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Collected Item: “Empty Shelves”

Give your story a title.

Empty Shelves

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

A collage of photos I took during the initial months of quarantine

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

On March 15, 2020 around 3 PM, Nevada’s governor announced that classes would be suspended. I took these photos on the same day, except for the one in the upper right corner, just about 2 days after. In the collage, you can see empty shelves of beans, pasta, paper towels, toilet paper, and even eggs. I never thought a day would come where multiple shelves in grocery stores would be empty. Coronavirus has already existed long before this announcement, but I remember that day because nothing was ever the same after. People were in a state of panic, buying everything in bulk because the person next to them was doing the same thing and God-forbid that they run out of eggs. Arguably so, at that time, I understood that people wanted to stock up on everything in order to properly quarantine themselves. Around April, I took the photo in the upper right which is a handwritten sign that I made for the store that I worked at. It took some time for the government to officially mandate that masks were required so we had to take the initiative of doing so. Now, 7 months later, I’m not sure if things have gotten better or if we just learned how to live around this virus, but at the very least, the shelves aren’t empty anymore.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#unlv, #psc101. #mlphelps, #walmart, #smiths

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Natasha Ambos

Give this story a date.

2020-10-20
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