Sunday, February 22, 2015

Beer sales and food stamp receipt timing are related...

No. You can't buy beer with food stamps SNAP (Sounds so much better than food stamps, doesn't it?) benefits, but you can use the money you saved from buying food to buy beer. Of course, there is also the epidemic fraud in the program.

Via WISTV
When people get their food stamp benefits on the weekend, the sale of beer rises among by as much as 7 percent by those people who receive the benefits — that’s the conclusion of a study conducted by several professors at the University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business and the University of Connecticut.
The study, called One More Saturday Night: Food Stamp Timing and Monthly Consumption Patterns, was done to “examine the relationship between the timing of food stamp receipt and consumption patterns.” John M. Gordainer and Orgula D. Ozturk were the USC researchers who worked with two colleagues from the University of Connecticut Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics on the study.
“Lots of people have looked at the timing of the distribution of food stamps and shopping behaviors,” Gordainer explains why they investigated this subject. “But we saw something strange with the shopping behavior on the weekends.”
The study found “purchases of beer are higher in months where food stamps are distributed on a Saturday or Sunday than in months where benefits are distributed during the week in food stamp eligible households."...

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