The cost of goods at wholesale is already part of the expenses, so on a P&L statement, the expenses have no revenue offset. No taxes are paid anyway.
Now, if they gave away stuff past it's sell-by date, (but still suitable for consumption) to a food pantry, the lost margin IS a write-off. But, only the margins, not the retail value, as what the store paid is already non-taxable.
In our tax accounting class in MBA school, retail was a focus for about 40% of the term, and grocery was a case study for a quarter of that. Learned quite a lot in that class.

Which at the end of the year is taxable.

On the other hand our local food bank is pretty good.

Life would be better if we simply provided homeless people with safe, secure, comfortable places to live. It wouldn't have to be anything fancy.

The "no free lunch" people who don't even want to feed hungry school children have trashed this nation. They want the homeless around to serve as a threat to any wage slave who might protest dangerous, inhumane, and soul-killing working conditions.

You don't want to be that guy...

I've been a dumpster diver at certain times in my life for various reasons, including homelessness.

When my wife started grad school we furnished our apartment with stuff that had been abandoned beside the dumpsters at the end of the school term.

At one of my kid's college the school had a formal system for redistributing all this stuff. It was astonishing what graduating classes left behind. There were microwave ovens, mini-fridges, any sort of furniture you might need, bicycles, clothing...

Maybe every community needs a place like that, but it would be a shame to deprive WalMart or Target of that business...

I worked at Macy's in Visual/Display and I was going to call the local news since brand new leather belts were among tons of expensive items that were trashed into the dumpsters since the various manufacturers, like Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, etc would not let us even donate items to charities, thrift stores, and so on. They didn't want their products "cheapened".

When I became a teacher I lived a block away from the Ed Center and I saw brand new phonics books in the dumpster. I recognized the books since I had the same ones in my classroom at a different school. The local news said the books were "old and damaged" but they weren't, they were the district's new books purchased with our tax dollars. Each classroom had several hundred of them.

"“There is this gap between what is usable for consumers and what is sellable for retailers"

I am an almost daily customer of a 'Dollar General' which is about 400 yards from my house---
now I'm wondering what might be found in THEIR dumpster, after-hours!

(Likely a lot of cardboard which I could use to cover my garden at the end of the season,
at the least!)

I'm an Ebay seller also, although I haven't done much of that recently---
but offering products which cost me nothing but physical energy to procure
would obviously be a big plus! HMMMMM...

Trump said that was a bad deal. He tore that agreement up. Now he’s launched a war he cannot win and cannot end and we will be worse off and you’re talking bananas.