Uber Eats will start accepting food stamps for grocery delivery in 2024
theverge.com
theverge.com
Reminds me of a similar example going on in my country, where unemployed people, get ahead of employed people, for getting a spot to put their children in the nursery.
Let that sink in: if you aren't working, you get a nursery to leave your children during the day. If you are working, you either pay private, ask the grandparents, or leave your job.
The State has basically transformed itself, on the anecdote of stealing from 1 to redistribute by 2, therefore ensuring its eternal permanence on democracy.
What makes you say this?
You get food stamps if you don't make enough money. For example, being in the service industry and relying on tips to make ends meet. If you have to work 80 hours, why shouldn't you be able to get your groceries delivered?
> too lazy to even prepare a cheaper and - on average - more nutritious meal.
You do know that only certain food items are available on food stamps. Because of people like you, we need to make sure the poor can't have any pleasure in life.
1. Presumably food stamps don't cover all food, so if someone wants to use their own money to get takeaways they can.
2. Surely the aim of the govt should be to make sure the citizenship is fed healthily, especially when they're footing the bill.
I know in the UK they have a similar system for pregnant women and young kids and it is restricted to healthy things.
Ultimately if you're going to let people spend food stamps on fast food, why not just give them cash instead.
Edit: does Uber deliver from supermarkets in the US? If so that seems ok. In the UK it's synonymous with fast food delivery, all the supermarkets have their own delivery services.
So food stamps can only be spent on certain food items.
Bread, milk, eggs, etc. So they are doing what is being requested. This is literally why they are given stamps instead of cash, to restrict people.
Don't demonise people because they are so poor that they have to accept assistance to be able to eat bread.
And yes, in the US they don't have food delivery from all the supermarkets like in the UK. Uber is filling that gap.
All the items you can buy on food stamps are explicitly reviewed. That's the point.
People are bitching because poor people can buy anything on UberEats, and this is not true.
Or better yet, maybe mind your own business and say nothing at all. The idea that a poor child shouldn't be allowed to have a birthday cake or that people shouldn't be able to decide for themselves what they'll eat is gross.
I've spent a lot of money over the years in taxes, and I do it in part on the expectation that there will be a safety net for those who might someday need it including (should something terrible happen) myself. I'd be pissed off if I fell on hard times and on the day I went to collect the assistance I'm owed it came with a list of arbitrary restrictions by people who assume I don't deserve anything nice.
We give a set amount of money to people to help them buy food. What foods they chose to spend that money on is no one else's concern. An exception to this being programs like WIC which are explicitly about making sure pregnant mothers and babies are getting the nutrition they need
If someone were genuinely concerned for people's health rather than just wanting to punish them for the moral failing of not having a lot of money, it'd make far more sense to bother their representatives about subsidizing healthy foods instead of restricting unhealthy ones, or fixing the countless issues that plague the healthcare system.
My suggestions for what was reasonable is what is already happening.
Too many people want the poor to suffer, because obviously being poor is self inflicted.
Too much avocado toast or something.
Fwiw, Personally I'd rather just give them the cash, rather than assuming they can't spend it. If you are going to have a system of food stamps though, it should be targeted to actually buying nutritious food.
LOL!
>Households CANNOT use SNAP benefits to buy:[0]
>Beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes, or tobacco
>Vitamins, medicines, and supplements. If an item has a Supplement Facts label, it is considered a supplement and is not eligible for SNAP purchase.
>Live animals (except shellfish, fish removed from water, and animals slaughtered prior to pick-up from the store).
>Foods that are hot at the point of sale
>Any nonfood items such as:
>Pet foods
>Cleaning supplies, paper products, and other household supplies.
>Hygiene items, cosmetics
>Because of people like you, we need to make sure the poor can't have any pleasure in life.
Execpt the pleasure of free food, housing and health care, right? Maybe we can add free tickets to the movies in the next social program.
Here you see a guy that never even got the taste of minimal wage jobs and working to have something to eat. The pure privilege oozing from your comment is pathetic. Please do yourself a favor and touch some grass. There are millions of people working so much more than 40 hours and still receiving food stamps or people who realistically can't (disabilities etc.) that also receive food stamps and you just flat out ignore them to reinforce your image of the lazy do nothing. Please do yourself a favor and work minimal wage for 2 months and see if you can live of of that.
My parents are working class, they lived on minimum wage or next to it all their life. Never, for once, they lived on welfare.
But that's the deal, they are working class. They worked their entire life, they used their money sparingly and without any luxuries for a big part of their life. Vacations, was going 2 weeks to the beach, by bus (later by car), coming and going every day, with a lot of bags, taking previously prepared food from home. Luxuries, was having a black and white TV, later a 2nd hand colour TV that lasted until I got into college and by the end was more than 20 years old. Eating out was a twice a year luxury for most of my infancy, and asking for food delivery? Are you joking me?
Weekend programs, was my father getting a side job to make more money installing and configuring electrical appliances in middle class people homes. And taking me along with him to help.
As hard-working and money saving people, they, of course, ended up building a better life for them and providing me an education within their means. Also, of course, they absolutely despise people that don't work and live on the state.
So, go burn yourself with your ridiculous virtue signalling high morals. It takes a lot of privilege and disconnect from reality, to think, and even say that out loud, that hard-working people are the ones living on the state.
And clearly no one else has ever, or will ever have a different experience than yours and if they ever do it's because they are worse people and deserve it right?
I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of people on food stamps who work harder than many high income earners myself included. If I suddenly had to spend hours on public transportation just to get to work where I'd spend all day doing the kinds of demanding jobs I pay others to do for me I'd envy my old life of sitting on my ass on the internet while in air conditioning all day.
Poor people often work their asses off because they have to just to get what little they're paid and keep what little they have.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
And you think that minimum wage in the 80s is the same as minimum wage today? If you have a minimum wage job in Mississippi and work 40 hours a week for a whole year you get 15000$ before taxes and roughly 12000$ after taxes.
According to https://www.mdhs.ms.gov/snap/ you are then eligible for food stamps with 1+ family members.
If you are a family of 4 and BOTH PARENTS work on minimum wage, you still get food stamps. Do you call parents with 2 children who both work 40 hours a week lazy? Should people with 4 children just work 60 hours? Oh they'd still get food stamps
Cmon give me the numbers instead of your feelings. My guess is you won't even reply because you already made up your mind.
It's must be easy to be you on discussions, when you just ride the Gish Gallop with your arguments and keep making up stuff for the others to rebuke.
[1] http://www.freeby50.com/2014/01/minimum-wage-history-adjuste...
> therefore ensuring its eternal permanence on democracy
I assume you would prefer a different system?
I most certainly don't approve a dictatorship of the majority.
The US certainly has enough money to feed everyone in the country (citizens or otherwise), it would be a tiny fraction of the current budget to do so. I'm curious to hear your ideas for better spending targets.
Who are we to judge how another fellow human decides to eat food? It’s not like the government is giving out extra money to use for Uber eats. Poor people ordering food to eat aren’t children, they’re adults who can be trusted to make decisions the same as anyone else.
Consider how important delivery couriers are to people who have illnesses and disabilities.
It’s also not that hard to order multiple days worth of food from a delivery person and have it be cost-effective.
In my opinion, one of of the most persistent problems with social safety network politics is this pervasive ideology where we all believe that because someone is “taking” from our tax dollars that now that person must have no excessive joy in their life and that our collective society has the right to micromanage behavior.
JPM (administered nearly half of all states’ EBT programs before the mandated oct 1st 2020 deadline) and Uber/Instacart have a nice little gov sponsored moat growing here...
There's no government funding for the activity; SNAP EBT doesn't pay for delivery.
> JPM (administered nearly half of all states’ EBT programs before the mandated oct 1st 2020 deadline) and Uber/Instacart have a nice little gov sponsored moat growing here...
Its a moat that Amazon, DoorDash, store-operated delivery services from all the major chains and many locals, etc., were inside before Uber. But, sure. “moat”.
So Uber will make nothing on processing these transactions that originate through them, and only offering because of their good will.
> Its a moat that Amazon, DoorDash, store-operated delivery services from all the major chains and many locals, etc., were inside before Uber. But, sure. “moat”.
>> You have to already be big to "compete".
Yeah, just ignore that part. Let me know when individual growers can get their account at their local credit union credited via an api call directly to the treasury dept without any frbny primary dealers involved.
No, they’ll make something by selling more delivery fees than they otherwise would when both in-store and essentially every other grocery delivery service (both other third pary services and first party store-owned services) already takes EBT and they don’t.
Uber taking EBT is just putting itself back on a level with every other way of buying groceries, rather than at a voluntary disadvantage.
Every other way of buying groceries if one limits themselves to buying from well established entities that are big enough to support it, which is a much smaller subset of those who could supply food now.
Either uber is putting itself at the same level as {everyone who accepts EBT}, which includes a bunch of tiny players like mom-and-pop shops and farmers markets, or uber is putting itself at the same level as {delivery services that accept ebt} which yes, is a set of big players, but that's because {delivery services} is a set of big players, not related to ebt. What's your point? That large, established chains can't accept EBT?
> What's your point? That large, established chains can't accept EBT?
Corner store is already way more overhead than needed in some cases when a seller can market their product online and can communicate with any would-be buyer over any messaging channel and drive it to you while handling their periodic activities that may have them already out and about.
Because there's an extremely small set of cases where such a direct delivery model makes any kind of economic sense. Distributors as intermediaries are more efficient for almost all cases.
I'm implying it should be available.
> , and they deliver it to me?
> Distributors as intermediaries are more efficient for almost all cases.
Except it should be possible for someone to grow in their local community at any scale desirable (esp important for urban agg entrepreneurs) and accept EBT from anyone near by. As kid, i helped a lot in a few community gardens in the city where i lived (where there also happened to be a lot of people already on government assistance within walking distance) and being able to sell produce and accept EBT would have changed the economics completely and incentivized way more productive economics beyond the donation model.
Current distributors would also have way more competition for the same pie of funds allocated for EBT, and help make the program more efficient.
If the availability for funding for something that is considered a public good is not broad and supportive of the smallest possible economic interactions, it is doing a disservice to the populations it is meant to support, esp for building wealth (esp for those building wealth in those communities have to subsidize big co distribution system).
I can understand arguments against if they were framed in the context that these gov programs didn't have the infra in place historically to support this in May 16, 1939 - but that is far from the case today.
I live in an EM country now that has a simmilar program to how food banks operate in the US (except the gov is doing it) abbreviated as SEMBAKO, and nothing like SNAP/EBT. Yet with technology, private banks are willing to finance peoples purchases of food online while paying full price at the local "stores" people choose to order food from (which is a big deal if you go out sometimes and talk to some of the sellers who would have no access otherwise to the markets they are selling into, some even going as far as sending hand written thank you notes on delivery).
Farmers markets allow this, at least in my area.
I don't think your objection is specific or related to EBT or delivery services, it really seems to be an objection to how economics works. Urban Agg is basically always going to (in the US) be vastly more expensive than (still localish but rural) agg.
> Current distributors would also have way more competition for the same pie of funds allocated for EBT, and help make the program more efficient.
There's like a dozen stores that sell produce and accept EBT within 3 blocks of where I live. None of them (that I know of) are chains or franchises.
Like, independently owned corner stores that contract with a farm whose name I know, and farmers markets that sell direct to consumer aren't subsidizing "big-co" distributors. I'm really not sure what you're getting at.
In the area I grew up in, having to pay fees to sell at a farmers market stall with everyone else was already way more overhead than desired.
> Urban Agg is basically always going to (in the US) be vastly more expensive than (still localish but rural) agg.
People growing in what space they have available at no extra cost to them and selling at the same/lower or even higher prices (at whatever volume) than stores (or thru a farmers market) should still be able to accept EBT. People should be able to sell out of their section 8 housing (1937 gov program) and accept EBT.
> I'm really not sure what you're getting at.
Clearly, I'm getting at that people should be able to sell without having a extra physical overhead any kind of store or incorporating (or paying without fees to those who do) and still be able to accept EBT.
If you ever come to Jakarta, you will quickly see what I'm talking about. Can use the same app to buy from a big/small grocery stores as from someone selling out of their corrugated metal roof "house" and have it delivered. Banks finance transaction volume regardless, no gov sponsored channel available to any actor over others in the apps.
I understand and am broadly supportive of the idea that deregulating welfare is good, but it's a soapbox that isn't particularly relevant to the rest of the discussion, hence my confusion.
> People should be able to sell out of their section 8 housing
What produce are you going to be growing in your third-story apartment?
If you think once something has been enacted into law, will remain effective throughout its history and in the same way, then there's nothing really you will be able to understand.
If any particular regulation benefited the people it is supposed to serve the most on a more holistic basis, beyond some narrowly defined definition (more than those who can afford to bear the direct monetary costs of conforming to it), I wouldn't be against it. SNAP served a much bigger role in 1939 in supporting those who needed it most than it does today in 2023 via EBT. There is no political will to correct for the institutional graft in the US (and arguably in a lot of "developed markets") the poorer off will suffer more, until things slowly fall apart under its own weight. There's a balance to be had, and we're a long ways from that going on stateside and across the north atlantic.
> What produce are you going to be growing in your third-story apartment?
Me, nothing (minus some herbs/onions). Less than 100m from my 20+ story apartment people are raising chickens and goats and selling the meals they make thru them to me on the same channels I could buy from carrefour, also less than 100m from me. Having that choice matters more to those worse off than I, than trying to pretend that if they could be givin some permissioned credits to buy only from carrefours (and to the exclusion of those raising chickens and goats next door, unless they become subservient to the carrefours). Indonesian people are lucky in that the institutional graft from 1998 has yet to build up like SNAP from 1939 in the US, yet people can still benefit from the advancement of technology since 1939 in how to go about their lives esp when it comes to building up wealth in their local communities and meeting their own needs as how they define them.
No, its not. Even independent groceries (and independent convenience stores that have grocery items) take EBT. There’s essentially no place you can buy groceries where you can’t use EBT. There may be a minimum viable scale, but its apparently very close to the minimum-viable-retail-operation-with-any-grocery-items scale.
Uber is playing catch-up, not establishing an edge (much less an edge protected by a moat) compared to other ways of getting groceries.
Yeah, that's where we are seeing things differently. The reliance on the well established store and their ability to accept EBT vs not needing to have that overhead and still being able accept EBT while provide similar goods. If you sell/deliver direct to consumer without going through a store that can accept/process EBT, you still have to subsidize them (unless you just avoid paying taxes, while still not having access to that EBT sponsored).
I really think it should!
I know, these are two completely different topics that can't be compared. I just feel a lot of people here think "Why should they get free food if I have to pay for it?".
IMO it's a very selfish way of thinking.
As far as I can tell, "Food stamps" are only a thing in the United States. Everywhere else just pays struggling people money.
Outside of maybe Amazon Fresh in Seattle (and even that was years ago), I have found it extremely difficult if not impossible to get cost effective grocery delivery. And that was before the recent inflation.
Instead of the program having a preferred delivery app, what's better for competition is having all the apps on the program.
No, because “food stamps” (actually, a food-specific EBT card) can only be used for the in-store cost on specific goods. It is Uber avoiding a self-created anti-subsidy that exists if people buying groceries plus Uber’s fees and delivery charges are prohibited from using a means they would otherwise have available to pay for the groceries.
I'd much rather have people who are struggling get delivery if they can manage it than have them go into the grocery store when they know they're infected, or when they've got a vulnerable person they'd risk bringing disease home to.
There exists a Restaurant Meals Program to help people get nutritious meals if they're unable to prepare them: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/retailer/restaurant-meals-prog...
Don't forget Meals on Wheels and other programs for seniors and the disabled.
It's been proven that every dollar SNAP injects into the economy stimulates it enough to make a difference. So it's a very good thing that programs like this for people whom you may consider to be lazy, stupid, or euthanasia candidates.