Wednesday, March 27

Which supermarkets in the US reduce hours and services due to Covid



Some supermarkets in the United States are reducing hours and cutting services as the spread of Covid-19 by the variant Ómicron infects cashiers, packers and stockists, deepening staffing challenges at grocery stores, Fox Business reported.

Workers are getting sick after contracting Covid-19 or being exposed to the virus, executives and employees said, causing workers to retailers manage operations with fewer workers, while the demand for groceries remains high.

The way stores are coping with this situation is by resorting to temporary employment agencies and overloading the staff available to keep stores open.

Although some establishments said they are concerned about the continued pressure on their workers, it is a measure they have had to take in the face of the new challenge that the pandemic has imposed.

Stew Leonard’s

The chain, which operates in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, has an employee vaccination rate of 90%, but Covid-19 cases have increased over the last month. The week before Christmas it had 30 of its 3,000 employees in quarantine or isolation, but by last Thursday, the company more than 200 employees were missing due to infections and exposures to Covid-19.

Piggly Wiggly

In stores in Alabama and Georgia, managers are overloading workers under the assumption that some staff members are not going to make it. The company has hired people from temp agencies to work in its warehouses that receive and stock products before they hit store shelves.

Some store executives and workers say fears of working in public and potentially spreading or contracting Covid-19 are keeping potential employees out of the job market.

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Stores are resorting to changing hours:

Giant Eagle

The company has avoided closing any of its roughly 470 stores during the Omicron surge, adjusting schedules and dispatching staff from your corporate office near Pittsburgh to help fill supermarkets.

Harris Teeter

These supermarkets, owned by Kroger Co. and operating primarily in the southeastern US, They said most of their stores will close an hour earlier at 9pm. The decision was not made for lack of staff, but to give workers more time to restock and clean stores.

Fresh Encounter

The 100-store Ohio-based supermarket chain has been closing most of stores at 10 p.m. for the past three monthsinstead of operating 24 hours a day before the pandemic, to accommodate staffing shortages.

In recent months, most of the chain’s deli departments have been closing at 5 p.m., compared to the 10 p.m. they used to, plus it’s selling fewer labor-intensive items like salad store-made chicken and certain varieties of meat cuts.

Robert Newell Jr., President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in New York State, where the daily average of Covid-19 cases has quadrupled, said 1,000 of the 17,000 supermarket employees the union represents are out of work, either due to quarantine, isolation or job change.

For Newell, the situation is concerning because workers face a combination of harder work, longer hours and the risk of contagion worsening an already difficult environment for grocery store staff. “If it continues, it will definitely create a bigger problem than we already have”said the union leader.

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