From Jim Wyss, of the Miami Herald…

Call it fingerprints for food. In the latest effort to keep shelves stocked in Venezuela, the government on Tuesday will begin registering the biometric information of customers who use state-run grocery stores.

President Nicolás Maduro says the measure will prevent hoarding and help keep price-controlled food from being resold for a profit on the black market….

On a recent weekend, the line to get into the Bicentenario supermarket in central Caracas wrapped around the sides of a massive atrium and then curled in a tight concentric circle as more than 800 people shuffled along waiting for a chance to buy mundane items, such as rice and toilet paper.

Deep inside the jostling sea, Eugenia Crespo, 33, thought the snarled line at the state-run store might be a good sign.

“Usually when there’s no line, it means they don’t have anything,” she said.

Crespo would end up waiting three hours to get inside (the lines at the registers also took more than an hour) but by the time it was her turn to scour the shelves what she was looking for was gone.

“There was no chicken, no beef, no butter,” she said after the ordeal. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”