If you spend any amount of time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen tweets imploring everyone to hold off on grocery shopping until April 3rd or later. The reasoning is simple: Government benefits are deposited on the first of the month, and with grocery stores experiencing extremely high volume due to the coronavirus pandemic, panicked shoppers could clear the shelves before their low-income neighbors have a chance to stock up.
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Although this is a nice sentiment, it’s not quite how benefits work. There’s not a single day each month when everyone gets a check in the mail. Some programs—including Social Security Insurance (SSI), Veterans’ Affairs (VA) compensation, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)—do make benefit payments on or around the first, but others don’t. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) deposits, for example, are staggered throughout the month. SSDI payments go out on the second, third, or fourth Wednesday of each month depending on birthdate, but SNAP payment schedules vary by state and county, and can be pretty drawn-out. Payments always begin on the first of each month—but in some states, the final batch doesn’t go out until the 28th. (To see what the schedule looks like in your area, look it up in the SNAP Monthly Issuance Schedule.) If everyone in the U.S. holds off on shopping until April 3rd only to immediately descend on grocery stores en masse, it will be deeply unhelpful to the tens of millions of people still waiting on SNAP or SSDI payments to come through.
Delaying your trip to the store for 48 hours probably won’t help much, but another popular Twitter suggestion—to avoid buying WIC-labeled foods when there are other options available—actually might:
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WIC is a federal nutrition program that, among other things, helps low-income families with infants and young kids access healthy foods by paying them a monthly stipend to use on specific categories of food. Many states further restrict WIC eligibility to certain brands, especially for packaged foods, and this is where your choices can actually make a difference. If you’re not on WIC, grabbing a different brand of cereal or yogurt is literally the least you can do to help people who are.
However, it’s not necessarily that simple, either. Not all WIC foods are subject to brand restrictions; a lot of people don’t realize that, for certain essentials like milk or eggs, there often isn’t a non-WIC option to buy instead. This doesn’t mean you should never buy milk if you’re not on WIC, it just means you need to consider that other people also need to buy milk, and act accordingly. In reality, the biggest threats to low-income and food-insecure people right now are panic shopping and resource hoarding—not when their more privileged neighbors choose to go shopping, or even what they choose to buy.
From a grocery shopping perspective, the single best thing you can do to look out for your fellow human beings during this crisis is to go as long as possible between trips. Whatever’s in your fridge or pantry, make it work—and when you truly run out of food and supplies, buy only what you realistically need. If you want to provide material help to people in your community, donate cash to local food banks and homelessness assistance programs. It’s infinitely more effective than rescheduling a grocery run.