In May 2020, a line of nearly 700 people wrapped around buildings at an emergency food bank run by a Barcelona neighbourhood association. Food and essentials were distributed to sustain families, while pandemic job losses pushed people who had not previously needed assistance into the queue.
What distinguishes this line is that even organisations experienced in the 2008 financial crisis described the new demand as a different scale. Deteriorating livelihoods appeared on the street as a weekly count of recipients before they were fully visible in official statistics.