When Michelle Manning stopped by her sister in front of the Las Vegas casino, she was feeling lucky.
Not that he needed it for poker, roulette, or craps, as all of these gambling establishments are closed for the coronavirus, but to get a good spot in line at a food bank installed in the Palace Station parking lot, very crowded in these times of crisis.
The clock read 2:30 in the morning and Manning was third in a queue of vehicles that winds its way to the street each week and stretches for about ten kilometers.
“We get fruits, vegetables, meat, milk … and with the money I have then I can pay for electricity,” said Manning, whose children were fired from the gigantic casinos and at home have to feed their 92-year-old father and a baby granddaughter.
“And this is safer than going to the market,” he added, because he does not need to get out of the car to get food and can maintain social distance.
With the trunks open, the line of approximately 1,000 vehicles was walking to receive food distributed by the NGO Three Square, which is supplied by programs of the federal government, as well as donors and local businesses.
The Palace Station is one of 20 centers managed by the organization in Las Vegas, where the world-famous casinos-hotels were forced to close in March to contain COVID-19.
Three Square, in fact, distributed all the food that was left in the kitchens of those establishments.
“They had hundreds of thousands of pounds of perishable food that we rescued in a matter of three or four days,” said COO Larry Scott.
But that meat bonanza and other premium products “stopped completely.”
– “Strange” –
Many of those now waiting in line are former casino employees themselves, laid off during the closing.
About a third of the southern Nevada workforce is in the tourism sector, which was hit especially hard by confinement orders and travel restrictions, leading to mass layoffs.
The MGM Resorts group alone left 63,000 workers unemployed.
Tom Schiffhauer, a 62-year-old poker dealer at the Orleans Casino, was fired when the pandemic hit … just like his wife at the Rio Hotel.
“I’ve been here 40 years and have never seen anything like this … It’s strange, strange,” he said after four hours of waiting.
Some of the city’s largest hotels are already planning to reopen later this month, though they still need the go-ahead from the governor.
“I don’t even care anymore because there’s nothing you can do about it,” Schiffhauer said, pausing to smoke his tobacco in the driver’s seat.
– “Surprised” –
A few cars behind was Sandra Flores, who before cleaning worked as a cleaner at the Stateline Hotel in Primm, about 40 minutes from Las Vegas.
“We need to go back to work, we need to pay the bills,” insisted this woman, “surprised” that the confinement has lasted so long and that, like many, she has had two months waiting for her unemployment insurance to be approved.
The impact of the closing of the casinos is even noticeable in the hundreds of volunteers who help in this food distribution center, such as Luis Rosales, who still receives the waiter salary he earned at the The Venetian hotel.
“I am a volunteer five or six days a week, which makes me feel like I have a job, there comes a time when I can’t do my laundry again or clean the windows in my house.”
And although the Palace Station Casino is located in a mainly working-class neighborhood, about 2 km from the famous Strip, in the row you can see from old ramshackle sedans to Hummers and Mercedes.
“This experience is different from all the previous ones because this virus does not measure economic class,” said Scott, the chief of operations, who highlighted how the number of people who today cannot guarantee their food in southern Nevada represents 14% of the population.
“And it’s not just for today, it’s going to go on and on. Demand will be high for a long time.”
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