Do SNAP Food Restrictions Help Health, or Punish Poor People?

[Alice B.]

79. I hear you. I know this quite personally because I've used an EBT card -- even an average white lady

gets stares. I'm just always amazed every time someone posts on Facebook or writes an LTTE with a highly detailed accounting of what another person is buying, while complaining about the misuse of their tax dollars.

True, it can often be hard to miss what people are buying and how they are paying (and cards in my state are, or at least they were, distinctively designed with a particularly obnoxious color combination; someone even wrote a blog post about it once) -- but a lot of times it can also be easy to look elsewhere. Considering lot of card readers have hoods to keep bystanders from being able to see your pin, to my mind, there is (or should be) an unspoken bit of etiquette about making an effort to mind one's own in the checkout line.

Maybe it's just me going out of my way not to watch someone pay, and find other things to look at. But I'd bet that if I started screaming about people's Wells Fargo or Chase cards and 2 liters of Mountain Dew with any degree of specificity, people might be worried I was trying to skim numbers or something.