I spent much of last night filling shelves with sacks of flour and bags of sugar. In the continuous overbuying that has accompanied the COVID-19 crisis, flour and sugar are outranked only by hand sanitizers, paper towels and toilet paper. Baking, it would seem, is the ultimate comfort. Wegmans is selling cake mixes, chocolate chips,…
Month: March 2020
Thinning ranks
“Wegmans is hiring” signs are posted in the front windows and at the registers. Actually, Wegmans is almost always hiring. When much of your labor force consists of teenagers, college students and senior citizens, turnover is constant. But the sign in the front window is new. And corporate has made a point of making the…
Finding comfort in endcaps
In grocery lingo, an endcap is the set of shelves at the front or rear of an aisle. Markets typically usually use this space to highlight new or unusual products or to give prominent display to sale items. Endcaps also change with the seasons. At Easter, you’ll see chocolate bunnies. At Thanksgiving, stuffing mix and…
Flashing red lights
There is a red light near the top of the wall in the front of the store and another one just like it in the stockroom. Employees are trained to notice when these lights blink, for it means cooler or freezer doors have broken or been left open. A protected environment has been compromised. We…
Dwindling desperation
If the level of anxiety can be measured by the length of the lines waiting for Wegmans to open each day, then people are calming down. The line outside my store at 6:30 this morning consisted of just one person, an elderly woman staring resolutely at the door. That doesn’t count a few scattered cars…
Nighttime Wegmans: another victim of Covid-19
Predawn Wegmans was a quirky time and place, a sort of alternate universe populated by nightshift workers, stoners, drunks, insomniacs, eccentrics, and lonely people who wanted someone to talk to. When we were open 24 hours a day, before shopping hours were cut because of coronavirus, we had our post-midnight regulars. There was the woman…
Smart move: purchase limits
Purchase limits work. We ended shopping hours on Saturday with chicken and beef in the meat cases, bread and toilet paper on the shelves. Wegmans has imposed limits on many items, ranging from diapers to spaghetti to carrots. (Precise limits are posted on the shelves.) The restrictions not only calm frantic buying, they calm frantic…
Just a matter of time
Wegmans has not yet reported any worker as having been diagnosed with coronavirus. It’s only a matter of time. Exposure, even with the new sanitary and social-distancing measures imposed by the company, is too high. Stores are too full. Out of negligence, ignorance or financial concerns, too many people are taking too many risks. The…
Night crew
My answer to the shopper who asked why we weren’t restocking during closing hours. This is just cereal.
More work, more risk, but no sick pay
In case you missed it, the New York Times ran this graphic Saturday under an editorial headlined, “The Companies Putting Profits Ahead of Public Health.” Follow the red arrow (which I’ve added to the illustration), and you’ll see Wegmans at about 2 o’clock. Using survey data collected between February 2018 and November 2019, the Times…