Comment by VLM

I used to work retail. Well, during Bush the 1st. Anyway there are multiple markets. Its not like on the internet where there's pretty much ebay and nothing else. Locality and physicality breeds multiple markets.

One is a kid can probably walk out of his parents basement with a bottle of tide and mom and dad probably won't notice quite as obviously as if the kid walked off with a $20 bill. So at least some Tide is from unemployed teens smoking up via mom's walmart bill. Obviously not terribly high volume, but...

Another is there is already a booming market in turning high value food stamp food into money for "whatever". Our food store was surrounded by bars where a cold steak presented at the bar resulted in maybe half price in cash being returned, more or less. Also you can buy a steak OTC, cooked even, from the bar, for cheaper than we sold them. Whatever drug market operating in steaks is parallel or in competition with the existing food stamp market in steaks. This also explains the anecdote WRT food stamp corruption the crooks are always buying stacks of steaks with food stamps... they're the universal currency, not doritos or rice bags or whatever. If you're trying to turn stamps into cash you buy steaks. (yes I'm old, and I'm well aware its a debit card like scheme now, but nothing really changes with the market)