Boy do I have feelings about this issue, as a grocery worker. Bart writing on a chalkboard forever "I will not allocate scarce resources by price"...and of course, yet another second-order reason to take the Jones Act behind the warehouse. You know what's a lot more efficient than shipping food overland via reefers*...?
The company I work for has a bit of an infamous reputation among food banks. We donate gobsmacking amounts of product each year - my store has cracked $seven digits' worth for years now - but a great deal is in those low-to-negative-shares categories, or otherwise takes additional work to make useful. As workers, we're simultaneously encouraged to salvage anything we can, but also maintain a threshold of "if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away". Which is clearly PR-first, actually-feeding-people second! Even though the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act and related provide a legal shield for charity, there's a certain level of corporate CYA about potentially having An Incident where harm is traced back to our donations. This gets especially tragic when there's some sort of quality assurance issue that doesn't actually affect the integrity, but is annoying to deal with...for example, poor seals on packaging leading to open units. I personally make extra effort to reseal such goods (hey, we get paid by the hour), but most employees...frankly can't be assed. So stuff gets binned. *Lots* of stuff. Sometimes there's at least a fig leaf of "well maybe it got contaminated, better safe than sorry"...but still, come on. Someone starving on the streets is not gonna care if a bag of cereal got nicked by a boxcutter.
Moral impulses really are important though. There's only so far you can go with workplace norms and vague threats of "the company gets fined if we throw away too much food". Employees have to actually care enough to do the donation. Whole system runs on trust, too - no one supervises the donation process to check it's being done correctly (or honestly even that people aren't just recording stuff as "spillage" and effectively stealing it, which is a nonzero occurrence sadly). If you don't earn any extra money for donating stuff, if no one's checking to make sure you do it, if there's no real consequence to doing it wrong or not at all, if you just don't care...then edible stuff gets thrown away. As someone who's been through lean times before, like literally negative bank account and subsisting on plain rice and instant noodles while unemployed, it breaks my heart a little every time someone chooses not to Do The Right But Trivially Inconvenient Thing in this area. I've seen the system from the other end too: used to pick up food bank groceries for a disabled client. The number of times I had to lug home 30 pounds of carrots or whatever...it's insane how much surplus this country produces, and a tragedy that we allow anyone to go hungry.
That footnote really should give people pause, too. It's literally small potatoes to efficiency-maxx the food donation ecosystem. Charity begins at Home Depot...but actually spending real money on the problem, like via SNAP? ~OOM improvement. Many such cases where it's possible to spend a dollar and get more than a dollar back, but we simply choose not to, because Dukes of Moral Hazard. Or something. Cf. "lawyer volunteers at soup kitchen instead of donating dollars" thought experiment. Time is money, friend...
*refrigerated trucks; we may or may not refer to delivery truck-induced stress as "reefer madness"
I really appreciate your insights from this world. So many of the policies you have to deal with seem like stupid bs. I briefly worked in food safety regulation and the whole “expiration date” thing drives me insane. I routinely eat yogurt a month or two past its “expiration” and I keep buttermilk on hand for months and months. I know it’s “best by” not expiration per se, but a couple of days ago I used a can of pumpkin “best by” the early 2020s and it was totally fine, including the taste and texture. I also live in a two-person household so our leftovers can get pretty old by conventional risk-averse standards.
Of course people who are immunocompromised have to take precautions. But so many of these regulations, especially truly bogus standards like “expired” food in undamaged cans, generate a lot of waste. My brother lives in a group home for developmentally disabled men, and they routinely throw away cans barely past their “best by” date. I don’t interfere with people doing their incredibly difficult and poorly paid jobs, but it’s frustrating that some of these labels even exist.
Great article, Caroline! It’s not entirely clear to me, though, why the organization is considering changing the model now. If it has held up this well over the last ~ five years, that’s pretty impressive.
Great to see you on the writing side, Caroline! Hope there's more from you in the future.
This was a clever story to improve output, and to me, actions like this is what it means for charity to get more effective: take a cause that's already established, then find ways to improve what the cause is doing.
The other broad thing I'll add is that while charities want to avoid turning down in kind donations if they can find any use for them, the most flexible donation that best adheres to market principles is straight cash, homey--something that regular Slow Borers are also well aware of.
While cash is certainly the best thing for individuals to donate*, this system seems to exist downstream of some places getting large homogenous in-kind donations, which probably means producers or grocers who have business reasons to be donating something like five tons of rice at once.
(*Actually, the best things to donate are highly appreciated equities, in order to maximize your tax leverage. But you can donate the equities to your DAF, which can then sell them and pass the proceeds on to the food bank.)
Yes, to be clear I would not advocate blowing up this particular system in favor of cash donations without some very good reasons to deviate from the status quo.
(And yes, an endowment would be the most ideal, but is also not as opportune.)
The best donation is straight cash and the best currency is… straight cash. Why go to the lengths of inventing “shares” when food banks could just bid real money? I think the article suggests this would lead to “the biggest” food banks hoarding the resources. Isn’t that a good thing? Presumably they serve the most people.
“Shares” ensure that the biggest food banks get the most goods. Using money means that the food banks with the richest donors get the most goods, which is very much not the same thing. If the Northwest Arkansas food bank gets a big cash donation from the Walton family, it can outbid the food banks of St. Louis and Cleveland that may be serving a lot more people.
To me it seems similar to why games like World of Warcraft don’t operate their virtual currencies in cash. It’s a lot easier to design a system to achieve your desired goals when it’s a closed system. If you use cash then you have to worry about people taking cash out of the system (ie corruption) or about extracting value from the system in ways that you don’t intend to be supporting.
This is a great piece and belongs in the SSIR. I'd add a personal and selfish analogue to this to draw Slow Boringers attention to an under discussed issue: this is exactly why it's in the national interest to have a vibrant Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that, among other things, funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education. This program has been in shambles for the past two years (in ways that have meaningfully upended my life and sent me on a detour into for profit employment), and OBBBA effectively closed off this pathway for young professionals in the future. It's one of the many crimes I'd lay at the feet of bad intentions on the right and poor governance on the left, and the downstream impacts are bad and getting worse.
The attempt to gut PSLF is evil, and my org is also in shambles over it. There’s no reason the current admin should be targeting people who’s given up nearly a decade of corporate earnings to help the poor, elderly and disabled, and yet lots of people are getting stuck unable to satisfy their payments because of forced forbearance or having to consider leaving the public service field because their org might get de-certified this July. And that’s just the EO attack on PSLF; the lawsuits around SAVE et al have been pretty horrible for people who just want to satisfy the forgiveness requirements they agreed to 9-10 years ago.
That is a horrid idea. MBAs do more good for the world than you even have the capacity to conceive of. Taking them away from actual productive enterprises would be like arson. Variation in management quality explains wholly a fifth of the dispersion in productivity in America [1]. It’s a really big deal!!
I didn't take his comment as a direct attack on me but rather on the stupidity of destroying this pipeline of management training for the sector (not to mention the many other impacts of PSLF being diminished).
Unfortunately, based on what regular readers of this comment section know about Mr. Decker (i.e. that he is an extremely dogmatic libertarian), I doubt he sees any value in either the PSLF program or the public sector in general. I would be happy to be proven wrong though...
I admit my feathers also get a little rustled when someone talks about things like, say, optimizing food bank deliveries so 50 million more pounds of food get into the hands of hungry people as not “actually productive.”
*Larry H. Parker client voice* "PSLF saved me $93,000."
My road to PSLF was a bit weird because my loans came before the program existed and my interest rates were low. But a lot of medical residents with high-interest loans are specifically looking at public-sector and academic jobs because they hear of stories like mine. As SBers now, altruism can only go so far toward meeting needs.
I'm a mediocre poster child for the direct effects of PSLF (since I probably didn't NEED it) but a better one for the indirect effects.
Did you read the article? I think the value of having folks trained in finance, operations, marketing, and basic economics in the public sector would be obvious (tech companies and retailers hire from the same programs for a reason), but if it's not this entire article just laid out a pretty ironclad example of the benefit.
This is one of the most rewarding articles I have read in recent memory. I fits into that area of knowledge of being a good news story with tangible innovative solutions to a seemingly unsolvable problem wrapped for me in the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know”. Thanks Caroline well done and Thanksgiving timely!
How so? We already know that there is an abundance of produce in the US. That people are willing to give away produce that is near to unsellable because it's perishing doesn't change whether that produce is available within an easily accessed distance to poor neighborhoods.
When I lived in the City of Detroit in the 1990s I lived in the outer edge of a food desert. The only grocery store for several miles was at the border between the city and a suburb. I certainly had the means to drive there whenever I wanted. But the further into the city you went the poorer, so that access diminished, and people without their own transport relied on what was available at places like Rite Aid or convenience/liquor stores.
"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
Food desert doesn't mean one can't find produce if they're looking for it and have means of transit. It means the market isn't supporting ample choice of affordable, nutritious food nearby someone's home. Local neighborhood grocers operating cash strapped businesses with low margins don't dedicate significant shelf space to second hand produce on the verge of spoilage.
Well, what share of your weekly (after-transfer) income would you spend on broccoli that will spoil in the fridge within 72 hours of purchase?
It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, it's that they have to prioritize what makes sense for their budgets and that in turn drives supplier decisions on what to stock, and then those become self reinforcing because of how markets work. I'm sure many people would love to buy a Porsche but you're not going to see their dealerships in areas where people's income can't drive inventory turnover before that year's model became out of date.
To add to what PP said downthread, the food desert argument only has a chance if it's on the basis of malnourishment. I could listen to an argument that welfare should apply to a higher measure of nutrition, but traditionally, welfare arguments for food have been on the basis of just avoiding outright starvation, and non-perishable goods can achieve that very easily.
"In-kind donations still help, of course, and nobody’s turning away boxes of food. But a fundamental issue is that many organizations feel that asking for money—like requesting cash as a gift—seems somewhat gauche. So, let me be rude on their behalf: Find well-managed charities in your community and trust them to know how to do their job. They have access to food at a fraction of the price. They know their clients, and they have better things to do than to sort through your canned goods."
For about a year I volunteered at a local food bank warehouse. Most of my time was spent throwing away food, and most of the food I threw away looked perfectly good & edible.
I remember hearing about this in a podcast episode some time ago. Planet Money? The pickle example stood out to me. Anyways so cool to hear about this again!
Boy do I have feelings about this issue, as a grocery worker. Bart writing on a chalkboard forever "I will not allocate scarce resources by price"...and of course, yet another second-order reason to take the Jones Act behind the warehouse. You know what's a lot more efficient than shipping food overland via reefers*...?
The company I work for has a bit of an infamous reputation among food banks. We donate gobsmacking amounts of product each year - my store has cracked $seven digits' worth for years now - but a great deal is in those low-to-negative-shares categories, or otherwise takes additional work to make useful. As workers, we're simultaneously encouraged to salvage anything we can, but also maintain a threshold of "if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away". Which is clearly PR-first, actually-feeding-people second! Even though the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act and related provide a legal shield for charity, there's a certain level of corporate CYA about potentially having An Incident where harm is traced back to our donations. This gets especially tragic when there's some sort of quality assurance issue that doesn't actually affect the integrity, but is annoying to deal with...for example, poor seals on packaging leading to open units. I personally make extra effort to reseal such goods (hey, we get paid by the hour), but most employees...frankly can't be assed. So stuff gets binned. *Lots* of stuff. Sometimes there's at least a fig leaf of "well maybe it got contaminated, better safe than sorry"...but still, come on. Someone starving on the streets is not gonna care if a bag of cereal got nicked by a boxcutter.
Moral impulses really are important though. There's only so far you can go with workplace norms and vague threats of "the company gets fined if we throw away too much food". Employees have to actually care enough to do the donation. Whole system runs on trust, too - no one supervises the donation process to check it's being done correctly (or honestly even that people aren't just recording stuff as "spillage" and effectively stealing it, which is a nonzero occurrence sadly). If you don't earn any extra money for donating stuff, if no one's checking to make sure you do it, if there's no real consequence to doing it wrong or not at all, if you just don't care...then edible stuff gets thrown away. As someone who's been through lean times before, like literally negative bank account and subsisting on plain rice and instant noodles while unemployed, it breaks my heart a little every time someone chooses not to Do The Right But Trivially Inconvenient Thing in this area. I've seen the system from the other end too: used to pick up food bank groceries for a disabled client. The number of times I had to lug home 30 pounds of carrots or whatever...it's insane how much surplus this country produces, and a tragedy that we allow anyone to go hungry.
That footnote really should give people pause, too. It's literally small potatoes to efficiency-maxx the food donation ecosystem. Charity begins at Home Depot...but actually spending real money on the problem, like via SNAP? ~OOM improvement. Many such cases where it's possible to spend a dollar and get more than a dollar back, but we simply choose not to, because Dukes of Moral Hazard. Or something. Cf. "lawyer volunteers at soup kitchen instead of donating dollars" thought experiment. Time is money, friend...
*refrigerated trucks; we may or may not refer to delivery truck-induced stress as "reefer madness"
I really appreciate your insights from this world. So many of the policies you have to deal with seem like stupid bs. I briefly worked in food safety regulation and the whole “expiration date” thing drives me insane. I routinely eat yogurt a month or two past its “expiration” and I keep buttermilk on hand for months and months. I know it’s “best by” not expiration per se, but a couple of days ago I used a can of pumpkin “best by” the early 2020s and it was totally fine, including the taste and texture. I also live in a two-person household so our leftovers can get pretty old by conventional risk-averse standards.
Of course people who are immunocompromised have to take precautions. But so many of these regulations, especially truly bogus standards like “expired” food in undamaged cans, generate a lot of waste. My brother lives in a group home for developmentally disabled men, and they routinely throw away cans barely past their “best by” date. I don’t interfere with people doing their incredibly difficult and poorly paid jobs, but it’s frustrating that some of these labels even exist.
I'm immunocompromised and I've eaten food >10 years past its best by date.
Great article, Caroline! It’s not entirely clear to me, though, why the organization is considering changing the model now. If it has held up this well over the last ~ five years, that’s pretty impressive.
Thank you so much for reading! Glad you enjoyed it.
Great to see you on the writing side, Caroline! Hope there's more from you in the future.
This was a clever story to improve output, and to me, actions like this is what it means for charity to get more effective: take a cause that's already established, then find ways to improve what the cause is doing.
The other broad thing I'll add is that while charities want to avoid turning down in kind donations if they can find any use for them, the most flexible donation that best adheres to market principles is straight cash, homey--something that regular Slow Borers are also well aware of.
Thank you, I really appreciate that! It was a fascinating project to learn about.
While cash is certainly the best thing for individuals to donate*, this system seems to exist downstream of some places getting large homogenous in-kind donations, which probably means producers or grocers who have business reasons to be donating something like five tons of rice at once.
(*Actually, the best things to donate are highly appreciated equities, in order to maximize your tax leverage. But you can donate the equities to your DAF, which can then sell them and pass the proceeds on to the food bank.)
Yes, to be clear I would not advocate blowing up this particular system in favor of cash donations without some very good reasons to deviate from the status quo.
(And yes, an endowment would be the most ideal, but is also not as opportune.)
The best donation is straight cash and the best currency is… straight cash. Why go to the lengths of inventing “shares” when food banks could just bid real money? I think the article suggests this would lead to “the biggest” food banks hoarding the resources. Isn’t that a good thing? Presumably they serve the most people.
“Shares” ensure that the biggest food banks get the most goods. Using money means that the food banks with the richest donors get the most goods, which is very much not the same thing. If the Northwest Arkansas food bank gets a big cash donation from the Walton family, it can outbid the food banks of St. Louis and Cleveland that may be serving a lot more people.
To me it seems similar to why games like World of Warcraft don’t operate their virtual currencies in cash. It’s a lot easier to design a system to achieve your desired goals when it’s a closed system. If you use cash then you have to worry about people taking cash out of the system (ie corruption) or about extracting value from the system in ways that you don’t intend to be supporting.
Where would the money come from and who would it go to?
The nice this if it were cash though? Someone would have come up with a way to make shelf stable broccoli potato chip casseroles.
Sorry, but I don't understand your first sentence?
This is a great piece and belongs in the SSIR. I'd add a personal and selfish analogue to this to draw Slow Boringers attention to an under discussed issue: this is exactly why it's in the national interest to have a vibrant Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that, among other things, funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education. This program has been in shambles for the past two years (in ways that have meaningfully upended my life and sent me on a detour into for profit employment), and OBBBA effectively closed off this pathway for young professionals in the future. It's one of the many crimes I'd lay at the feet of bad intentions on the right and poor governance on the left, and the downstream impacts are bad and getting worse.
The attempt to gut PSLF is evil, and my org is also in shambles over it. There’s no reason the current admin should be targeting people who’s given up nearly a decade of corporate earnings to help the poor, elderly and disabled, and yet lots of people are getting stuck unable to satisfy their payments because of forced forbearance or having to consider leaving the public service field because their org might get de-certified this July. And that’s just the EO attack on PSLF; the lawsuits around SAVE et al have been pretty horrible for people who just want to satisfy the forgiveness requirements they agreed to 9-10 years ago.
That is a horrid idea. MBAs do more good for the world than you even have the capacity to conceive of. Taking them away from actual productive enterprises would be like arson. Variation in management quality explains wholly a fifth of the dispersion in productivity in America [1]. It’s a really big deal!!
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23300/w23300.pdf
"than you even have the capacity to conceive of"
Maybe don't leap straight to the personal attack?
I didn't take his comment as a direct attack on me but rather on the stupidity of destroying this pipeline of management training for the sector (not to mention the many other impacts of PSLF being diminished).
Unfortunately, based on what regular readers of this comment section know about Mr. Decker (i.e. that he is an extremely dogmatic libertarian), I doubt he sees any value in either the PSLF program or the public sector in general. I would be happy to be proven wrong though...
I admit my feathers also get a little rustled when someone talks about things like, say, optimizing food bank deliveries so 50 million more pounds of food get into the hands of hungry people as not “actually productive.”
"funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education"
Ugh - education? FdB - call your office.
*Larry H. Parker client voice* "PSLF saved me $93,000."
My road to PSLF was a bit weird because my loans came before the program existed and my interest rates were low. But a lot of medical residents with high-interest loans are specifically looking at public-sector and academic jobs because they hear of stories like mine. As SBers now, altruism can only go so far toward meeting needs.
I'm a mediocre poster child for the direct effects of PSLF (since I probably didn't NEED it) but a better one for the indirect effects.
“funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education”
So we’d have more people working in social services and education who were trained in business?
What would be the point of that?
Did you read the article? I think the value of having folks trained in finance, operations, marketing, and basic economics in the public sector would be obvious (tech companies and retailers hire from the same programs for a reason), but if it's not this entire article just laid out a pretty ironclad example of the benefit.
“Did you read the article?”
I think so. Wasn’t it about a nonprofit that engaged some academics for a practical research project?
This is one of the most rewarding articles I have read in recent memory. I fits into that area of knowledge of being a good news story with tangible innovative solutions to a seemingly unsolvable problem wrapped for me in the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know”. Thanks Caroline well done and Thanksgiving timely!
Thank you so much! That really means a lot.
Such a great piece: a topic I care about but where I didn’t know this history. And not overly long to read and digest. Thank you!!
Fascinating article, thank you for sharing
Great article! Lovely and inspiring holiday read.
Such a great article and topic! I love reading about how systems can get better. Thank you for covering this!
Nice article on the benefits of markets and good system design!
"Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares."
That sort of undermines the food desert theory, doesn't it?
How so? We already know that there is an abundance of produce in the US. That people are willing to give away produce that is near to unsellable because it's perishing doesn't change whether that produce is available within an easily accessed distance to poor neighborhoods.
When I lived in the City of Detroit in the 1990s I lived in the outer edge of a food desert. The only grocery store for several miles was at the border between the city and a suburb. I certainly had the means to drive there whenever I wanted. But the further into the city you went the poorer, so that access diminished, and people without their own transport relied on what was available at places like Rite Aid or convenience/liquor stores.
That's one theory.
"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
Is another.
But Rite Aid and Convenience stores would sell produce if there was a market for it.
Food desert doesn't mean one can't find produce if they're looking for it and have means of transit. It means the market isn't supporting ample choice of affordable, nutritious food nearby someone's home. Local neighborhood grocers operating cash strapped businesses with low margins don't dedicate significant shelf space to second hand produce on the verge of spoilage.
Exactly, they don't sell it because people don't want to buy it.
Well, what share of your weekly (after-transfer) income would you spend on broccoli that will spoil in the fridge within 72 hours of purchase?
It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, it's that they have to prioritize what makes sense for their budgets and that in turn drives supplier decisions on what to stock, and then those become self reinforcing because of how markets work. I'm sure many people would love to buy a Porsche but you're not going to see their dealerships in areas where people's income can't drive inventory turnover before that year's model became out of date.
"It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, "
Yes, it is.
"And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
“It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff”
Are you referring to broccoli or to orphaned Tupperware lids?
To add to what PP said downthread, the food desert argument only has a chance if it's on the basis of malnourishment. I could listen to an argument that welfare should apply to a higher measure of nutrition, but traditionally, welfare arguments for food have been on the basis of just avoiding outright starvation, and non-perishable goods can achieve that very easily.
super interesting, thanks.
Thank you so much for reading!
Great article, but since Caroline seems like a nice person who doesn't want to be rude, I'll let Matt do that and point out the corollary point that your food drive isn't nearly as helpful as you think (even if it does let you feel good freeing up shelf space): https://slate.com/business/2011/12/food-drives-charities-need-your-money-not-your-random-old-food.html
"In-kind donations still help, of course, and nobody’s turning away boxes of food. But a fundamental issue is that many organizations feel that asking for money—like requesting cash as a gift—seems somewhat gauche. So, let me be rude on their behalf: Find well-managed charities in your community and trust them to know how to do their job. They have access to food at a fraction of the price. They know their clients, and they have better things to do than to sort through your canned goods."
sorta related
For about a year I volunteered at a local food bank warehouse. Most of my time was spent throwing away food, and most of the food I threw away looked perfectly good & edible.
I stopped volunteering there.
There have been Nobel Peace Prizes awarded for less!
Alvin Roth (IIRC) won a Nobel for designing a similar sort of market mechanism without explicit prices for kidney donations.
Thanks! But is one Nobel enough? :)
I remember hearing about this in a podcast episode some time ago. Planet Money? The pickle example stood out to me. Anyways so cool to hear about this again!