'EBT, Yeah Right': Woman Shamed for Food Stamps at Edina Cub Foods

A Minneapolis woman wrote in the Star Tribune earlier this month about a disconcerting encounter she had with a customer of the Edina Cub Foods.

One Sunday evening, Sue Bulger was at the checkout counter with her daughter, a college senior enrolled in a social-work program, when a woman behind them in line gave a disparaging remark.

"I did not observe you," Bulger wrote in an epistolary Star Tribune opinion piece, "but my daughter was with me packing the groceries and saw it all: 'EBT: Yeah, right,' you muttered, with that look of disgust that would have shattered someone feeling just a little bit of shame over needing food stamps."

Bulger wrote that she wished she could have told the woman about her disabled 28-year-old son who she supports.

"I know we looked like people you might think need EBT: a bit unkempt in sweatpants and T-shirts," she wrote. "If I’d had the guts to talk to you, I would have told you that I’d just had an emergency surgery and that my daughter came home from college five hours away to help for the weekend because my husband had scheduled surgery two days after mine."

Read Bulger's full piece at the Star Tribune.