Household Budget: minus a few frozen dinners and five cartons of cigarettes

Grocery List 008 /009

It's funny how people buy the same things at the grocery store over and over. I wonder if people with plenty of grocery money switch it up more often. This (top photo) is still our thirty dollars in food stamps person (from the last post). I think I'm going to start calling her Popcorn.

That list on the blue post-it note is mine. "Refly" (tribute to a Chinese cook I used to work with) = refried beans. Really, I've had enough of them lately to last my entire life, speaking of repeat purchases.

Last week someone offered to sell me their food stamps. Ninety dollars worth - for forty bucks. Not a bad deal really. I didn't buy them of course, but it got me thinking about all the reasons people sell their food stamps. I've known it to happen for the most responsible and deplorable of reasons. In this instance, it was all about cigarettes. Taxes on the price of cigarettes shot up this month and in effect, lowered the value of food stamps. Who's keeping track of the urban stock market? Anybody?

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This individual gets thirty dollars in food stamps each month. This particular list used the entire thirty dollars plus eleven dollars in loose change that she fed into the change machine at the front of the store before shopping. The only thing not on the list that was purchased was an extra tomato and a pack of cigarettes, the price on which has jumped more than a dollar in the last two weeks. This is purely an opinion but I have always failed to understand why we think it's okay to feed off of people who are busy giving themselves lung cancer and/or alcoholism. Would it be so difficult to tax something that everyone uses, like water or toilet paper for example?

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