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Using the lens of counter-economics, this essay maps shoplifting and a donation-based food network onto different “markets,” and makes a case for an underground that feeds people through consent, trust, and shared power.
In many cities, the same question is being asked in very different ways:
If a society is structured in a way that leaves people hungry while food is thrown away, what counts as a moral response?
One answer says: steal. If the system itself is based on exploitation, then taking from large corporations—especially when they discard surplus goods anyway—can be framed as a small act of justice. Under this view, shoplifting from big-box stores or supermarket chains becomes a kind of micro-reparation: a way of clawing back value from an economic order that was rigged from the start.
Another answer says: build parallel systems. Instead of sneaking goods past the scanner, ordinary workers and volunteers quietly organize an alternative supply chain: surplus food is reclaimed with permission, rerouted into a mutual-aid network, and distributed for free from a folding table in the middle of the city. No questions asked, one bag per person, no money accepted.
Both approaches are trying to address the same reality: people are hungry in a world of abundance, and much of that abundance is controlled by institutions whose priorities are profit, not care. But they make fundamentally different bets about how to change that reality, and at what cost.
This essay looks at those two paths side by side. It does not deny the anger that fuels the first. It simply asks a harder question: Which underground do we actually want to grow?
The argument for shoplifting as a moral act usually starts from a structural claim.
Modern economies, the argument goes, are built on legalized theft: of land, of labor, of time. Wages for low-level workers are kept barely livable while executives receive bonuses large enough to buy houses outright. Housing markets price people out of neighborhoods their families have lived in for generations. Food deserts appear in poor areas while upscale grocery chains throw away pallets of unsold goods.
If all of this is true, then a shoplifter is not the first thief in the story. They are a latecomer to a game that was rigged long before they arrived. From this point of view, slipping a package of meat or a bag of rice into a backpack is not an attack on justice; it is a tiny correction.
There is a real moral intuition here. It is difficult to look at warehouses of excess and aisles of overstocked goods and accept that someone should go hungry because they lack the right numbers in a bank account. The shoplifting argument tries to force that contradiction into the open: If you will not change the rules, then the rules will be broken from below.
But there is a hidden cost to this approach, one that does not show up on the receipt. Theft does not just move goods; it moves trust.
Most everyday social life runs on a quiet, invisible fuel: the assumption that strangers will, more or less, follow the rules.
Clerks put items on shelves without expecting a wrestling match over every can of beans. Shoppers walk down aisles without constant suspicion that the person next to them is planning to rip them off. Security guards exist, cameras exist, but they float on top of a deeper layer: the expectation that most people, most of the time, will not try to get away with whatever they can.
When theft becomes normalized—even as an act of protest—that layer starts to crack. Workers become anxious and guarded. Management responds with tighter controls, more surveillance, and policies that often harm the very people on the edge: bag checks, increased policing, reduced freedom for employees to exercise discretion. Marginalized communities tend to bear the brunt of these crackdowns.
At the interpersonal level, trust erodes. The idea that “everyone is stealing from everyone” easily slides from corporations into daily life. If companies are assumed to be thieves, and customers are encouraged to act like thieves in response, it is not surprising when that logic bleeds into relationships between neighbors, gig workers, and even members of the same community.
The question is not simply whether stealing from a large store is morally worse than the broader injustices of the system. The harder question is whether a tactic that chips away at trust can realistically build a more just order on top of the ruin.
If trust is a kind of social capital, then theft is an expensive way to buy groceries.
There is another way to move food from abundance to need, and it also operates partly underground. It does not show up in glossy corporate reports or government planning documents. Instead, it starts at the level of the loading dock, the stock room, and the closing shift.
In this model, workers at local grocery stores quietly set aside food that is nearing its sell-by date or would otherwise be discarded. Volunteers from hunger-relief groups arrive to pick it up. The key detail is that this process is consensual: employees are allowed, either formally or informally, to donate the food, and store managers tacitly or explicitly approve of the arrangement.
Sometimes there is even a small incentive streamlining the process. For the corporation, donated surplus can be logged as a tax write-off or a public relations bonus. For the workers, it is a chance to see food they handle every day become meals instead of landfill. For the volunteers, it is the raw material for a parallel distribution system.
The donated goods then move into a network of small organizations: food pantries, community fridges, neighborhood churches, pop-up mutual aid groups. From the vantage point of upper management, this might all appear as a blur of minor losses in the accounting system—a few hundred dollars per store per month that never make it to the trash. At ground level, the meaning is very different. For the people receiving the food, those bags are the difference between skipping meals and eating well for the week.
This, too, is a kind of counter-economy: it operates in the spaces where formal markets fail to allocate resources in a humane way. But it does so by deepening trust rather than dissolving it. Workers trust volunteers to handle the food responsibly. Volunteers trust workers to call when donations are available. Recipients trust that the food will be there again next week.
No one has to sneak anything past a scanner. The “underground” part of the system lies not in deception but in the quiet refusal to accept waste as normal.
The most visible face of this model appears not in the back rooms of grocery stores but out in the open: a simple table set up in a central part of the city.
For a few hours every week—say, four hours on a Saturday afternoon—volunteers lay out bags of food gathered from these donation networks. There is no paperwork, no ID check, no income verification. The rule is disarmingly simple: one bag per person, no questions asked.
People line up. Some clearly need the food to get through the week. Others might be doing slightly better, but still find that the rising cost of living has eroded their margin of comfort. Parents arrive with children. Elderly neighbors shuffle forward in line. Newcomers pause at the edge, unsure whether this is “for them.”
Again and again, the same scene plays out. Someone reaches for their wallet. They ask, “How much?” Or they try to press a few dollars into a volunteer’s hand, embarrassed to walk away with free food.
When they are told, “There is no charge; we do not take money,” many are shocked. In a culture where almost every interaction is mediated by price, a table with no price tag feels like a glitch in the system. Some insist on donating; the volunteers politely decline. The point is not to start a different market at a lower price. The point is to do something else entirely.
That “something else” is crucial. By refusing money, the table draws a boundary between itself and the logic of the store just down the street. It is not a discount aisle. It is a commons.
The same food that corporations would have written off as waste becomes the centerpiece of a radically different kind of exchange: not a transaction, but a recognition. The people walking away with bags are not customers; they are neighbors participating in a shared resource.
Political theorists who study underground economies sometimes divide economic activity into different “markets”:
Some radicals argue that people should seek to expand black-market activity as a way of withdrawing support from unjust systems. Operating outside state regulation, they say, undermines centralized control and builds alternative structures.
Both shoplifting and the donation-based table are responses to the same perceived injustice. But they fall into different categories.
Shoplifting resides in the red market: the transfer of goods is nonconsensual. The store does not agree to the loss, and the practice relies on deception or stealth. Even when the target is a large corporation, the people who feel the immediate pressure are often low-wage workers and local managers who must respond to loss-prevention policies.
The donation-driven mutual aid network, by contrast, operates on consent at every critical step. Workers choose to set aside food. Managers choose not to interfere—and often quietly support the practice. Volunteers choose to organize pick-ups and distributions. People in line choose to come, not under compulsion, but because they heard that the table is there for anyone who needs it.
One approach treats the system as a battlefield where everyone is an enemy or a mark. The other treats it as a landscape full of potential allies trapped in rigid roles, waiting for someone to offer a different script.
Consent, in this sense, is not just a moral preference. It becomes a strategic asset.
Supporters of theft as justice often frame the issue in terms of courage: Are we willing to break the rules of an unjust order, or are we too timid to resist?
It is worth turning that question around.
Which approach actually reduces the power of centralized institutions over the long term: individual acts of appropriation that prompt more surveillance and harden corporate defenses, or the steady growth of networks that quietly make those institutions less necessary?
The donation-based model does several subtle but important things:
It redirects resources without escalating conflict.
Corporations lose some potential profit on surplus goods, but in practice, they are often relieved to have a simple, low-friction way to move inventory they cannot sell out of the store.
It empowers workers at the edge of the system.
Stockers, cashiers, and managers become the crucial link in a chain of community care. Their discretion matters. Their judgment matters. That is a quiet transfer of moral authority.
It strengthens local institutions.
Small organizations become known as reliable sources of help. Over time, they accumulate relationships, trust, and logistical knowledge. That is real power, even if it does not show up on a shareholder report.
It rebuilds social trust instead of eroding it.
People learn there are spaces where they can show up as they are, without having to justify their need or hide their desperation. That trust makes other forms of cooperation easier later.
It models a different economic logic in public.
The table in the city is not hidden. It is a visible demonstration that not all exchanges have to be mediated by price and profit. Children who watch their parents pick up a bag of free food are quietly learning that mutual care is possible.
None of this is as dramatic as a well-timed shoplifting spree. It does not produce instant catharsis. It will not go viral as easily as a confrontation captured on a phone. But when measured in lives steadily stabilized, in anxiety quietly reduced, in neighbors slowly coming to recognize one another, it may be far more radical.
Theft shouts, “The system is unfair, and I refuse to play by its rules.”
Mutual aid whispers, “The system is unfair, so we are building another one beside it.”
Only one of those statements requires everyone involved to become a little more suspicious of everyone else.
A society that leaves people hungry while food is thrown away is already committing a kind of moral theft. It is understandable that some would respond to that theft by taking matters—literally—into their own hands.
But not every form of resistance moves in the same direction.
Shoplifting from large stores may feel like a strike against an unjust order, yet it often deepens the habits of suspicion and control that keep that order in place. It makes it easier to justify more cameras, more guards, more separation between those who have and those who lack.
The quiet, consent-based counter-economy of donations and no-questions-asked food tables does something different. It takes the same resources that would have been wasted and routes them through a web of trust. It treats workers, volunteers, and recipients not as opponents in a zero-sum game, but as partners in a common project.
On paper, both approaches move goods from one set of hands to another. In practice, they cultivate different undergrounds:
In an age where nearly every human interaction is nudged toward transaction, the second underground may be the more disruptive one. A society built on extraction expects some people to steal and others to crack down in response. It is less prepared for a growing network of places where, for a few hours on a Saturday, the rules simply do not apply: no prices, no paperwork, just a line of people walking away with food because someone, somewhere, decided that waste was not inevitable.
The question, in the end, is not only what feels just in the moment, but what kind of habits we want to spread. If the goal is a world where fewer people are hungry and more people can trust their neighbors, then the underground that feeds without demanding anything in return may be the most revolutionary one of all.
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