Independent grocery stores rely on food stamps sales. The new tax bill could impact this : NPR

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A new massive bill for taxes and expenses recently signed by President Trump includes snap cuts, also known as the food coupons program. This is bad news for independent grocery stores because many of these stores see most of their sales from Snap Dollars. Stephan Bisaha from Gulf States Newsroom reports an Alabama grocer who is preparing for the cuts.

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Stephan Bisaha, Byline: about 20 minutes by car from Auburn University is the Wright market in Opelika. He is an independent grocer, but really, he doesn’t seem so different from your classic supermarket, just a little smaller. He has aisles filled with sweet tea, vegetables and the best fresh catfish than the buyer Diane Chavis (PH) says you can get.

Diane Chavis: I am an old girl from the countryside, so I like old country products.

Bisaha: And what brought you today?

Chavis: Best chopped beef in town. My husband – If I am in a hurry and I have to stop elsewhere, he can say it every time, as soon as he bites, that I did not go to Wright to get this chopped beef.

Bisaha: The name of the Wright market behind the owner of Wright is the owner Jimmy Wright. He says he saw the American dream, serving his hometown. Of course, this does not mean that work has always been easy.

Jimmy Wright: I will be 64 years old in September. I think the last five years have moved me, like 84, since it was difficult.

Bisaha: Remember, these difficult five years started with COVID-19, then inflation, and the last challenge comes from changes to Snap. Snap is a federal security net program that helps families with low income payable for grocery store. The new tax on taxes and expenses adopted by the Republicans reduces spending by around 20% over 10 years, mainly through new work requirements and a ceiling on inflation adjustments. The problem for independent grocers like Wright is that SNAP purchases are often a large part of their sales.

Wright: We are somewhere around third of our company goes through Snap.

Bisaha: And this is much more than that for some other grocery stores, especially those of low -income areas, where they are often the only option for healthy foods. These are the stores most at risk of closing.

Wright: I am concerned that – it will have a negative effect on small stores in rural America and urban America, where they cannot remain open?

Bisaha: The National Groceers Association says, yes, it will have an impact on the grocers, but it could have been worse. They put pressure for the original version of the cup to be reduced, and the congress did it by about a third. Stephanie Johnson is with the NGA and says that they are satisfied that the law renews personal and fiscal alleviations that would have expired without him.

Stephanie Johnson: We are very enthusiastic about the tax discounts of this package. I just want to say that we are – we were strong supporters of certainty that these – the continuation of these tax provisions given to our members.

Bisaha: Now Jimmy Wright is not talking about the closure of his own store. Customers will always come for this good beef. But he also doesn’t have much room to cut. After all, grocery stores generally have fairly tight margins.

Wright: I mean, we are a penny business.

Bisaha: He means it literally. He says that for each dollar spent in a store like his, the grocers are only clearly on a penny and a half. The others are spent on things like keeping the lights on and restocking the shelves for products that are sold or go bad. Now that some of these dollars start disappear, Wright hopes that he will not have to leave any of his employees to leave.

Johnson: It would be the very, very, very, the last thing I did. The last two things I want to do is try to increase prices on people who have trouble, and I certainly don’t want to do anything to my employees.

Bisaha: Wright says he does not blame the legislators for having made the cuts, but he is concerned about what it means for grocery stores and the customers he serves for most of his life.

For NPR news, I am Stephan Bisaha in Opelika, Alabama.

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