This paper engages with the social world of subsidized bakers in two locations in Egypt, a popular neighborhood of Cairo and a village in the Upper Egypt region of Sohag. Unlike most other MENA countries where all bakeries can make and sell subsidized bread, alongside other non-subsidized forms of bread, in Egypt only licensed, privately-owned, bakeries produce the subsidized balady bread, and they are not allowed to produce any other kind of loaf. This distribution system has gone through important modifications during the last 10 years, with the implementation of a reform that changed the mechanism of subsidization and introduced the targeting of beneficiaries. Struggling against corruption (fasad) and dismantling the “bakery owners’ mafia” was one of the major reasons put forward by the government to advocate for such reform. In line with the questions raised by this session, I argue that aspects of the so-called fasad results – at least partly – from a sense of state responsibility taken over by the bakers in face of the new constraints imposed by the reform. Building on ethnographic interviews conducted with owners and workers at balady bakeries in 2021-2022, I intend to relocate the illegal and semi-legal practices through which they accommodate the new system in the social context of the labor division at the bakery and of their interactions with citizens that, far from being passive recipients, formulate specific expectations regarding what they think they are entitled to. From this perspective, corrupted practices may be better understood as the "inloading" by subsidized bakers of citizens’ state expectations. The paper is also conceived of as a dialogue with the work of José Ciro Martinez about the case of subsidized bakers in Jordan (2022). Comparing the gambits and ethics of bakers in both countries – and further, in two locations in Egypt that involve contrasted expectations – this analysis seeks to illuminate the specific state effects that these practices, and their underlying institutional and social arrangements, generate in different contexts.