I work at a grocery store as a cashier and I can tell you that there are WAY too many people on food stamps who don't need them. I had one customer recently who bought $200 worth of porterhouse steaks and crab legs all on an EBT card. That's an extreme example but almost every day I get someone paying EBT for a $20 steak, or a $15 sushi platter, or a $5 pint of Ben & Jerry's, and of course they have cash for beer, wine, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. And this is in a middle class area, I can't imagine the kind of fraud that goes on at stores in poor neighborhoods.
When I was growing up, my grandfather was the first person to complain about that sort of thing anecdotally (of course 10% of the time it was him actually witnessing what you describe and 90% was "Oh I heard about...") and my grandmother would always say you can't judge someone if you don't know their whole story and if you briefly encounter someone in a store you're getting maybe 5% of their story.
"This person is on unemployment and drives a Cadillac!"They probably bought the Cadillac when they had a job and didn't need unemployment benefits.
"This person bought ice cream with food stamps!"Because that's the closest she comes to anything resembling "escape" from her unemployed, impoverished, isolated life. But yes, a $5 pint of cookie dough ice cream is the source of the problem here.
"This woman was already a single mom with a kid and now she's pregnant again. Didn't she learn her lesson the first time?"What if you knew the first pregnancy only happened because she was raped by her mom's boyfriend?
