UPDATE: The raid collected more than 5,710 pounds of food to help feed people in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Original story:
It's a shopping cart. No, it's a vehicle.
"This is street legal. It goes from store to store, said Joe Fasula, Gerrity's Supermarket.
Okay, it's basically both, but whatever you want to call it.
"And this just goes from Gerrity's to Gerrity's to ace hardware to all the other partners," said Fasula.
It means the start of the annual Prospector's Pantry Raid.
It kicked off bright and early Thursday morning at Gerrity's on Keyser Avenue in Scranton.
The supermarket chain is teaming up with radio station Rock 107 to collect donations for the CEO Weinberg Food Bank.
"They're a great food bank because they help out pantries all over northeast Pa.," said Fasula.
We're told you can buy already made bags for $5 to donate or even bring something from home like canned goods.
"We already have a pile of bags waiting in there to be picked up," said Fasula.
"With the pandemic going on and everything else, everybody's short on money and cash and everything else, but if you come over here and you've got five bucks, you can buy a bag and donate it to prospector's pantry raid," said Edward McHugh, Scranton.
Organizers say they've been doing this for quite some time.
"I'm really bad at remembering what year, so we've been doing it for at least 17 years," said Prospector, ROCK 107's morning host.
Gerrity's Joe Fasula says the spectacle is to bring awareness to his community.
"To let people know that the need isn't just at the holidays. The need is all year long during the summer, food banks suffer because people aren't thinking about them at that point and, for the second year in a row continuing through this pandemic," said Fasula.
"With COVID, it just made that problem so much worse because so many more people are going into the food banks looking to get food because they need it," said Prospector.
"The cost of food is just going through the roof. We're getting notifications every single week from different manufacturers, telling us the price of this product's going up, the price of that product's going up," said Fasula.
Organizers say they'll be cruising around, picking up donations until Friday afternoon, but there will still be more opportunities to donate, even after that.
You can donate at any of the Gerrity's supermarkets in the area or online here.
For more information on the Pantry Raid, click here.