Damned if I know. The place I got my free food basket used to get donations of little toiletries from a local hotel.
I was at the checkout line when the whole EBT system crashed. The cashier asked “Don’t you have some other way of paying?” I demanded to see the manager, and complained about her attitude. Yeah, right, if I had another way of paying would I be on Food Stamps??
I don’t agree. “Cut rate resale” is more difficult to get to than the retainer that sold the water in the first place. For someone with no transport, no time to wait, and an immediate need for cash, even “cut rate resale” is not an option.
On game days, during game times, sure. But not 24/7. And not five miles away.
I don’t.
But I caucus with the guy who said, “What you do for the least of My brothers, you do for me.” I don’t oppose charitable outreach. I regard it as a necessity.
I just think it has to spring from a kindly heart, not a secular mandate.
It’s funny how being able to get a photo ID is an insurmountable obstacle for some people, but reselling groceries is a piece of cake (no pun intended). How many of you would buy groceries second hand from anyone, much less someone who is “needs cash fast”?
You also have them pretty much every day at a number of overpasses and intersections in Chicago. (One by my house is particularly busy, with four working the on-ramps on to the Stevenson. What I didn’t understand was all the cotton-candy men. A couple summers ago, there were four different people selling cotton candy for the whole summer on the same intersection. Who the hell buys cotton candy that this is profitable enough for one person working the intersection, much less four? And it was throughout my part of the city. Everywhere. Cotton-candy men. They’re still around, but not in the numbers they were.)
Who’s “we”? Individual Christian congregations? Is this a discussion topic on your Sundays?
Many people don’t realize that you can’t buy diapers with EBT or WIC.
You kids these days. Back in the day, we got milk in glass bottles, which we saved, washed, and took back to the dairy farm, where we got those bottles refilled with fresh steaming hot milk straight on tap. (ETA: Yes, this was right in the Big City – Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley to be exact – where there were still things like dairy farms and orange groves back then.)
True story: A time came when my mother began to buy milk in cardboard cartons at the supermarket. I, a naive young kiddo of 5 or 6 at the time, complained that the milk didn’t taste very good. Mother dearest insisted that she couldn’t tell any difference.
One day I complained that the milk in the glass bottle wasn’t very good either. Sure enough, she had filled a glass bottle with milk from the cardboard carton, just to see if I would notice. Yeah, I did.
Here in the wilds of Appalachia it’s very common for people to buy carts full of soda with food stamps and resell them. There are ready buyers and everyone knows who they are.
People complain about this all the time because it’s hard to go to the grocery store around the first of the month (when food stamps are deposited) without seeing someone paying for a cart full of name-brand soda with the American flag-emblazoned EBT card. But the fact is that it’s just not that many people doing it. Even if a couple hundred people were pulling this scam, which would be plenty to be visible, it would be a small percentage of the 8,000 or so residents of my county who are on food stamps. And I doubt it’s that many–there just can’t be enough people buying and reselling soda to handle more than that.
This is one of the many reasons why food stamps shouldn’t pay for soda in the first place. I’ve never heard a compelling argument in favor of that.
All that said, if we had no available rebuyers, I could definitely see someone desperate to get enough oxycodone to get through the day pulling the buy-and-dump scam described in the OP, if Kentucky had a deposit on containers. Addicts can do some really dumb shit to come up with $10 for a Percoset, so I’m sure this would occur to someone. But I can’t imagine it would become common enough to be worth spending time and effort on a solution.
I wouldn’t, because they are invariably junk food. But I’ve certainly been offered, and seen it successfully transacted. Reselling groceries is slightly harder than pouring out beverages, but considerably more lucrative. Which is to say, not very, but still much better than the purported bottle-return scam.
If we really don’t like these kinds of micro-scams/entrepreneurship among food-subsidy recipients, we could knock them right out by just giving out the subsidies as cash in the first place.
Can’t buy toilet paper, either.
The rationale is, of course, that food stamps are for food, nothing else. Stinky poor people with babies that need changin’ are just going to have to beg, borrow or steal what else they need. Definitely steal toilet paper - that’s an easy one. Diapers, soap, and toothpaste are a bit harder, but not so much as to be impossible.
At my store we do lose a certain amount of toiletries to walk-offs. Sometimes people using them right in the store, too. The really expensive perfume, soaps, and cosmetics might be re-sold on eBay or something, but the cut-rate bargain stuff?
Don’t forget the folks re-selling food and beverages at the El stations. Usually on the stairways leading into or out of the station, or to and from the platforms, or in the access tunnels between the Loop stations.
The funny thing is, if those folks engaging in small-scale entrepreneurship were anyone but desperately poor people on public subsidy we’d be applauding their initiative and capitalism. Instead, we punish them. We exhort them to get a job but when they create one they’re despised for it.
Often – and a discussion topic at my Knights of Columbus meetings twice monthly.
No, you’re factually wrong.
The reason that buying water for $6 and pouring it to get the $2.50 in deposit money works should be obvious: they don’t incur the $6 cost in the same way that someone not on public subsidy would incur the cost.
They are punished because they are abusing the subsidy, not because they are desperately poor. They have not “created a job.” I suggest that you don’t really understand what a “job,” is, at least in this context.
The word can be used to refer merely to arduous labor, or to a difficult task – even that would be a poor description of what goes on when water is purchased and dumped. But when we speak of job creation, we are talking about creating a framework in which a person’s labor adds some value to a process, value for which they are paid a wage. Dumping water to get the deposit on the bottles does no such thing.
Poor people tend to know…other poor people. And other poor people may indeed like access to cheaper food. I think it’s less often selling food to random people on the street, and more often picking up groceries for your sister and being reimbursed cash.
I was not referring to water-dumping-for-bottle-deposit stupidity, I was referring to the people who purchase items and re-sell them. Acquiring a resource and re-selling it for profit is seen as a legitimate way to do business… unless you’re poor. Then you’re a criminal.
Sure, it’s “public money”. So are tax breaks, small business loans, and grants. We’d do better giving these enterprising folks micro-loans to set up a small business.
You’re missing my overall point, which is that some of these folks are NOT lazy and NOT scammers - they’re actually trying to raise money with the resources at hand. Granted it’s shady at best and a violation of restrictions and intentions, but rather than punish people who show a spark of initiative and a desire to earn some money (and if you don’t think standing outside and El station for hours hawking bags of junk food isn’t tiring and at times unpleasant you haven’t ridden mass transit) we should try to channel that into a real job instead of simply assuming that poverty=criminal or poverty=drug abuse or whatever the meme is this week.
Are some of these folks cheating to drugs or booze? Yeah. And some are cheating for the money to buy toothpaste or diapers. The ones dumping water are stupid. The ones re-selling for profit are the ones that we should be steering into an honest job.
The USA is the *only country in the world *that has “food stamps.” Because other countries just give poor people money. You should try that. This idea that it’s horrible to spend money on poor people if they get money out of it is absurd.
And spare me the whining about “drugs.” For many Americans, SNAP & Medicaid are the only public assistance programs they qualify for. SNAP is the closest thing some people have to income.
Anyone who thinks cash is only spent on “drugs” is living in a sparkly world of delusion.
Abolish the program and you eliminate all fraud & waste. Plus you get to fire some overpaid government workers as a bonus. Then we can stop talking about what the poor can and can not do with the taxpayers money, since we are not giving them any.
Problem solved!
Both Bricker and Foggy seem to speak of replacing much of public welfare programs with private charity. (I think Foggy is being facetious.) I have serious doubts that such a program would be even remotely feasible.
I’d like Bricker, or anyone who thinks a significant portion of the cost of public welfare programs can be offloaded onto private charities, to start a thread in IMHO (or resp., GD) to explain (or resp., debate) their plan. (I’d start such a thread myself but think it far more appropriate that a supporter of the idea start the thread.)
Bricker?