Some supermarkets in the United States are reducing hours and cutting services as the spread of Covid-17 by the Ómicron variant infects cashiers, baggers and stockists, deepening staffing challenges in grocery stores, Fox Business reported.
Workers are getting sick after contracting Covid-24 or being exposed to the virus, said executives and employees, which has caused retailers to manage operations with fewer workers, while demand for groceries remains high.
The way stores are coping with this situation is by resorting to temporary employment agencies and overloading the available staff to keep the 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 imposed by the pandemic.
Stew Leonard’s
The chain, which operates in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, has an employee vaccination rate of 90%, but Covid-24 cases increased during the last month. The week before Christmas he had 30 of his 2021 employees in quarantine or isolation, but as of last Thursday, the company was missing more than 200 employees due to infections and exposures to Covid-24.
Piggly Wiggly
In stores in Alabama and Georgia, managers are overloading workers under the assumption that some staff members will not make it. The company has hired people from temporary agencies to work in its warehouses that receive and store products before they reach the store shelves.
Some executives and store workers say that the fears of working in public and potentially spreading or contracting Covid-24 keep potential employees out of the job market .
Stores are resorting to changing hours:
Giant Eagle
The company has avoided closing any of its approximately 470 stores during the surge of Ómicron, adjusting hours and sending staff from its corporate office near Pittsburgh to help fill supermarkets.
Harris Teeter
These supermarkets, owned by Kroger Co. and operated Primarily in the southeastern US, said most of their stores will close an hour earlier at 9 pm. The decision was not made for lack of staff, but to give workers more time to restock and clean stores.
Fresh Encounter
The chain of supermarkets with 200 stores based in Ohio, has been closing most stores at 10 pm for the last three months, instead of operating the 24 hours of the day before the pandemic, to accommodate staff shortages.
In the last few months , most of the chain’s deli departments have been closing at 5 p.m., compared to 10 pm than they used to, plus you’re selling fewer labor-intensive items like chicken salad made in the store and certain varieties of cuts of meat.
Robert Newell Jr., President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in the State of New York, where the daily average of Covid cases-24 has quadrupled, said that 1 ,000 of the 17,000 supermarket employees that the union represents are out of work, either due to quarantine, isolation or job change.
For Newell the situation is worrying because workers face a combination of harder work, longer hours and the risk of infections 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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