If you are a city resident on food stamps you will soon have a new place to do your shopping – Costco.
Responding to pressure from Councilmember Eric Gioia, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and shoppers, Costco Wholesale Corporation recently announced that it would soon begin accepting food stamps at two New York City locations – the Long Island City store at 32-50 Vernon Boulevard and Sunset Park store at 976 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn.
“Today is a great day for the 1.2 million New Yorkers who rely on food stamps to buy food,” Gioia said in a statement. “By accepting food stamps, Costco will allow more New Yorkers than ever to have access to fresh, healthy food at wholesale prices. . . . In tough economic times more people than ever will qualify for food stamps and there was simply no good reason for Costco to continue to refuse them as payment. I welcome their decision and look forward to the trial becoming a permanent policy.”
The announcement came almost two years after Gioia began his crusade to get the warehouse giant to accept the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was spurred by his experiment to live on $28 worth of groceries, the monetary allotment of food stamps, for a week in 2007.
After realizing that he was unable to purchase a livable, nutritious amount of food, he wrote Costco President James Sinegal regarding the opportunity to help families eat healthily and affordably.
In the announcement, Sinegal stated that the company is “mindful that many of our fellow citizens are facing unprecedented economic challenges at this time, and it seemed to us that it was worth reconsidering our position in that light,” despite “not having been convinced that there was sufficient demands” for food stamp reliance among their members in the past.
Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, the umbrella group that represents the 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City, is very pleased with this development.
“Low income people haven’t had many victories lately…We don’t throw around the phrase ‘win-win’ a lot … It’s great for low income New Yorkers and hopefully it’ll be great for Costco.”
