Fact check: How many Walmart employees received SNAP/food-stamp benefits in 2023 compared to Target and Amazon?

1. Why the headline number people want doesn’t exist — and what we do have on Walmart

The precise question — “How many Walmart employees received SNAP benefits in 2023 compared to Target and Amazon?” — cannot be answered with the documentation provided because no 2023 employer-specific SNAP counts are reported across these sources. The clearest employer-level data in the set is a Government Accountability Office finding cited in one analysis that, in 2020, 14,500 Walmart employees were on SNAP across nine states, with 10,350 on Medicaid in those same states; the GAO also reported that 70 percent of SNAP and Medicaid users were full-time workers and 90 percent were in the private sector ^[1]. Those figures illuminate a pre-2023 pattern in which retail employers were prominent among firms whose workers accessed public benefits, but they do not provide a 2023 tally or a national employer comparison.

2. Retail spending patterns show Walmart’s central role for SNAP shoppers — but not employee eligibility

Several marketing and retail reports document that Walmart is the dominant retail destination for SNAP-benefit spending, with Numerator reporting Walmart captures about 25–26% of SNAP grocery dollars and that nearly all SNAP shoppers purchased groceries at Walmart in the past year, spending an average of $2,290 annually ^{[4] [5] [2]}. These studies describe consumer behavior and sales share, not employee-level benefit receipt. The distinction matters: high retailer share of SNAP transactions does not equal high counts of employees on SNAP, and these consumer-focused metrics cannot substitute for employer-level benefit participation statistics ^{[5] [6]}.

3. Target and Amazon: program participation and corporate changes, but no employee SNAP headcounts

Target’s public materials and news coverage document that the company accepts SNAP/EBT for online grocery orders and participates in benefit-payment access, indicating retailer-level access for SNAP customers, but these documents do not report how many Target employees receive SNAP ^{[7] [8]}. Coverage of Amazon in the supplied materials focuses on corporate staffing changes and layoffs and notes Amazon’s large workforce, but it contains no data on how many Amazon employees used SNAP in 2023 ^[9]. In short, retailer program participation and corporate staffing news are present; employee SNAP recipient counts for 2023 are absent.

4. Bigger picture: millions of workers rely on SNAP, and retail jobs are prominent among them

Analyses from policy organizations show the broader context: roughly 15.7 million workers — about 10% of all workers — live in households where someone participated in SNAP in the last year, and workers in low-paying retail and service jobs are heavily represented among SNAP recipients ^{[3] [10]}. Those national-level estimates confirm that many retail employees are likely to be SNAP participants, but they do not allocate those millions to specific employers. The national prevalence of worker reliance on SNAP underlines why employer-level tallies would be meaningful for public discussion and corporate policy scrutiny ^[11].

5. What these gaps mean for reporting, policy, and public scrutiny

The absence of 2023 employer-level SNAP counts in these sources points to three practical realities: first, data collection and reporting on employer-level participation in public benefits are fragmented and often limited to GAO snapshots covering subsets of states or past years ^[1]. Second, marketing and retail-share studies are useful to understand consumer behavior but cannot answer workforce-policy questions ^{[2] [5]}. Third, public-interest analyses on employee reliance on safety-net programs must rely on broader national surveys or targeted audits; without such audits or voluntarily released corporate data, cross-employer comparisons for a specific year remain inferential, not factual ^[3].

6. What would be needed to answer the question definitively — and who might have an incentive to produce it

A definitive, comparable 2023 count would require either a federal audit or survey that ties SNAP participation to employer data nationwide, or transparent corporate disclosures from Walmart, Target, and Amazon listing employee reliance on SNAP. GAO-style studies and policy groups have incentives to produce such counts to inform wage and benefit debates, while retail corporations and trade groups might resist or contextualize such numbers to avoid reputational risk; marketing firms focus instead on consumer spending metrics that serve different stakeholders ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Given the current documentation, the correct, evidence-based conclusion is that no verified 2023 employer-level counts exist in these materials, and any head-to-head comparison between Walmart, Target, and Amazon for that year would be speculative.