Patricia Gamboa arrived at a government-run supermarket in western Venezuela at 2:00 am, six hours before doors opened, to be first in line and buy whatever she could get her hands on.

As dawn broke, about 200 people stood behind her outside the Bicentenario shop in San Cristobal, with numbers written on their wrists with green markers to avoid arguments over who came first.

One end of the street was blocked by one of the many barricades that demonstrators have built with trees across the city to protest, among other things, the basic food shortage plaguing their oil-rich country.

The empty store shelves are among the major grievances fueling a wave of protests that have spread to other cities and dogged President Nicolas Maduro for the past month.

Like in other parts of the country, flour, butter, cornmeal and cooking oil are hard to come buy in this city where Venezuela’s protest movement emerged on February 4.

Gamboa, the 58-year-old customer with the number one scribbled on her wrist, did not have a shopping list to feed her family of six.

What was she hoping to buy, then?

“Whatever they have,” she said, echoing the sentiment of everybody else reading, sipping coffee or sitting on the sidewalk to pass the time.

Residents can only shop at Bicentenario on certain days, which are decided by the last numbers on their ID cards. Once in line, people agreed on the wrist number system to avoid trouble, but the shop also assigns them paper numbers.

Across the city, even longer lines stretched 200 meters (yards) deep at two private supermarkets.