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Diagnosis: WIC depression
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Munch depicts a WIC recipient post-sale.
I just checked out of Giant Eagle, after a particularly soul-crushing WIC transaction. No one was mean to me. The checker was friendly and apologetic after she used some milk coupons on juice and had to go back and redo, causing an additional delay. About four people got in line behind me and subsequently packed up and left because it took so long, but none of them said anything. I didn't notice any dirty looks, although I was carefully avoiding eye contact by staring at any and all inanimate objects in my line of vision.
Oh, and I didn't even use my multi-item coupons. These were six coupons -- three for milk, and three for juice. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong.
So it was nowhere near as horrible as it could have been, but I still fought back tears and a desire for Giant Eagle's ceiling to cave in and crush me with a massive cardboard pill bottle or other POP display.
WIC is easy to qualify for, but difficult to use. Why is that? Why not use swipe cards encoded with information about each recipient's qualifying items? Is that too costly? There are only a small number of coupon packages, so it seems like cards would be easy to produce. The savings in time at the point of sale, and in paper for printing all these coupons, would be significant. Food stamps are on a debit card now -- why couldn't WIC work the same way?
I'm going to do some research on this, and report back. But I'm interested in hearing from you. Does WIC work the same way in your state? Have any states worked out a better system than paper coupons?
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