**CORRUPTION WATCH**
— Chief_Engineer (@ChiefEngineerCE) October 3, 2026
Walmart cashes about a quarter of every food stamp dollar in the country. Then their lobbyists shows up in Washington to keep the EBT card loaded.
Then underpay their employees who are on the same program. Think about that next time you are in Walmart...…
Walmart cashes about a quarter of every food stamp dollar in the country. Then their lobbyists shows up in Washington to keep the EBT card loaded.
Then underpay their employees who are on the same program. Think about that next time you are in Walmart... we are literally paying part of their compensation while their company falls short.
At the very least its irony but its also corrupt when you consider this is a company worth 850 billion dollars raking in profits.
The card is public. The redemption is private. Then the same companies show up in Washington to keep the program open.
Walmart takes about a quarter of every SNAP dollar in the country. Numerator put it at 25.8 percent of redemptions in the year ending July 2025. State records pulled by reporters also put Walmart and Amazon among the top employers of people on SNAP. Low wage on the way in. Guaranteed customer on the way out.
Massive lobbying effort to keep it this way.
Taxpayer in the middle.
When Congress tightened eligibility in 2025, the grocers did not talk about hunger. They talked about sales. The National Grocers Association said the cuts run about $186 billion over ten years, that eligibility changes alone are about $88 billion of that, and that grocers could lose about 6.7 percent of sales as people come off the card. Kraft Heinz and Ahold Delhaize have already told investors the smaller SNAP crowd dented the earnings report.
The drink makers lobbied the other door. Not “keep illegal aliens on stamps.” Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible. They lobbied against telling the card what it cannot buy. PepsiCo spent nearly $2.8 million on lobbying in the first half of 2025, up from $2.3 million, with SNAP purchase restrictions on the list. The American Beverage Association spent $1.7 million in that same half, more than double the year before, as states moved to block soda and candy.
That is the receipt. A retailer pays wages low enough that the worker qualifies. The worker spends the benefit in the same store. The trade group then fights anything that shrinks the card or steers it off soda. Call it a subsidy if you want to be polite. The engineer name is a closed loop.
It's important that we understand the system and how every part of it appears to be subsidized off of our taxes to make folks rich.
Sources:
Numerator SNAP redemption share via public reporting. National Grocers Association on the 2025 bill and the 6.7 percent sales hit. Bloomberg Government on PepsiCo and American Beverage Association lobbying, first half 2025. Financial Times, May 2026, Kraft Heinz and Ahold on SNAP demand.
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