I agree with you. They can also have MCC coding, meaning you can only use the cards at certain merchants, for certain items. Company Credit Cards are set up like that. My previous employer had them set to where you could only use them for lodging, food, and rental cars. Sometimes our repair crews would be out of town for weeks on end, and would want to just go to the grocery store to get food to keep in the fridge. The cards would not work. We also had cash advance blocked, so yeah, it can be done.
Ah the good old days, yup, I remember when food stamps were sent in a booklet to be torn out at the grocery store to buy food only. The cashier would ring up food items first take the food stamp and give change if needed. Then they rang up non food items and expected cash for them.
It really surprised me to find the number of Military dependents using food stamps at the commissary.
I fell into the whole deal when I was asked to buy food stamps from a coworker that worked 2 jobs with 3 children , hubby gone to the hills, she told me she would send her kids to the local store restrooms to steal toilet paper. Her kids would go in with bottles they filled up with soap in the washroom and bring home a bucket of hand paper towels. She washed the clothing in the tub in the way wine was made along time ago, fill the tub with hot water pour in vinegar [ a food item ] and have the kids stomp them clean.
What she needed was money to buy dish soap, shampoo, deodorant and diapers for the baby. One cannot use cloth diapers on a baby that has been boiled in vinegar, OUCH.
She was not military so she could not take her kids to a free hospital when they ran a fever or a bad cold, she needed money for over the counter drugs.
She and the kids were really over weight because on food stamps she could not afford fresh vegetables, dried beans and rice was about as close as they got to real veggies.
I went to her house at dinner time one day and she and the kids were filling their belly's with those Boxed Kraft Macaroni and cheese, she showed me how to add a cooked box of elbow macaroni to the dish and supersize it to feed 6 people. Then for meat she cooked hot dogs put them in a slice of day old bread and slathered on Mayo.
So some of us got together at work and chipped in a few bucks each week to buy her mouth wash, toilet paper soap and tooth paste--and brushes. We got my EX to deliver the bag to the house as she and kids had never met him he was just a man that left this bag for them.
At no time would we give her money just the basics she and children needed outside of food.
She and kids somehow over came the odds, the State sent her to school and all 3 kids did well in their schools. I am not sure about this but I believe in later life she found a partner of some sex --last I heard she way finally happy.
