Is there any formal or official explanation for why businesses such as grocery stores and bank lobbies are reducing their hours? Granted, having a grocery store stay open only half the usual time is – purely hypothetically – going to reduce the probability of passing the infection, but I just can’t see how that justifies just part-time closures. I mean, if you want to significantly reduce infections, close entirely! Infected people are obviously just going to shop during the open hours, so no one’s safety is enhanced.
Unless you figure only healthy people eat.
Not only that, but the 24-hour stores all around me that are now 8 hour operations or less have now thrown a huge proportion of their employees out of work unnecessarily, probably damaging them far more than the small chance of infection.
I gotta believe there’s something wrong with my thinking since this is happening more and more. So does anyone know a truly valid and rational explanation?
Supermarkets near me are closing in the evening (as opposed to staying open 24 hours) so that:
[ol]
[li]They can restock shelves[/li][li]They can deep clean high touch surfaces (basket/trolley handles, touch screen self serve checkouts, etc)[/li][/ol]
Point 2 is also related to the fact that they’re making the first hour of shopping for elderly people
The big-box groceries in my area are HIRING temporary part-time help, mainly for cleaning and stocking.
Some of this is because 1) many parents are making their teenage children leave their jobs; 2) lots of daytime employees are SAHPs who only work while their kids are in school, and now they’re not in school; and 3) many older employees need to be at home because of their own health issues, and/or they’re needed to look after grandchildren.
Another grocery store question: the store I usually go to has two entrances. One of them is now closed, forcing everyone to go in and out through a single set of doors. I’m not sure I understand how that’s supposed to help?
That seems like that would be a good guess if they had reduced hours from, say, 24 hours to 20, but 7 or 8 out of 24?
I’m a night owl and almost always shop around 2 am. When I went to the nearby 24-hour Walmart superstore and found that they had closed at 8:30 pm, I decided to look inside to see what I could see.
There was not a single person visible. And since I usually shop around 2 am – during the regular restocking hours – so I know how it would look if that’s what was happening. It most emphatically did not look like anything at all was happening inside. Furthermore, there were only three cars in the parking lot. And while I admit I didn’t check to see if there was parking in back, during all my other early morning shopping trips, there were cars a plenty.
ETA: There’s another 24-hour grocery store near me, and it looked the same as Walmart, although I’m pretty there’s employee parking in back that I didn’t check.
But again, I’m not defending any particular explanation. Perhaps I missed something important.
Businesses are doing a lot of things that do not actually help, but give the appearance of helping, in order to reassure both employees and customers. Our local grocery store is no longer allowing re-usable bags, insisting that you use their plastic bags. Which is (a) not helpful, and (b) actually harmful on environmental grounds. (I mean, on the off chance that your canvas bag has the virus clinging to it, wouldn’t your clothes have the same?)
Same with drinks places no longer allowing refills.
This kind of annoys me, but then, keeping panic down is pretty important, especially with regard to the food supply chain, so I’ll live.
Dr. Drake, I think you’re onto this. Human beings are absurdly emotional beings, and no one knows that like Walmart and the other chains, large and small. And nothing pushes that into hyper-drive like panic – especially health panics. So appealing to our emotions for calm and comfort *becomes *the rational, intelligent choice. Well, within reason, of course. A certain cretinous monster downplaying the situation irrationally and increasing deaths as a result wouldn’t fit that bill…
I read that some CostCo stores, with only one portal, count customers and allow only a certain number inside at any time. Your store may also be limiting the crowd.
There’s much more receiving and restocking to be done each day than usual, what with the panic-buying. It’s a lot easier to restock when there are no customers in the store (and yes, restocking also happens during the reduced shopping hours, but it’s less efficient). And of course, deep-cleaning/sanitizing takes a long time, and you don’t want customers in there touching and moving things while that’s happening.
I just saw online that a few major grocery chains here in New England are giving their employees $2/hr raises for the duration. Good. They deserve it.
In fact, it does the opposite. It makes it likelier customers and employees will pass infections to one another. By reducing hours, the average number of customers in the store at any given point in time goes up, since people have fewer hours in which to buy their groceries.
Increase security by monitoring one entrance? The local formerly 24 hour stores almost all closed one entrance during the overnight hours. The security monitor for one door is now able to keep the TP hoarders civil.
Yeah my local Whole Foods was only allowing so many in at a time. The result, somewhat predictably, was a tightly packed queue of about two hundred lined up in the cold outside right on top of each other, not moving fro 45 minutes …
If they are selling enough stock in 8 hours to fully saturate their supply chain, they may have realized that they just don’t need to bother opening 24/7. “Cut costs to our consumers by running reduced hours”.
Costco was only allowing in 500 people at a time, and telling people outside to stay at least 6 feet apart. Everyone was very well-behaved, and I think the result was actually less busy on the inside than an average weekend, allowing them to serve more people total because there was no gridlock.
I suspect that so few people shop during the hours that they are now closed that it doesn’t raise the number of shoppers during the other hours by that much.
My store now has more checkout lanes open than I’ve ever seen, which is good since it allows distancing in the line. That takes more people and thus fewer stockers. I think they are hiring.
…the only think this tells you is that at the time you decided to look inside you didn’t see anyone. If the shops are running out of stuff well before 8.30 pm it doesn’t make any sense to keep the shops open any later. And if your suppliers can’t get the trucks to the store until 1000 PM at night then it doesn’t make any sense to have staff on hand to fill shelves if the stock just in case somebody pokes their nose in through the windows.
Supermarkets and superstores are complex machines in normal times. These are simply not normal times. The logistics of keeping each store running will be unique to each chain, even unique to each store. Maybe (due to restocking) they don’t have enough staff to run multiple shifts: so instead of multiple shifts with overlap they only open their doors for 9-10 hours instead. It could be something as simple as that, or maybe not.