How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.
You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about “food stamps” targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.
Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like “no hot food” where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.
Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.
You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about “food stamps” targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.
Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like “no hot food” where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.
Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.