WIC stands for Women, Infants and Children provide vouchers for low income families funded by federal grants to the state. The vouchers cover basic necessities such as milk, eggs, cheese, cereal, fruits, and assorted juices for use at grocery stores. The tricky and time consuming thing about these vouchers for the checkers is that we have to check for specific items to see if they match the description of the voucher and half the time, they’re not. Checking, correcting the item then validating the voucher is a timely process. Which leads to long lines. Each voucher has an expiration date and many times customers come in to use them all at the same time before they expire.
A lady came in my line with 4 WIC vouchers that were set to expire on December 30, 2009.
Each voucher contained:
-2 (1) Gallons of milk
-2 lbs of cheese
-Up to 36 oz of cereal
-2 frozen juices
-1 16 oz peanut butter or lentils
I did this 4 times!
That’s 8 gallons of milk, 8 lbs of cheese, 8 boxes of cereal, 8 frozen juices, and 4 jars of peanut butter. That’s absurd and it was only for the month of December! The total time it took to process those orders was almost 15 minutes!
Not to be outdone, she didn’t even bother to grab the receipts…
