The strangest grocery-shopping experience ever!

**Slightly controversial...don't read if you're easily offended!**

So, I was at Whole Foods yesterday...had to buy a cake, some milk, and was hungry for their bagels (delicious, by the way)...and there was this woman in front of me in the check-out line. Anyway, she seemed a little *off* but whatever...

I'm standing there, trying to mind my own business, and keep Maddie from accidentally dumping the container of blueberries she's insisting on holding on the floor... This woman is taking forever, and now there is a line forming behind us. Something is not going right with her method of payment... I look up at the little screen and see that she's paying for her groceries using foodstamps! Anyway, I'm not really familiar with how electronic foodstamps work, but she literally paid for $65 worth of groceries using foodstamps, and had an outstanding balance of $3-something that she was getting all worked up about.

Now, I didn't really pay close attention to what she bought, but I did notice that she had cookies from the bakery, organic sugar, and wild rice (the kind you buy by the pound from those bins). First, tell me how electronic foodstamps are paying for groceries at Whole Foods!? In other words, why are my taxpayer dollars paying for food items that I consider totally unnecessary and most of all, overpriced?!

Not to sound insensitive or anything, but I feel totally lucky to be able to shop at Whole Foods and buy my kids organic eggs, milk, cheese and other dairy products, along with grass-fed beef. Do I buy a lot of the other organic items like wild rice by the pound or organic sugar? No way. I look for the cheapest 20-lb bag of rice at the Korean market and buy that one cuz I figure they're all about the same.

Anyway, I was totally befuddled by this woman and how she was able to buy all these things using foodstamps. Then she was all annoyed cuz she had to pay $3.xx out of pocket, which she ended up doing after 15 minutes of arguing about how the foodstamps should've covered the entire bill. Needless to say, a bunch of us were not happy (obviously we picked the wrong line). Unfortunately, the guy behind me and I were pretty much stuck cuz we had already placed all our groceries on the little conveyer belt thingy.

After all was said and done, and I was packing up my car, the guy behind me came up to ask me what the hold-up was. I told him that the woman was trying to pay with foodstamps and that $3 wasn't covered. He commented that she shouldn't have been shopping there, which I completely agreed with (once again, not to be totally insensitive, but that's how I feel).

Our government and its welfare system is completely broken in my opinion. I am not a big supporter of freebie type programs to begin with -- they don't really help in the long run, and there are always too many people who cheat and take advantage of the system. It's that whole idea of teaching a man to fish versus just giving him a fish.

I dunno, the next time our government wants to expand social welfare and raise taxes, maybe we should look at how our money is currently being spent. Just food for thought (pun intended).