it on the check. Usually I just let them have it rather than deal with the hassle of arguing with them. Has this system been changed in the six years since I left the US?