Babies eat $9 steaks do they??

The BBQ Pit
1

Never done this before but this really pissed me off and if you know me you know it takes a lot to piss me.

A lot of regulars to the store where I work use food vouchers and gift certificates given to them by churches and various charity groups. It’s a wonderful program and I’m so happy the store can participate. Here’s my problem:

This stupid bitch of a woman who is raising 2 kids comes in and uses said certificates to buy $9 steaks, pop, chips and the like whilst talking on her newish (and not used) cellphone!!! Jesus fuck woman!! Your kids are wearing shabby clothes with stains and holes while you live it up off the generosity of others! You have a baby!! Where is the baby food? Your daughter doesn’t need that chocolate bar to shut her up she needs some veggies and milk to give her some colour! This isn’t an isolated incident-she does this all the time.

The fact that i come from a very low income, single mother home where we were always one check away from homelessness maybe biases me but I can’t even imagine such selfishness. I would never, ever judge someone who is doing the best they can but my god this woman sickens me. I’d like to rat her out somehow except I worry she’d kept buying her own stuff and the children would suffer more.

There are vouchers that specify you can only buy meat, dairy and fruit and veggies but most places prefer to give out gift certificates. I know it’s only a few bad apples who do this but arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! it makes me so mad.

2

yup.
some people should jnot be allowed to have babies.

They should be removed from the gene pool altogether

3

What goes around come around. Too bad when those kids are grown and want nothing to do with Mom, she probably won’t see whose really responsible.

4

I don’t want to un-pit this thread - I too grew up observing some creative stretching of dollars. We were never to the point of needing food vouchers or public assistance but there were lean times. My mom worked in a grocery store at that time and told me that since Food Stamps could not be used for diapers some people bought steaks, sold them to friends and neighbors and came back with the cash to get diapers

Now, back to our regularly scheduled thread already in progress.

If the kids are pale and the clothes are dirty (holes I can excuse. I had patches, and obvious lines where the hems had been let down but dirty is different) it doesn’t seem as if mom is doing what I described above. She should be thumped soundly on the head!

The cell phone would really get under my skin.

I think what bothers me most is that she obviously doesn’t have the sense to be ashamed of herself.

5

More and more people I know have a cell phone instead of a home phone. Perhaps she made that choice as well.

6

Why are you so surprised? Some are poor by a confluence of unfortunate circumstances while others are poor (or stay poor) because they have no common sense. Using (or attempting to use) food stamps or vouchers for non-essentials is hardly a rare occurence.

7

Also, for all you know, she could be breastfeeding and not need baby food. I don’t plan to ever feed my daughter babyfood or formula.

8

Being a chronically ill single parent I have experienced, from time to time, the worst poverty, and even in the best of times we are far from rich.

gwendee has described one possible scenario. In the days before electronic benefits cards, I used to carefully add up the cost of my groceries, making sure I had a few cents over even dollars to guarantee I would get 90-99 cents in change so I could have laundry money. I also offered to do friends’ shopping, paying with food stamps and getting cash from them. These tactics were, of course, illegal, but when you get $158 cash for two people but $250 food stamps you learn real quickly how to cheat the system. This was several years ago and in those days two people (one a small child) could easily eat healthily and plentifully on $200. That extra $50 helped me get off welfare by buying gas and trolley tickets to look for a job.

Here is another:

It always astounded me how many of my friends and family decided to “help” me with paying for cable TV for me, buying me movie tickets, magazine supscriptions, etc. when we didn’t even have food in the house. If their “gift” was something tangible and of value I sold it with no qualms or guilt. But cable TV and cell phone air time can’t really be resold. I never did figure out how people could gleefully hand over $100 worth of CD’s (and pat themselves on the back for “helping out the needy”) but refuse to buy a sack of groceries or hand over a roll of laundry quarters or fill up a gas tank for fear it would “insult” me.

Of course, none of us knows if this family has had similar useless gifts bestowed on them, but you never know. Until you know that they ate those steaks, and until you know that her welfare check is paying for that phone (and even if it is - you try getting a job with no phone) we really can’t judge.

Oh, and, one last comment - those stained, holey clothes the children are wearing? She probably got them from the same charities. You’d be shocked if you saw the garbage people think the poor should be grateful for.

9

Of course, it could be for a special occassion. I think someone wrote into Dear Abby complaining about seeing a woman buy shrimp and a big cake with foodstamps.

Someone wrote back saying it was for their daughter’s birthday-she had cancer and probably would only live for a few more months.

Or something like that.

10

Or what about the young woman with immaculately dyed and groomed hair using food stamps whose daughter is dressed in BabyGap (logo on the shirt) and brand-new Nike sneakers? Yes, someone may have given them to her as gifts, but when she began talking about her next trip to BabyGap, I was peeved!!!

Yes, I know she may have been “talking” so as to make others think that she shopped there (out of shame), but I doubt it.

11

Ah, my post was eaten. Basically- Avarie, I don’t get it…how “shabby” does a person on food stamps have to be before you’ll cease passing judgment on them? I just don’t think it matters what someone else sees fit to wear. That’s their problem, not mine. First you people get angry when the kids are wearing clothing that is dirty/with holes, and now it’s bad that they’re wearing the Gap? What exactly should the poor be sporting this season?

12

How’d I get the computer I’m posting on?

A friend found it while cleaning out the basement. He was going to throw it out as it had no trade in or resale value.

What about that second phone line, dsl, or broadband connection?

I’ve got one phone line. No cable. No dsl. No broadband.

What about the isp?

The last pc my Dad bought came with a rebate-plus lots of fine print. By buying it, he signed up with MSN for a good long time. Since he’s hardly ever online, I use his account.

I live almost entirely off diet Mountain Dew, peanut butter, and cereal. I hardly ever cook. I just don’t have the energy or willpower to clean dishes to the standard my supressed OCD requires. Yep, I still have the obsession that everything be spotlessly clean. But my only remaining compulsion is to do nothing. I lost 90% of my silverware because it was in the sink so long it rusted. I know bottles of soda are cheaper than cans. Buying ingredients and cooking is cheaper than buying premade frozen foods. But cooking leads to a sink full of stagnant water and rusting pots. So I buy cans of soda, frozen food.

I do sometimes splurge on luxury items. One of my friends is a gourmet chef. I bought him an imported, prepackaged tira mi su. Another friend misses the foods of her Central American childhood. It’s time to buy plaintains and high end Goya.

OTOH

The system sucks. I’ve had social workers, other folks getting benefits, and county employees tell me that it’s much easier to get benefits illegally then by actually qualifying and applying through proper channels. Why is it that I can legally blow the whole months (OTOMH) $140 on a can of caviar but can’t use the stamps to buy toilet paper?

Mr Jim
Wait. It could be another case of somebody’s birthday. Or, she could be one of the people who makes everything so hard for the rest of us.

13

Wow. That column was the first thing I thought of when I read the OP. Not many Dear Abby (or was that an Ann Landers?) columns have remained stuck in my head for several years, but that was one of them. It’s a good lesson in not ranting until you know all the details.

14

I appreciate everyone’s suggestions. I wish it was something else as much as anyone, a birthday, reselling the food, etc., I just very sadly doubt it.

15

As for the “special occasion,” Mr Jim said in the OP that she does this all the time, so we can probably rule that out in this particular case.

16

Oh, those kids might have something to do with their mother.

Like choosing her nursing home.

17

Mr Jim

I have been in your shoes and know exactly how you feel. I worked at a convenience store that frequently put 12-packs of soda on sale. The amount of food stamps we took in during those sales was amazing. I know one lady spent over $100 and left with a truckload (or should I say a shiny new car full.) I also saw people coming in and buying entire boxes of candy bars. This didn’t make sense to me because our candy was like 70 cents a bar…the same candy was much cheaper at the little grocery store right down the road.

Another instance was this older gentleman who loved to play the lottery. He would come in, buy his 25 cent Little Debbie snack cake with a doller f.s., get his change. He would come back again, do the same thing, and now he had enough for a lottery ticket. He would manage to sit in the store and scratch off tickets for hours. I finally read our food stamp handbook and realized I could refuse to sell him the cakes if I knew he was using the change in a wrongful manner. And I did. Thank heavens Kentucky has since changed to a debit card system.

I understand there are a lot of people out that who really need help, but I also come from an area where an extremely high number of people abuse the system. I have family members who do and it really bothers me. I suppose it’s better to have the programs available for those who do need help and accept that no system is perfect.

18

Doc, your post was painfully honest. I have to admire you for that alone.

19

Well, as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers. You want to come begging for free stuff, you want to put yourself in a situation in which you can’t pay for your own shit, then you better realize that everyone isn’t going to come running to shower you with golden jewelry. Some people are actually willing to give up their stuff, free of cost, as a voluntary act to benefit others.

I’m no Lorenzo de Medici, I’m gonna keep clothes until they’re pretty much shot, and then drop them off at Salvation Army. Ever hear of needle and thread? They can repair them, you know. I’m not poor enough to bother repairing clothes, but some people are, so they can have 'em. Do you really expect people to run out and buy new clothes just to donate them to the poor? Hell, I wasn’t poor growing up, but my mother still got alot of clothes for me and my brothers used by shopping yard sales, and my younger brothers subsisted to a great extent on hand-me-down clothes.

Anyways, the problem the OP describes is familiar to me, as I worked in the liquor department of a grocery store in the lower-income part of town. Yes, you heard right, a liquor department. In Missouri, they hand out these things that are basically debit cards, called EBT (electronic balance transfer.) Every two weeks the welfare portion of their benefit is automatically credited to their account, and the food stamp portion is added if they also qualify for those. You can use the food stamps only on food products, but the welfare part on anything. Well, for the welfare part since it’s a debit (they can get “cash back” like with any debit) I know what alot of welfare people are spending their welfare money on. Cartons of cigarettes and half-gallons of Crown Royal, Tanqueray, or Smirnoff vodka, pints of Courvosier, Remy Martin, cases of beer, and various canadian whiskeys. I sold a frickin’ case of Mickey’s 40 oz. one time. Jesus, even I can’t afford to drink Mickeys more than once in awhile. When you’re poor you suck it up and drink the King Cobra or Old English.

Now at the time I worked there, I was under 21. So I couldn’t buy a fifth of gin or vodka myself. But my state income taxes were being used in part to buy alcohol for other people. WTF?

20

I used to work in a convenience grocery/deli/liquor store in Las Vegas. It always amazed me that so many people were willing to pay our prices in food stamps for candy, chips, soft drinks, and deli items. These items were as often as not consumed on the spot. It wasn’t for special treats, either…we had regulars who were coming in every day or so, getting chips, soda, and made-to-order deli sandwiches.

Like Kyann22, I saw people getting change from food stamps to play the slot machines in the store (this was in Las Vegas, remember) or to buy booze or cigarettes. Regularly.

I took that job, incidentally, because my family needed the money. We qualified for food stamps and other assistance, but I had been raised to view going on assistance as the LAST resort.

Some people are genuinely needy. Others are simply out to milk the system for whatever they can.