Why are food stamps accepted at gas stations?

Parent Cafe
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<p>What those with food stamps often do with food stamps is swipe the card and then pay whatever is left over. There’s really no way for the author to know whether or not that happened unless he was studying her very, very closely.</p>

<p>You don’t have to look that hard to see that she only purchased one item…lol</p>

<p>Since she only bought the cake (nothing else) and she swiped her benefits card, she was using it to buy the cake…</p>

<p>*Recently I had to run into that store and, sizing up the three lines, chose to stand behind a woman with one item in her cart. It was one of those large ice-cream cakes. When the checkout person said “Forty-one dollars,” I wasn’t the only one who blanched. The shopper’s son, around 12, repeated it as a question: “Forty-one dollars?”</p>

<p>I quickly calculated that the woman’s cake was eight times more expensive than the kind I make at home to celebrate birthdays. The mother ignored her son’s question.</p>

<p>She took out her benefits card, swiped it through the machine, and they were off. My turn.</p>

<p>I stood there, wondering what lesson the young boy takes away from this transaction. Does he grow up with the faintest understanding of delayed gratification—that you have to earn your money before you can buy candy—or, in this case, an ice-cream treat? I wondered how we arrived at this point as a nation. I also felt like a chump.*</p>

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<p>I suggest that before one passes judgement about what one someone else should or shouldn’t be doing, one ought to try living in an inner city, on food stamps, for awhile. </p>

<p>I’ve purchased a few expensive cakes for things like graduations, promotions, weddings, other important life events. Apparently poor people aren’t supposed to celebrate … anything.</p>

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<p>

I don’t often buy food at convenience stores but I know people do, and as best I can tell, the folks buying stuff in there aren’t 1%ers. Since only 1%ers have “money to burn” and they’re not shopping at 7-11, I assume you would outlaw convenience stores? Or do you expect the really poor to be smarter and more virtuous than everyone else?</p>

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<p>The assumptions being made about how food stamps are being used are just that…assumptions. The gas station likely posted that so that folks using food stamps would know that they could get things there if they needed to. Our gas station is where I buy much of our milk…you know what…it’s the least expensive milk in the area…and it’s on my way home…thus saving me gas money.</p>

<p>I think this thread has a lot of nasty assumptions…making it seem like everyone on food stamps who buys a food item at the gas station is buying junk. Sorry…I don’t buy it. It’s convenient for them, just as it’s convenient for everyone else…and with the cost of gas, I say…save money where you can.</p>

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<p>The principal of fungibility tells you that you really can’t control what people do with their resources. Buying food for people frees up resources to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. You might as well call food stamps “cable tv and cell phone stamps”, or whatever is incrementally added to the family budget as a result of the handout.</p>

<p>But calling it food stamps makes it sound more palatable.</p>

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<p>Not sure how you can buy a cake since you can’t use food stamps to buy prepared food… Are we positive this is even true?</p>

<p>For all we know she was picking up the cake as a favor to someone to be reimbursed… who cares. She’s the one that will have nothing but cake to eat all week if she really did just decide to buy a $41 cake with EBT, your taxes are the same either way.</p>

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<p>Well, our local gas station sells milk for far less than our local grocery store (about 2/3rds of the cost at the grocery store), and I live in a very nice neighborhood. Its prices for candy bars are also very better. I expect it has something to do with the exorbitant profits to be made off gasoline.</p>

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<p>

Thank you! I’m a bit skeptical of the whole story.</p>

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<p>For all we know she was picking up the cake as a favor to someone to be reimbursed… who cares.</p>

<p>You’re not allowed to do that with food stamp money. That’s the same as selling your food stamps. If it were allowed, then people would do this, pocket the cash, and then use the cash for booze and cigarettes…that why it’s forbidden. She can only use food stamps to buy things for her qualified family members.</p>

<p>[Food</a> Stamps and the $41 Cake - WSJ.com](<a href=“Food Stamps and the $41 Cake - WSJ”>Food Stamps and the $41 Cake - WSJ)</p>

<p>I think if the story weren’t true (or wasn’t even possible), that would have been exposed by now.</p>

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<p>Well, no, you’re not allowed but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have done it. You’re also not allowed to buy prepared food!</p>

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<p>You cannot buy food heated up in the store. I couldn’t understand that either until I got to the ice cream part. I wouldn’t spend forty one dollars on any cake. It sounds like a very special treat and not the usual thing for EBT.</p>

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<p>

If gas was so profitable, every gas station around here wouldn’t have spent the money tearing down and replacing the buildings with convenience stores.</p>

<p>Gross margin on gas is 7 to 10 cents per gallon, actual profit on that is more like 3 to 5 cents per gallon.</p>

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<p>If someone is using food stamps to buy food, they are pretty low income.
( for instance you can’t get food stamps as a college student unless you are also working at least part time.</p>

<p>While my H complains about the cookie selection at our regular grocery store, ( $4.70 for six cookies), the Safeway across the street sells rows and rows of white/flour sugar premade products. So obviously spending $ 50 at Safeway they easily could get a shopping cart full of snack foods.
However, it is accurate to say that many neighborhoods do not have 24/7 access to a grocery store. The grocery store may be too far to easily walk or use the bus for anything but preplanned out trips. The grocery store may have limited hours- often stores in high crime areas do. If you are homeless, you don’t have anywhere to store food. Getting something at the local minimarts, whether it be snack food ( or if you are lucky), something made locally, may be necessary for your well being.</p>

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<p>Notrichenough: according to this site (which looks sensible), gross margin is around 27 cents/gallon. [Estimated</a> 2012 Gasoline Price Breakdown & Margins Details](<a href=“http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/index.php]Estimated”>http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/index.php) </p>

<p>There is no indication of part of that is net profit (which I assume is what you meant by “actual profit”).</p>

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<p>According to comments on various blogs/columns about this, you can now buy cakes and some other prepared foods with EBT/SNAP cards …the restrictions have loosened in recent years.</p>

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<p>For a period of time while we were together, my ex had EBT. I remember we went to the store once, were able to get about half of what he needed grocery wise, and then had to put the bottle of laundry detergent we were trying to buy back because neither of us had the cash to pay for it-- which was mortifying, people were staring. That year was damn hard. I try not to judge… I don’t know what’s going on in other peoples homes. If my ex had wanted to eat ramen for a month to have enough EBT left over for a fancy cake or a box of twinkies from 7-11, I don’t see why that’s such a problem… it’s not like anybody is getting extra EBT because they aren’t putting it to “good” use. They’re the ones that have to eat whatever they bought.</p>

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<p>I am disgusted by some of the things that have been written in this thread.</p>

<p>There are vast areas of my city that have no grocery stores worthy of the name, only gas stations and tiny bodegas. Getting a supermarket into their neighborhood is the #1 objective of every functioning community development group, but it is very difficult to pull off (and even when they do, there is a pretty high failure rate for the stores). Getting to and from a decent grocery store can easily mean $5 or more in cash public transportation cost, and an hour or more travel time, and you are still limited by what you can carry easily on public transportation. That’s why people use food stamps at gas stations, convenience stores, and bodegas.</p>

<p>And a good thing they do, because without the food stamps there might not be any stores at all carrying milk, eggs, and bread in those neighborhoods. The difference between food stamps and cash assistance isn’t because food stamps and cash aren’t basically fungible to the recipients, it’s that food stamps support a food distribution chain in poor neighborhoods. The real constituency for food stamps isn’t limited to poor people who receive them, it includes small businesses, the few supermarket operators who are willing to try to serve poor areas, and the distributors who supply them. It may be difficult to get a supermarket or a farmer’s market into a poor neighborhood, but cut out or reduce food stamps and that will become impossible (and all of the existing ones will be shuttered within weeks).</p>

<p>The food stamp program is a great program. It supports nutrition and small business. The rate of fraud and abuse is demonstrably tiny. Especially as compared to things like frequent flyer programs – doesn’t it bother you that tax dollars are funding deductions for overpriced business travel that results in an untaxed kickback to highly paid workers? How many people do you know who pay tax on their frequent flyer awards?</p>

<p>Meanwhile, all we have is Mr. Kozak’s word for it that this woman was paying for an expensive cake with food stamps. I shop, week after week, at a supermarket where lots of people use food stamps, and I never see anything like that. ( I shop there because I represented the guy who developed it, and I know what he had to go through to build a quality store for a mixed-income clientele, and because people there are incredibly kind to and accepting of my Alzheimer’s mother-in-law who comes with me so she can wander around the aisles pushing a grocery cart, which is about 99% of the exercise she gets in a week.) And even if Kozak was right, what if it was part of a pooled effort with 80 other people at the woman’s church, in which everyone was going to celebrate (and have plenty of nutritious food to take home)?</p>

<p>Clearly the right-wing blogs must be on about food stamps for some reason now, because urban folklore like this is getting passed around with greater frequency. I am naturally pretty conservative – I believe in markets, and I am suspicious of regulation – but this kind of thing makes me unwilling to associate with lots of self-proclaimed conservatives.</p>

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<p>*Quote:
Not sure how you can buy a cake since you can’t use food stamps to buy prepared food… Are we positive this is even true?
*</p>

<p>Yep, according to the USDA, you can buy cakes with food stamp money…</p>

<p>Identifying Eligible Food Items
Before turning to the issue of how EBT systems might be able to differentiate between program-eligible and ineligible items, we discuss how scanning systems identify eligible items.
It is unlawful to use FSP benefits to purchase anything other than “eligible foods.” According to regulation, eligible foods include:</p>

<p>· Any food or food product intended for human consumption except alcoholic beverages, tobacco, and hot foods and hot food products prepared for immediate consumption; and</p>

<p>· Seeds and plants to grow foods for the personal consumption of eligible households.4</p>

<p>since the cake isn’t a “hot food” and it’s not booze or tobacco, it qualifies…and at ANY cost.</p>

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<p>I completely agree with JHS.</p>

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<p>Great post, JHS.</p>