SNAP households spent 9.3 percent of their grocery budgets on soft drinks | Hacker News Reader

SNAP households spent 9.3 percent of their grocery budgets on soft drinks

nytimes.com

18 pointsvinhboy31 comments

Seems like the headline should read "In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Slightly More Soda Than the National Average." I wonder what the distribution of money spent on soda is by income level. My guess would be that the 7.1% number (the national average) is brought down by wealthier people who buy much less soda and if you look at income levels right above those using the SNAP program it'll be approximately in line with those on SNAP. Also easy to forget that healthier options are not that available in lots of places. Food deserts are real.

In general soda consumption is on the decline in the US and if that decline follows the same pattern as cigarettes it will start with wealthier people drinking less and then move down the socioeconomic ladder. Seems a shame for tax payer dollars going to fund unhealthy food options but maybe the answer to that is a tax on sugar to correct for the negative externality on health.

I have a few issues with this article.

One is that basing "they could buy x amount at so and so store" is meaningless because when you are poor you don't tend to arbitrage for lower prices, you buy when you're out. Not to mention that poor neighbourhoods have fewer supermarkets in number and are less likely to offer sales.

But more egregious, the Walmart cited is in a shopping district with a Costco and a HomeDepot in San Leandro which is not in an especially poor area. [1]

Non-SNAP families paying 7.1% for soda is a meaningless comparison since generally these families have much bigger food budgets than SNAP families so it's not unreasonable to see that figure be lower. Also non-SNAP families have access to more supermarkets and ones with sales.

And 9.3% of $256 is $23.80 per month or about $0.80 a day. This is not an abusive amount of expense for a family, yes, it would be nice to offer incentives for better food, but this will be just an excuse to do more poor bashing.

[1] http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2007/10/14/san-francisc...

Update: ninja edit to add part of a sentence

> and 9.3% of $256 is $23.80 per month or about $0.80 a day. This is not an abusive amount of expense for a family

I feel like this is a bit of gymnastics of the numbers. When you recast the number as "only $23.80/month" what happens is that you mentally recontextualize that around your own budget, in which $23.80 is probably negligible. For a family on SNAP, the whole point is that $23.80 is not negligible. If you have problems with hunger and under-nutrition due to lack of income, $23.80 can go a very long way. Percentages are an appropriate way to discuss the issue in this case, because they more appropriately encapsulate the opportunity costs of such spending.

Hahaha ... people pay for groceries with dollars not percentages, the math I did is simple and plain enough that you may be overdoing the generosity in describing it as gymnastics.

On the contrary, I feel it is the use of percentages that obscures the truth and allows blame to be reassigned. The poor aren't on the sort of budget or living in circumstances that allow for much weighing of opportunity costs.

$23.80 for a person might go some distance on a food budget, but for a family of 3 it is less than 32 cents per person per day. If you can make that stretch "a very long way", you're a better budgeter than anyone I've ever met and could have given my mother lessons when we had to struggle to make ends meet (thankfully for not very long).

I urge you to try to shop with $23.80 in a poor neighborhood's supermarket, corner store or bodega. Best of luck with the stretching.

Update: the true figure for the soda budget is 5.44% or closer to $13.93/month, the discrepancy caused by the Times author including juices in with sweetened soda.

Well, I live in a major metropolitan area so I have access to things like Walmart, but I can (and do) buy 20lb of rice for around $8, 20lb of potatoes for around $8, and 5 dozen eggs for $6.50. That's an awful lot of calories (7k from potatoes, 12k from the rice, 4.7k from the eggs), with good carbohydrate, fat, and protein availability - about 4 days worth for a family of 3 eating at 2k calories/day/each - for around $22-$23, and it's going to leave you a lot more full than $23 worth of soda and juice.

If you want to go for straight caloric juicing then you just replace some potatoes with vegetable oil in the budget and cook extensively with it. A gallon costs ~$6 and contains a whopping 31,000 calories, and fattier foods tend to leave you feeling more full.

I've spent a significant portion of my adult life stretching my grocery budget, and while I'm fortunate enough to not have to do so by necessity right now, I've learned that it's very possible to eat well for a fraction of what most people expect.

You're very right that $23.80 isn't a whole lot for a family of 3, which rather reinforces the accusation that always underlies this kind of article - that that $23.80, which is so meager, represents a significant chunk of the low-income family's already-meager grocery spending power, which already isn't enough, and is being spent on liquid sugar rather than more nutritious alternatives. To suggest that it doesn't matter in the budgeting because it's a small number just handwaves away the fact that these families are already struggling to buy enough food.

For the record: I'm of the opinion that we should let people buy whatever they please with their SNAP benefits and seek to offer education to those on SNAP about how to spend their entitlements in the most cost- and nutrition-effective ways. Nobody likes feeling hungry. Some people are going to make poor decisions about how they spend those funds, but it's a fool's errand to try to police that.

Definitely reads as poor bashing to me. Here's a response from a University of Minnesota professor: https://www.facebook.com/joe.soss/posts/10209924428939404. I think the original article doesn't even link to the real study (https://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFoodsTy...).

Thanks for sharing that Facebook post, it makes the case far better than I did. The professor makes it clear that the conclusions of the study are totally ignored by the NYTimes author and the figures are not only cherrypicked but misquoted.

Apparently the percentage for soda is actually 5.44% not 9.3% (the bigger figure includes juices and other sweetened beverages).

Attacking SNAP families for wastefulness strikes me as one of the sleaziest ways of trying to solve the problem of sweetened soda overconsumption.

  you don't tend to arbitrage for lower prices

Are you kidding? I grew up relatively poor, and we watched for sales all the time -- one needs to more aggressively pursue sales / lower prices, as long as the savings exceed the travel cost / value of time.

Perhaps you meant that the poor won't have the same ability to stock up on sale items because they can't front the cash, but that's different from saying they don't pursue the lowest price available for everyday needs.

Besides, Grocery Outlet gets some cool things that the top-tier stores don't even carry. ;)

When I was 16 (2006), I worked in a grocery store. I still remember vividly a woman coming in, buying $200 worth of food with SNAP and then pulling out two crisp $100 bills and buying 4 or 5 cartons of cigarettes. I was really put off by it, though I never showed. It felt like a kick to the gut. That someone would abuse the system in such a fashion felt like an affront to all the people paying for her food when she clearly had the ability to pay.

This wasn't an isolated incident from her or any of the other SNAP beneficiaries in my area. It was just my first encounter with abuse.

This is of course anecdotal and it only reflects on fewer than 100 people in a small Tennessee town.

I truly believe we need to abolish food stamps and other welfare programs and replace it with a "negative income tax". That way these sorts of people can buy cigarettes (or soda) instead of food without the public feeling like they've been cheated.

What do you propose to do about the people who don't buy cigarettes and soda with their food stamps?

They still receive their benefits. The negative income tax allows for them to spend money freely.

I find it interesting that they had to rely on data volunteered by a grocery chain. They should build in something to the SNAP card system so they can track at high level where the money is being spent. That could provide some interesting data about nutrition and budget of the low income population.

This so much. That's as rigorous as a study of the most gas efficient automobile using only data provided by Volkswagen.

This is not an independently controlled dataset.

A single nation-wide grocery chain should be enough to establish trends - that's how statistics work.

The report is looking at broad categories of foods (soft drinks, vegetables). Walk into any Kroger, Whole Foods, Von's, or Trader Joe's and you'll the same assortment of products at similar levels of inventory. Demand shifts take many years and even decades, and grocers use that data very effectively for inventory control management.

Even without controlling for multiple chains, I'd wager the numbers are in the ballpark of the expected value.

You should take into account that individuals with SNAP benefits:

1. Are less likely to have transportation to goto a grocery store and opt to going to small convenience stores that are in walking distance.

2. May not have the ability to prepare their meals, such as being homeless, not having a stove, or don't have utilities such as electricity/gas.

I mean isn't there some psychological studies that show that people consume more calories when under extreme stress. And what could be more stress inducing than poverty and what provides the highest amount of calories ?

It's easy to demonize these people but they're under extreme stress all the time.

Turning snap into wic would probably cost more than 9%

But it's not about how much they spend on sugary drinks and junk food. The issue is that taxpayers are subsidizing the purchase of food and drinks which are known to be incredibly bad for the health of consumers. This is a bad thing, in large part because the additional social costs are profound. We cannot in good conscience subsidize purchasing these sorts of food and drinks (just as we don't allow purchasing alcohol with food stamps). And, I think we should tax them at a high rate just like we do with tobacco, alcohol, and now marijuana. We need to stop treating these toxic foods and drinks as somehow acceptable, just because it doesn't (but probably should) come with a Surgeon General's warning.

I predict that someday we'll have the same sorts of ads which play on TV for smoking and drugs for sugary drinks and junk food. Heck, if I were a billionaire, I'd pay for the campaign myself.

This is exactly why so many people resist nationalizing health care. They know it'll be about 30 seconds afterwards when people start trying to tell them how to live under the guise of "we're paying for it."

And they aren't wrong.

Incorrect on both counts.

The evidence is that most people want federally funded healthcare.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...

And the experience of nationalised health care in other countries is very much not of being told how to live.

The NHS in the UK is fairly easy-going about health promotion. If anything it could have done a lot more about smoking, whose costs have always consumed some significant percentage of the entire NHS budget.

Currently it could also be doing a lot more about obesity and exercise. And about sugar consumption.

But instead of going through the NHS, the British gov is seriously considering a sugar tax.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38212608

Just because they are poor doesn't mean that you ought to use your monetary control to manipulate how they eat even for their benefit. How about we try to educate all of America and make everyone healthier.

Not sure education alone can do what you desire. In the case of cigarettes, education was coupled with ever-increasing taxes to decrease the percentage of smokers. And speaking of cigarette taxes, they are certainly used, as you say, as a form of monetary control for the public's benefit.

> "The issue is that taxpayers are subsidizing the purchase of food and drinks which are known to be incredibly bad for the health of consumers."

Wait until you learn about farm subsidies.

If it is unfair to single out a single kind of food, it is worth pointing out it is also unfair that food stamps are given and not cash.

If it were cash, this article would be about cigarettes and alcohol.

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