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A massive new tax and spending bill recently signed into law by President Trump includes cuts to SNAP, also known as the food stamps program. It's bad news for independent grocery stores because many of those stores see the bulk of their sales coming from SNAP dollars. Stephan Bisaha of Gulf States Newsroom reports from an Alabama grocer that is bracing for the cuts.
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STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: About a 20-minute drive from Auburn University is Wright's Market in Opelika. It's an independent grocer, but really, it doesn't look all that different from your classic supermarket, just a bit smaller. It's got aisles packed with sweet tea, veggies and the best fresh catfish that shopper Diane Chavis (ph) says you can get.
DIANE CHAVIS: I'm an old country girl, so I like old country products.
BISAHA: And what brought you in today?
CHAVIS: Best ground beef in town. My husband - if I'm in a hurry and have to stop somewhere else, he can tell every time, as soon as he bites into it, that I haven't gone to Wright's to get that ground beef.
BISAHA: The Wright behind the Wright's Market name is owner Jimmy Wright. He says he's living the American dream, serving his hometown. Of course, that does not mean the job's always been easy.
JIMMY WRIGHT: I'll be 64 in September. I think the last five years have moved me up to, like, 84 on there, as far as it's been a challenging few years.
BISAHA: Remember, those tough five years started with COVID-19, and then inflation, and the latest challenge comes from changes to SNAP. SNAP is a federal safety net program that helps low-income families pay for groceries. The new tax and spending law passed by Republicans cuts SNAP spending by about 20% over 10 years, mostly through new work requirements and a cap on inflation adjustments. The problem for independent grocers like Wright is that SNAP purchases are often a big part of their sales.
WRIGHT: We're somewhere around the third of our business comes through SNAP.
BISAHA: And it's way more than that for some other grocery stores, especially ones in low-income, areas where they're often the only option for healthy food. Those are the stores most at risk of closing.
WRIGHT: I get concerned that - will that have a negative effect on the small stores in rural America and in urban America, where they cannot stay open?
BISAHA: The National Grocers Association says, yeah, this will have an impact on grocers, but it could have been worse. They lobbied to have the original steeper version of the cut reduced, and Congress did that by about a third. Stephanie Johnson is with the NGA and says they are happy the law renews personal and business tax breaks that would have expired without it.
STEPHANIE JOHNSON: We're very excited about the tax cuts in that package. I just want to say we are - we were strong supporters of the certainty that those - continuing those tax provisions gave to our members.
BISAHA: Now, Jimmy Wright is not talking about his own store closing. Customers will still come for that good beef. But he doesn't have much room to cut, either. After all, grocery stores usually have pretty tight margins.
WRIGHT: I mean, we're a penny business.
BISAHA: He means that literally. He says for every dollar spent at a store like his, grocers only net about a penny and a half. The rest get spent on things like keeping the lights on and restocking shelves for products that either get sold or go bad. Now that some of those SNAP dollars are going away, Wright hopes he doesn't have to let any of his employees go.
JOHNSON: That would be the very, very, very, very last thing that I did. The last two things I want to do is try to raise prices on people that are struggling, and I certainly don't want to do anything to my employees.
BISAHA: Wright says he does not blame lawmakers for making the cuts, but he is concerned about what this means for grocery stores and the customers he's been serving for most of his life.
For NPR News, I'm Stephan Bisaha in Opelika, Alabama.
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