So, Who's On the Hook for all that Food that Welfare Users Stole in Louisiana?

If you guessed “the taxpayers,” for once, that was not the correct answer.

The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, which oversees the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, said Walmart will have to foot the bill for store losses in Springhill and Mansfield, La., during a food shopping frenzy.

When the EBT system went down, stores had the choice to let people use them anyway, or stop them from being used while the glitch was sorted out. Most stores chose the latter. For whatever reason, these Walmarts chose the former. So it’s on them. The state is able to track the cards via GPS and can provide the “who bought what” information to Walmart, so it’ll ultimately be up to the stores to decide what to do.

They should probably start by firing the managers who allowed the theft to go on. Surely welfare users weren’t the only customers in the stores when the glitch went down. Those managers basically encouraged theft and made a mess of things for their self-reliant customers.