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Your Daily Question 23rd April. Rate how the Supermarkets have coped with the Covid crisis
Tikay10
Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 160,129
The Supermarkets have been under real pressure in all sorts of ways.
How do you think they are coping with the Covid crisis?
Could they have done better?
Mark them out of 10 (10 = perfect, 1 - abysmal).
Comments
I've not drove since lock down so I use my local coop ive got to give them 9/10 they have been excellent with just a few items short
The workers are putting their own lives on the line in just being there to stack shelves or serve people. Good job. They deserve the greatest respect.
What Ryan said
However, at the start of the pandemic both they and the public seemed clueless , whether that was by the guidelines not being clear, or by the public simply not taking notice I’m not sure.
When you have a mass of people buying crazy amounts of toilet rolls etc, it doesn’t take a genius ( in Supermarkets procurement) to work out they will run out pretty quick.
I went for our normal weekly shop , on my normal day, and the shelves were bare, there was zero social distancing ( when the guidelines were already in place. I had to leave .
As an addendum to this, I will add that last week there were people queueing outside of Lidl but not at Sainsbury's or Iceland (all in Stoke town centre) and this week the reverse is true with queues outside both Sainsbury's and Iceland but not Lidl...
40% of food in the UK is consumed outside of the house, (not right now obviously). If you ask people to stay at home then that food is going to be consumed at home and it shouldn't be a surprise that people need to suddenly buy 40% more food. People running supermarkets have these numbers at their fingertips and it shouldn't be a surprise to them. There was a chance in early February that we would face a real problem here and that it would mean a lockdown and I know plenty of people who stopped leaving home in the 2nd week of March and were starting to stock up on groceries. It wasn't until March 20th that pubs shut and the weekend following that was when the stockpiling and toilet roll shortage stories started appearing in the media. The shops had at least ten days to prepare for that and it could have easily imposed limits on items like soap, hand-sanitisers and toilet roll.
The opening of stores for just the old and vulnerable for the first hour was suggested on social media on around the 23rd but it took several days to come in. Throughout this thing it's been the public calling for things with the authorities and agencies being reactive rather than pro-active. In the early stages of this experiment people said that "ordinary" customers were getting involved, there was too much of a queue and a crush and vulnerable people were being brought into contact with others with no social distancing. It took days before the shops sorted this out, put staff outside, limited the numbers coming in, controlled the queues.
It's still very difficult to get delivery slots and this is baffling to me. If I was the government and I wanted people to stay home then why would I not encourage supermarkets to expand their deliveries? There are millions who are currently unemployed, tens of thousands of vans sitting idle and millions of customers sitting at home wishing they could get a slot rather than going out and risking their health. One supermarket that I know the details from have decided they don't want to expand their number of drivers and vans as they feel that this will be a temporary thing and it will waste money getting new vehicles, training staff and changing their systems only to lay them off again in a few months. They have instead moved staff from other parts of their business into their stores where people queue round the block and risk their health.
Surely plenty of people who have never quite embraced online shopping and deliveries will have been converted during this. Once the younger generation of the family set up an account for their mum or granny they'll surely realise it's much more convenient and stick with it. This seems like a massive error.
1/10 from me.
@NChanning
Meanwhile, you can read who won what last night
HERE
Supermarkets are prioritising deliveries to the people at most risk.
Demand is no doubt unprecedented.
People who are capable of doing their own shopping should not be afraid to get off their own fat a....s and do their own shopping.
The logistics of home delivery are not as easy as you seem to imagine.
In a normal week the pickers start at about 5am and pick the items from the shelves in your local supermarket after the night team have stocked these shelves.
With the current demand we are now picking from 2am but this causes problems as the delivery is still sat on pallets waiting to be worked.
The aim is to have all picking completed by 8am to help with social distancing, less people on the shop floor when the doors open.
The demand is unprecedented and in my store the online business is up 400% year on year. We are at breaking point and to increase this number would be nigh on impossible.
You also seem to forget, as do many, that colleagues are employed to stock shelves and serve customers, they are not here to police the public, who in my experience dont seem to give a ****.
The amount of confrontations I have had with trying to impose rationing is a poor reflection of the selfish society we now live in.
And the amount of people who think scratchcards, cigs and alcohol are essential is a joke.
I saw a post from someone who was worried about going to the Supermarket , their ‘friend’ suggested doing what he does , it went along these lines-“It’s easy, I book lots of delivery slots and then cancel the ones I’m not going to use closer to the time”
These tough times highlight the selfish and ignorant , also the wonderful selfless people.
Stock has been okay though, so I'll give them 3/10 despite the above criticism. That's the only shop I've been in since the lockdown though, so obvs it could just be one store where nobody gives a ****.
I went out yesterday and popped into the local Jempsons store ( a smaller local supermarket which also has a post office) and also the Holland & Barratt health food shop.
Holland and Barratt was like a well run military operation, only 2 customers allowed in at any one time, two staff with virtually full PPE gear on, strict 2m distancing at all times, you scanned your own purchases and paid by contactless, also asked to add a small donation to the NHS, which I did. 9.5/10 (I know it's not a supermarket)
Jempsons was different, despite restricting the number of customers, who I have to say kept a strict 2m, the staff seemed much less bothered and were frequently walking very close to customers. 6/10.
Scaremongering re "panic buying" (thereby encouraging it) early on. Not sure doing enough to protect own employees. Could do more in relation to home deliveries.
But doing well. Keeping to exacting logistical standards. 8/10.
Staff are great and although some items are still very scarce, I find that I can get what I want.
The whole process outside of management is performed by minimum wage workers.
From warehouse to shop floor to your door.
Not sure I'd take the risks for min wage, but I'm so grateful for those who do.
Ocado- overpriced...
Morrison’s- now they’ve got their on line platform queue sorted! Excellent!
My criticism was purely of the management who simply must employ more people to pick orders, load and drive vans. They must do this as it's much safer and easier for their staff, it's much safer and easier for their customers and it's also much better for their business and the shareholders who they are legally obliged to maximise profits for. They have now had enough time to start sorting out these issues and it's not that it takes time and they haven't managed to complete the logistics, it's that they have decided they aren't going to expand the delivery side of their business.