Homeless on food

Weird blog headline "homeless on food."  However, that is precisely my concern.

One of the useful but minor contributions of the hippies and their food coops was the invention (or re-invention) of the open barrel of foods. The open barrels and bins contained a wide assortment of foods and candies...commonly nuts, herbs, coffees, teas, beans and other bulk items.

The hippy model of open barrels and bins was copied in nearly all major food chains and some small part of it survives. 

Why did the barrel and bin model shrink to near invisibility?  Homeless. 

Many shoppers started to realize that homeless people put their filthy hands into the bins to steal food.  Ordinary shoppers are driven away by any thought of touching what the homeless touch.  Goodbye good idea.
 
I repeat here what I have said elsewhere on a related homeless issue: Each visible homeless person costs the city of San Francisco $200,000 per year in lost tourist revenue.

The figure is easy to calculate.  One-third of S.F. tourists say the homeless are the thing they least like about their visit to S.F.  Tourist destinations without homeless (Disney World and Disney Land) get 4 times the number of visitors that San Francisco gets. 

Each new tourist would bring $350 and a 10% increase in tourists is $200,000 per visible homeless person (assuming only 1,500 of our 5,000 homeless are visible to tourists).

Regardless of what we waste already to maintain homeless in San Francisco we automatically lose $200,000 per year per visible homeless person in tourist revenue.

How do we tolerate that?