I get paid 20% of my salary in &quot;food stamps&quot;&#x2F;&quot;food vouchers&quot; (they&#x27;re more lightly taxed both for employees and employers so companies try to foist as much as possible upon employees). And they suck, a lot.<p>They&#x27;re called &quot;Ticket Alimentación&quot;, and they&#x27;re provided by Edenred. They&#x27;re electronic these days to prevent the easiest ways to convert them into real money.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edenred" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edenred</a><p>Among the problems:<p>- most places don&#x27;t accept it, so you HAVE to go to the places where they accept them. That sucks a lot (nowadays I can&#x27;t go to the small local places as they don&#x27;t have the infrastructure to process them, since government heavily monitors their use)<p>- you can only buy essentials with them, but that does not include stuff like paying rent.<p>- all taxes and stuff are taken from the &quot;real&quot; money, and you can have a negative &quot;real&quot; income while having too much in food vouchers (which can&#x27;t be used to pay rent or utilities or transportation).<p>- you&#x27;re basically forced to spend them (I make more than what I&#x27;d like to spend on food &amp; essentials), you can&#x27;t save unless you do some kind of hoarding or buy-to-sell scheme. I&#x27;m pretty sure some kind of black market would emerge where your proposed &quot;necessity dollars&quot; would be exchanged for &quot;nicety dollars&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t have enough leverage to individually negotiate not getting paid in food vouchers, but it&#x27;s definitely a factor I&#x27;m going to consider.