Coronavirus Fears and Empty Supermarkets

[Super S]

The issue is not a shortage of food. The issue is that the food is sitting in the warehouses due to a shortage of warehouse workers and truck drivers. The driver shortage has been an issue long before this epidemic. The word from warehouse workers is that many of them are quitting left and right. The workload is crazy and the pay is terrible. Many of them are afraid of catching the coronavirus.

The warehouses are overloaded with food and they cannot get the merchandise to stores fast enough.

With all of the people who are out of work or will be unemployed soon, why can't these companies hire more warehouse workers?

Truck drivers are also in short supply, but they do not seem to be recruiting any more than before. Perhaps the companies are afraid of hiring too many people.

For what it's worth, over the last couple months (before the Coronavirus events took hold) Fred Meyer was running ads over the store's PA system about openings at their Chehalis and Clackamas distribution centers, and also mentioned they were looking for truck drivers. (Fred Meyer and others at times have also been using drivers from outside companies to meet demand)

[jamcool]

In Arizona, the National Guard is moving grocery store trailers and stocking stores at night

[klkla]

It’s hard for me to believe that this is the only grocery employee to have been infected. Makes me wonder how other companies will deal with this when it happens.

Three supermarket employees have tested positive now. In addition to the employee at the Gelson's in Pacific Palisades a Vallarta Supermarket in Canoga Park closed its doors for an unknown duration after one of its employees tested positive on Friday. Meanwhile, a third person employed at a Sprouts Farmers Market on El Camino Real in Tustin also tested positive for COVID-19. The store confirmed it after rumors began circulating online. All employees were notified and the store has since reopened after an extensive cleaning.

https://abc7.com/vallarta-supermarkets- ... n/6060666/

[CalItalian]

One thing I noticed today was the Fab 5 prices were coming up even if you just bought just one Fab 5 item rather than five. At self-checkout it would automatically apply the savings each time I scanned a Fab 5 product. Normally, it won't take the savings off until I get to the 5th Fab 5 product. I have a personalized price for Rice-a-Roni for .99 cents and as always it gives me that savings in addition to the Fab 5 price (Rice-A-Roni is $1.29 on the shelf but my personalized price is .99 cents. Fab 5 price is .79. The system takes the price down to the Fab 5 price of .79 stacks another .30 off for my personalized .99 cent price and makes them .49).

I'd suspect that they may have done that to prevent complaints where someone was willing to buy all 5 but was not able to do so, either due to limits on certain items or due to some items not being available.
Not being sure if this program usually requires 5 of the same or allows mixing & matching of 5, but it seems that could be a problem if someone was planning to get certain items and those were in limited availability.

To add to changes, ShopRite (at least here in NY) decided to just do a single page ad for this week (with one side explaining the reasoning and the other featuring a small number of deals), while the other two chains (Price Chopper and Hannaford) just have normal looking ads (which one suspects will have some items that are unavailable, and one hopes most will understand that).

Mixing and matching. Fab 5 is offered every week at Vons, Albertsons and Pavilions in Southern California. It's mix or match from a wide variety of products and they are changed each ad week. Savings can be anywhere from .30 to $2 per item wyb 5 or more Fab 5 products. Unlike Ralphs (Kroger) which is a set amount .50 or $1 off per item depending on the promotion for that week (or two or three week period).

[CalItalian]

I was in the 99 Cents Only store in Menifee (Riverside County) today. This is a relatively new store. 1/2 a former Albertsons.
I've never seen it so clean before. There were people with gloves and masks actually cleaning each shelf and neatly putting products back on the shelf. After seeing how dirty the (empty) shelves (still) are at Ralphs and Vons, they should be doing this, too. At 6 PM, there were very few customers in the store, too, but 3 checkstands were open which was a miracle in itself.

This store has recovered well in the cleaning aisle and with water. Paper products were still sparse, no TP or Paper Towels. Food was in pretty decent shape especially bread, produce and most of their refrigerated and frozen sections.

They're also the new leader in egg prices. $1.49 for a dozen large eggs.

[storewanderer]

I was in the 99 Cents Only store in Menifee (Riverside County) today. This is a relatively new store. 1/2 a former Albertsons.
I've never seen it so clean before. There were people with gloves and masks actually cleaning each shelf and neatly putting products back on the shelf. After seeing how dirty the (empty) shelves (still) are at Ralphs and Vons, they should be doing this, too. At 6 PM, there were very few customers in the store, too, but 3 checkstands were open which was a miracle in itself.

This store has recovered well in the cleaning aisle and with water. Paper products were still sparse, no TP or Paper Towels. Food was in pretty decent shape especially bread, produce and most of their refrigerated and frozen sections.

They're also the new leader in egg prices. $1.49 for a dozen large eggs.

Our 99 Cents Only Stores up here in Reno and Sparks are so dirty I haven't gone into them in a couple month.s The ones in Sacramento are always very clean and it is my understanding they are part of a different region.

The (empty) shelves at Safeway here are very clean and probably were clean to begin with given the orderly customers and low level of traffic they have. Also part of when they do resets, all of the shelves are supposed to get cleaned. Smiths shelves were not so clean (the worst was the last store Kroger remodeled over in Sparks- they must use awful shelving that breaks and punctures packages), but they seemed to take the opportunity to clean the shelves while they were empty as I saw multiple employees cleaning shelves one evening in one location, and the shelves in Sparks were much cleaner than before.

[ClownLoach]

The issue is not a shortage of food. The issue is that the food is sitting in the warehouses due to a shortage of warehouse workers and truck drivers. The driver shortage has been an issue long before this epidemic. The word from warehouse workers is that many of them are quitting left and right. The workload is crazy and the pay is terrible. Many of them are afraid of catching the coronavirus.

The warehouses are overloaded with food and they cannot get the merchandise to stores fast enough.

With all of the people who are out of work or will be unemployed soon, why can't these companies hire more warehouse workers?

Truck drivers are also in short supply, but they do not seem to be recruiting any more than before. Perhaps the companies are afraid of hiring too many people.

In Southern California Albertsons/Vons stores I suspect the story is slightly different. The Irvine DC for the combined entity was running 24/7 at 100% capacity well before this entire situation began. The DC is so overloaded that the neighborhood around it frequently has empty Albertsons/Vons trucks sitting and waiting for a dock door or parking space to open at the facility as every door is loading 24/7. The most popular place for the drivers to wait, ironically, is the back alley behind the Walmart at Technology and Alton off I-5. Most times there are so many Albertsons trucks there that you would think that they had a store in that center. I'm assuming this is because of the consolidation and closure of the Vons DC facility to save money after the merger. Now they are literally in a massive crisis and they cannot do anything to get the product out faster with only so many outbound dock doors and loaders who can only work so fast. This is the real reason why they are struggling to keep the stores in stock, and I'm convinced it is the reason here for the shortage of paper products and water at their stores. When you can only deliver so much as what fits in the trailer you can easily optimize dollars per cubic foot. The big bulky stuff is low dollar, low profit and is deliberately going to be left behind. Just the fact the largest chain here can't get this product flowing to the stores is what's driving the shortage everywhere else as they can't keep up with demand for their own reasons... But I am 100% sure this overloaded and overworked DC in Irvine is the root of their problems here. Anyone can drive around Alton Pkwy and I-5 and see this with their own eyes.

[storewanderer]

I guess they could start to supply Bakersfield and far flung stores like Paso Robles from Tracy NorCal distro, even though it is an extra hour... not sure but I think that Tracy distro is quite large.

They already took those Las Vegas Stores and Fresno Stores away from SoCal Distro and moved them to Phoenix distro so combined that was probably 40-45 stores taken away from the SoCal distro.

Interesting to think 21 years ago in SoCal there were distros for Albertsons, Lucky, and Vons all separate. Now there is one DC to serve that total store group.

I was in more stores than I should have been the past few days and only saw toilet paper at two stores: WinCo as described above and one lone sad low volume Save Mart which had about 10 boxes of not sure how many packs in each box, house brand (ME brand) 6 pack mega rolls priced at only 6.29 (very fair price). I was in other Save Mart/Food Maxx locations and they had none (busier stores I guess).

Safeway NorCal in 3 different locations was completely out of any "paper" product the past few days. One store did have some rayon or bamboo towels. I did see one person buying some 6pk of Open Nature Paper Towels one night, not sure where she got them, suspect it may have been an off duty employee and they were in a special place.

Another thing they can do if they are short on trucks is get the thin plastic bag ban overturned and start using ultra thin plastic bags like Kroger is using where they still can (cannot believe how thin the Smiths bags with the new Fresh for Everyone slogan are- but they do the job). Those CA super thick plastic bags and the paper bags take up 10x-20x the room on the truck of the old thin bags. I am not really sure all those .10 bag fees they are collecting make up for the lost sales and inability to keep the shelves stocked. Wholesale cost on the thick plastic bags and the paper bags is close to .10 at this point if not a bit above at this point as prices have gone up on paper bags recently for some mysterious reason (thank other states with plastic bag bans). The super thin plastic ones like Smiths and most of Kroger uses now probably cost between 1 and 2 cents each given how they are thin and smaller than typical.

[klkla]

Interesting to think 21 years ago in SoCal there were distros for Albertsons, Lucky, and Vons all separate. Now there is one DC to serve that total store group.

I thought there were four distribution centers, although I'm not certain about one of them.

Irvine (Originally Lucky)
El Monte (Originally Vons)
Santa Fe Springs (Originally Safeway)
La Habra (I'm not 100% sure on that one but the original Albertson's DC)

I was under the impression they kept Irvine and La Habra but I could be wrong.

[reymann]

some communities are considering ordinances that would limit customers to one trip per week or designated shopping days based on the alphabet of your last name.