At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays: A growing number of free grocery stores offer shoppers not just free food, but choice, ambiance, and space for dignity, too.

Also it's why it's great to donate food but if you can donating money goes a long way further as the good bank can buy so much more food with the same amount of money that you can. The small amount I donate every month feeds about 20 people.

I have also done sorting at a food bank and you wouldn't believe how much spoiled food is donated. Like the oldest box was from the 70s. Food banks loose in opportunity costs while volunteers have to spend their time throwing that stuff away and the effort to haul it off vs giving cash directly to farmers and suppliers to provide crates of good but ugly produce and tones of frozen and can food.

here it used to be an (for a single or 2 person household) overflowing banana box of stuff (sometimes two) a week, usually close or past-dated. with a lot of sad looking produce and almost always a package or two of meat (like ham, ground beef, sometimes nice steaks though).

now it's often not enough to fill a single paper grocery bag, and never any meat. they see a lot more 'business' these days than 5-10 years ago. there is not enough to go around.

there's a 'store like' pantry too (can choose a certain quantity from each 'department'). you can 'shop' every month--but it has stricter qualifications than the weekly random distributions.

The counter argument that picking and choosing creates a sense of priority and "missing out". Because even if you didn't actually want the canned peaches (NOBODY wants canned peaches), you are worried that the person ahead of you got it. Which tends to lead toward discontent or outright discouragement amongst those who "don't really need it and are doing fine".

Whereas the box of food set aside by the volunteers? Half of you got canned peaches and the other half canned beets. While people are annoyed they got the god awful peaches, they at least feel better because "everyone is in this together" and so forth.

Charity is a shockingly hard problem because so many people will insist they don't actually need any help and so many things can create a barrier to make them decide it isn't worth their time or the hit to their pride. And different models tend to appeal to different people. But, from talking to some of the organizers at a food bank I used to volunteer at a couple years ago, the "take what you need" model tends to pull in more "dumpster diving college kids" rather than "actual people in need". But I suspect a lot of that is also a function of it having been in a college town.