The Noticing Folk Foundation has been doing exactly that — showing up at local shops and picking up tabs for whoever happens to be there. No criteria, no strings attached. It's the kind of radically simple generosity that makes you wonder why we spend billions on programs that require layers of administrators just to hand someone a sandwich.

Let's be clear: this is private charity working the way private charity is supposed to work. No taxpayer dollars seized and redistributed through a labyrinth of city departments. No six-month waitlists. No consultants hired to study the feasibility of maybe eventually helping someone. Just people helping people, directly, at the point of need.

Of course, the skeptic in us has to ask the obvious question: can this scale? Probably not in its current form. You can't cover every grocery bill in a city where a bag of organic kale costs more than a movie ticket. But that's kind of the point — not everything has to scale into a massive government apparatus to be valuable. Sometimes the most effective social safety net is a neighbor who notices you're struggling and steps in.

There's also something worth noting about the where. The foundation is specifically targeting independent grocery stores, not big-box chains. That means the dollars are doing double duty — feeding families and keeping small businesses alive in a city that's been hemorrhaging them for years.

San Francisco's official poverty programs cost taxpayers hundreds of millions annually, and homelessness and food insecurity persist. Meanwhile, a small nonprofit with a simple idea is making a tangible difference one checkout line at a time.

Maybe the lesson here isn't that government should do more. Maybe it's that government should get out of the way and let more of this happen.