The Rev. DeWayne McCoy gently arranged heads of cabbage and oversized pieces of grapefruit after business at his hybrid grocery store and food pantry slowed down for a bit one afternoon earlier this month.
Cognizant of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on food insecurity, the pastor founded and opened The After Market in the northeast Las Vegas Valley in 2023.
The store sells groceries in one half of the small building to fund its adjacent pantry where those in need can pick up free food items.
Not many people thought the business model would work when it opened, McCoy told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Three years in, it has, although he’s had to furlough a few employees.
But economic headwinds and changes to eligibility for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act have threatened The After Market’s business model, he noted.
The store has experienced up to a 50 percent drop in sales while the pantry is seeing an unprecedented need, McCoy said.
“Right now we’ve been getting about 15 to 20 people that come in a day that had never been here before,” McCoy told the Review-Journal about the pantry.
About half of the roughly 140 people who showed up the day prior were seniors, he said on July 15.
“You have seniors who weren’t getting a lot of benefits prior to everything going on with SNAP,” McCoy added. “Now they’re basically not getting anything, and so they’re showing up in numbers that are greater than they usually were.”
The pantry serves about 150 people daily, on average, he said. It’s come to the point where The After Market is having to pay to self-fund the service with the help of donations, McCoy said.
‘Historic levels
of food insecurity’
The scenario is playing out across the valley, according to Three Square, the Southern Nevada food bank that supplies The After Market and dozens of other nonprofit pantries.
“Despite the fact that food banks like Three Square and all the partners that we work with have been doing more than ever before, food insecurity continues to rise,” Three Square President and CEO Beth Martino told the Review-Journal.
“We’ve reached historic levels of food insecurity,” she added. “In fact, surpassing food insecurity levels that we reached during the pandemic.”
SNAP served about half a million Nevadans in the fall, according to the state.
That figure had fallen to about 433,000 by late February when the state informed roughly 45,000 recipients that they risked losing benefits if they didn’t confirm mandatory work requirements, a new federal rule that took effect March 1.
Nevada data from mid-June shows an enrollment increase from February to about 446,000 average monthly SNAP recipients.
Another federal rule calls for beneficiaries up to age 64, who are able to work and have no dependents under the age of 14, to spend 20 hours a week working, searching for a job or volunteering.
Not all recipients who left the program did so because they weren’t eligible, Martino said. New administrative changes and overall fear about staying in SNAP likely drove them away, she added.
Partner pantries have told her that seniors who were encouraged to apply to the program say the process has become too complex.
“So the work that they would have to go through to get $25 in benefits a month is really not valuable to them,” Martino said. “Instead, they’re going to rely more on a food pantry, and that means that those food pantries are stretched thin.”
Other people who newly rely on the pantries are doing so because of cost-of-living increases, Martino said.
“Maybe instead of putting food on the table, they go to the doctor, or they pick up a prescription,” she added. “Instead of buying food, they put gas in their car.”
Shutdown effects linger
Martino said Three Square and its partner pantries are still dealing with the aftermath of the 43-day federal government shutdown that ended around mid-November, which saw SNAP benefits lapse at the beginning of that month.
Even though the Nevada Legislature stepped up with an emergency stop-gap measure, longer-term effects include an erosion of public trust in federal programs, she said.
“We have people who won’t apply for SNAP, who won’t turn up for help because they have seen that that program isn’t reliable, and that’s what those programs are supposed to do,” Martino said.
McCoy said that once SNAP benefits came back, they weren’t as plentiful and that recipients entered a scarcity mindset.
“If you’ve taken my SNAP for a month or two, when I get them back, I’m going to be careful of how I shop in the grocery store,” he said.
“And so people became more frugal, and that mindset has settled in because of uncertainty of what the whole economy is going to look like in the near future,” he added.
States could pay
Beyond cutting SNAP funding and narrowing eligibility for many recipients, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill also could require states to pay a share of the cost of SNAP food assistance benefits provided to eligible households. It’s a cost that has been typically covered entirely by the federal government.
Under the new law, states with SNAP payment error rates above certain thresholds will be required to help pay for those benefits, potentially leaving Nevada on the hook for millions of dollars annually.
A recently released report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that Nevada’s payment error rate reached 6.22 percent in federal fiscal year 2025, the 10th-lowest among states, but was still just above the 6 percent threshold that would require the state to cover 5 percent of SNAP benefit costs beginning in October 2027 — the start of fiscal year 2028.
However, if Nevada can bring the payment error below 6 percent during the current 2026 federal fiscal year — which ends Sept. 30 — the federal government will continue covering the full cost of expenses.
Kelly Cantrelle, a deputy administrator for Nevada Social Services, said the state is currently tracking below 6 percent this fiscal year.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that we’re going to remain under the 6 percent error rate. What I can say is this time last year, we were over 7 percent,” Cantrelle said, adding that the final payment error rate will not be known until USDA completes its annual quality-control review audit.
To reduce payment errors, Nevada has increased staff training, strengthened its internal quality-control reviews with new AI assistance and more frequent beneficiary interviews, and worked more closely with USDA to identify recurring mistakes in eligibility determinations and improve payment accuracy, Cantrelle said. She also noted that payment errors are often the result of paperwork or reporting mistakes by either recipients or caseworkers, not fraud.
USDA spokesperson Michael Abboud said in a statement that the agency appreciates “Nevada’s attention to program integrity, including their consistent sharing of data to ensure their eligibility systems and processes are accurate and efficient.”
If the state’s payment error rate reaches 6 percent or above, Cantrelle estimates that it would cost the state at least $44 million a year. She also noted that because of the high amount, the governor and state legislators would have to decide whether to fund that.
If that happened and the Legislature didn’t approve the funding, it would likely mean that Nevada would no longer be able to have a SNAP program, Cantrelle said.
“I honestly don’t know what would happen at that point,” she said. “I don’t think we could run a SNAP program.”
She also noted that the state would not have the authority to reduce everyone’s SNAP benefits to offset the new costs because benefit levels are set by federal law.
“It’s all or nothing. We don’t have the authority to change federal policy,” Cantrelle said. “It’s not like we could say, OK, so instead of $100, everyone’s getting $75. We’re not allowed to do that.”
‘A man of faith’
McCoy worked for Three Square in managerial positions. He left after seven years to open The After Market.
The need he saw during the pandemic and his own experiences as a food-insecure child in Louisiana inspired the endeavor, he said. He also grew up working in grocery stores.
No one should go hungry, he said.
“Without a healthy meal, you can’t concentrate on work. You can’t concentrate on family. You can’t concentrate on schoolwork. You can’t concentrate on anything,” he said. “It’s the fuel that fuels our bodies … It’s like having a car with no gas. You can’t go anywhere.”
While The After Market is struggling, he expressed optimism that it will survive.
“I’m a man of faith, I’m a man of hope,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to come to the point where doors have to be closed.”
However, he added, “I believe it’s going to get tight.”
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Contact Lucas Hellberg at lhellberg@reviewjournal.com.
