Grocery stores sell gift cards which work like cash within the store. You can buy anything with them, including alcohol and cigarettes. In some cases, I’d prefer that the gift card worked like food stamps. I want it to only be able to buy food. Are there stores which do something like that?
In some cases I want to help someone be able to buy food, but don’t want them to be able to buy alcohol or cigarettes. Right now I don’t know of any way to do that, other than actually buying the food for them myself.
None that I know of, and I’ve seen most every store gift card out there. If they did exist, the recipient could simply sell them for less than face value even easier than SNAP cards and use the cash for anything they liked instead of what you wanted them to buy. Hell, you could straight up buy them food and have it delivered to their house, they could still go to Walmart or the like and return the items for cash.
I have a sponging brother, have had sponging, using friends and I speak from experience. In their mind, what you’re really giving them is something to sell.
Well you could try getting a gift card to some place that doesn’t sell booze or tobacco. Here in PA most supermarkets don’t sell the former, and there are a few that have stopped selling tobacco products.
So get a list of products they regularly use, and check the prices on Amazon and Walmart to see which has competitive prices.
So you might end up setting up Amazon Subscribe and Save subscriptions for their favorite cereals, diapers and coffee and do a monthly Walmart Home Free purchase…
Honestly it’s a huge waste of time. If they want to sell that that food only card at a discount and turn it into cash they can use that’s extremely easy to do.
I would just buy him alcohol and cigarettes directly, and save him some time.
There’s literally nothing you can do other than preparing home cooked meals yourself, as others have mentioned, that will prevent him from selling/trading whatever you give him for cash or liquor/tobacco.
Okay, not EVERYONE is going to take those steps to buy non-food items, even if they would have done so with cash or even an unrestricted gift card. An addict, yes, probably. Someone who occasionally spends some of their grocery money on cigarettes or booze but isn’t all the way gone? Likely not. There are plenty of people who receive food stamps or use food banks and also drink and/or smoke but still don’t sell their benefits.
No doubt about that; but if someone’s so concerned that they ONLY spend the money on food then they likely have past experience w/ that person to look back on. The bulk of people who get benefits use them for their intended purpose IME. I’ve been behind plenty of people doing exactly that to the most correct degree, down to the brand/size.
But I know if I gave my brother a $50 Kroger card, he’d sell it to a neighbor or friend for $30 to buy smokes. I know this from my past experiences w/ him. He thinks I give outdated technology to his step-kids b/c I’m cheap; actually, it’s so he can’t sell it and they still get use out of it.
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet, but you run the risk of the recipient just selling the card at a discount for cash to someone else, then using the cash to buy cigs and booze. Just thought I would mention that.