Perhaps it’s just crassy me. But I thought the entire point of foodstamps was to subsidize the poor who cannot afford bare essentials. I fail to understand how one could justify being able to spend $60 or so of personal income on a membership and at the same time be on foodstamps, unless the membership itself is paid by foodstamps.

Then you run into the other issue of if the membership itself can be paid by foodstamps, you need another class of membership that only allows one to buy boxed food (not even prepared food). Otherwise, that membership paid by foodstamp is not really just giving access to food, but other goods/services too ( otherwise the foodstamps is indirectly giving benefits to non food items)
Also, food stamps don’t allow you to buy food that is served or prepared. So that most likely elminates things like bakery, rotissere chicken, costco fro2n pia, etc.

In reality, its way to much overhead for costco to do, and in the end the margins wouldnt justify the headache. Costco doesn’t make that much from food sales itself, its all the other crap people buy there that has much higher margins.

Plus the belief that costco food is really that much cheaper than sales item is a myth. Costco has high quality food, but it isn’t necessarily cheaper than elsewhere. Foodstamps are meant to allow one to buy an entire meal. Costco model is based on buying a lot of quantity. So someone on foodstamps would not be able to buy every essential thing at costco, or doing so, would be overconsuming.

Lastly, if costco allowed this, they should also be able to accept manufacterer coupons, otherwise its not really cost saving to shop there. But costco doesn’t nor does it have abilities to, since most manufacterer coupons apply to retail sizes