Why shelves are empty at the grocery store

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Laura Reiley explains the kinks in the food supply chain leaving grocery shelves bare. Grocery workers share their well-founded fears with Abha Bhattarai. Erin Patrick O’Connor hears from sanitation workers on the pandemic’s front line.

The industry says we have enough food. Here’s why some grocery store shelves are empty anyway.

The grocery workers on the front line of the pandemic never thought of their jobs as risky. Now, they’re scared to go to work.

Sanitation workers are exposed to the coronavirus every day they go to work.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, Washington Post is Colby.
0:10.6	Hi, Stephanie McCreement from the Washington Post.
0:13.6	This is Post Reports.
0:15.1	I'm Martin Powers.
0:19.0	It's Monday, April 20th.
0:23.7	Today, why supermarket shelves are still empty?
0:27.1	How grocery workers are coping with the risks of their job?
0:30.7	And the problem of trash pickup?
0:36.1	My name's Laura Riley and I am the Business of Food Reporter at the Washington Post.
0:42.6	So describe to me what regular consumers are seeing when they go to the grocery store
0:50.4	and try to buy food.
0:52.0	It really depends on who you are, where you are, and when you're going.
0:55.1	I think one thing we can all say is there's probably not going to be toilet paper yet in
0:59.1	a lot of places.
1:00.4	But the gaps are idiosyncratic and a little bit different geographically and depending on
1:06.5	the time of day or depending on the time of week.
1:08.9	But we are still seeing gaps.
1:10.3	I think we've all recognized that.
1:14.2	And it's frustrating and it's a little bit scary.
1:16.1	It seems like something we've never had before.
1:18.5	You know, kind of big swaths of the grocery store with empty shelves.
1:22.9	So I think that there are a lot of different reasons for some of those gaps.
	...

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