This column is the first in a series of opinion pieces by FoodNavigator correspondent Timothy Inklebarger. The views expressed are his own.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and I often return to a statistic I came across showing roughly one in 10 grocery workers receive SNAP benefits.
The 2020 Government Accountability Office report that cites the stat shows it’s even higher in Maine and North Carolina, where 19% and 12% of grocery workers, respectively, need SNAP benefits to afford to eat.
It’s also worth noting that grocery retailers often are among the largest employers at the state level. A lot of employees don’t work for mom-and-pop or regional grocery chains. Most of them are at big-box mass merchandise retailers like Walmart and discount grocery chains like Dollar General.
I was thinking about that stat again this week when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, announced an investigation into Walmart, Kroger, Dollar Tree and Dollar General.
Sanders connects the investigation to the recent passage of President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. That budget bill approved about $900 million in tax breaks for corporations and subsequently cut about $280 million in SNAP funding.
“It has never been acceptable that incredibly profitable companies like Walmart – owned by one of the richest families on Earth – pay their workers starvation wages, forcing many of them to rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP,” Sanders wrote in a letter to Walmart. “But it is even more unacceptable when those benefits are being slashed so that corporate executives and billionaires like the Walton family can become even richer.”
Sanders wrote in a press release that the committee is calling on executives at Walmart, Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Kroger to publicly disclose how much the tax break will earn them and whether they will pass those savings along to workers.
We’ll see if they respond, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s obviously an investigation launched to make the simple point that major retailers are getting a great deal while working-class taxpayers pick up the bill. Paying into the SNAP program is an important duty that we all share, and it’s a bill worth paying. But when large retailers fail to pay workers a living wage, tax breaks are the last thing they should be getting.
Sanders notes in his letter to Walmart that the retail giant made $19.4 billion in profits in 2024 and spent $7 billion in stock buybacks in 2025. “Meanwhile, one in five Walmart employees in Nevada are on Medicaid,” Sanders notes.
This low-wage epidemic impacts tens of thousands of workers, according to Sanders, and it’s about to get worse.
“Kroger pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive,” he said in the letter to Kroger. “At Kroger, tens of thousands of low-wage workers are forced to turn to SNAP to feed their families and Medicaid to get the health care they need – all paid for by US taxpayers.”
This problem is going to get worse before it gets better with wealth inequality reaching its biggest gap in three decades. A report from the Federal Reserve reveals that the top 1% of household earners in the US now own nearly a third (31.7%) of wealth – that’s about $55 trillion in assets, according to CBS News.
Forcing taxpayers to subsidize mega-corporations is unconscionable in this economy, and while Sanders’ investigation mainly aims to raise awareness, it’s a topic we should be discussing as a nation. And it’s something to think about next time you’re making your way through the checkout line.
