America Food Stamp Rush Hour
At the stroke of midnight every month, shoppers fill their carts as the government refills their benefit cards.
J BY ROBEN FARZAD
ust before midnight at the end of every month, swarms of shoppers at the Walmart Supercenter in
North Bergen, N.J., fi ll their carts with milk, bread, cereal, vegetables, baby food, and more. Some hold crying or sleeping infants. Others have brought along elderly relatives who cruise the aisles in scooter carts. Nearly every- one is yawning. At about 11:50 p.m., long, winding
lines start to form at the three open checkout lanes. The manager takes to the storewide PA to summon all cashiers to their posts. As the clock strikes 12, the lines move slowly for- ward. Almost all the customers pay with swipe cards and linger over brim- ming carts to double-check foot-long receipts for errors. It’s a monthly event, and a sign
of the times. On the last day of every month, at 24-hour Walmarts, food stamp recipients line up to make pur- chases just as their federal benefi t cards recharge for the new month. News of the trend was fi rst broken
by William S. Simon, Walmart’s U.S. chief executive offi cer. At a Goldman Sachs conference in September 2010, Simon told investors that on the last day of the month, “it’s real interesting to watch. About 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fi ll their grocery basket with basic items . . . and mill about the store until midnight. “Our sales for those fi rst few hours
on the fi rst of the month are substan- tially and signifi cantly higher. If you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the
night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it.”
According to the U.S. Agriculture
Dept., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) has grown from 26 million recipients fi ve years ago to a record 46 million today. The U.S. Census Bureau says nearly 50 million Americans are living in pov- erty, the highest fi gure since record- keeping began 52 years ago. The bureau calculates that 6 mil-
lion more people would be living in poverty were it not for a tempo- rary increase in the earned-income tax credit. And without food stamps,
an additional 5 million Americans would fall below the poverty line. “That is my reality,” says Lois Mar-
cucci, a single mother who was fi rst to swipe her benefi t card just after midnight on the fi rst of the month at a Walmart in Richmond, Va. Look- ing over at her two teenagers push- ing her cart fi lled with food, she says she can no longer pay her phone bill. “You can’t make ends meet,” she says, catching her breath. “I’m month to month.”
Roben Farzad is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in New York.
Used with permission of Bloomberg L.P. Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved.
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