Somebody help me here - how does Wal Mart cutting hours help?

Another in a long-line of poor decisions being made.

Time to clean/disinfect?

A lot of the problem is that they literally couldn’t load up on the shelves fast enough.

It isn’t just refilling what was taken.

Roughly 2/3rds of grocery sections (including freezer and refrigeratated sections) were 100% depleted over the weekend at many many stores.

They need the time and the space to roll out pallets onto the main floor to replenish effectively.


If you want to avoid the crowds, put in a pick up order the prior day.

Far better odds of getting what you need that way anyway.

quote:

---

Time to clean/disinfect?

---

And restock

My guess: They need time to clean and restock shelves. I'm also assuming it allows them to schedule more employees during those hours and not have to staff the stores around the clock for the few stragglers that shop at odd hours (that's me btw). Something they also know is that some employees will get sick and they will soon be dealing with reduced staffing.

Probably to help them have time to restock.
Also probably having trouble getting enough employees to show up to be open normal hours

I think it just gives them time to restock the stores. When they are open 24 hours a day, there is little time to restock so the shelves remain empty even if they have stock to put out. I have been reading stories of people buying up the re-stock of TP before they can even get it on the shelves.

I do think we are gonna see shortages due to supply line disfunction, esp. China, but TP isn't going to be one of them long term. Hell, the mill in Port Hudson is ramping up tissue production to meet demand and that is only one of many tissue converting factories in the US.

edit: The port hudson mill shut down it's fine paper production months ago due to restructuring but kept the tissue machines going full blast.

quote:

---

they can dedicate more labor

---

But they won't, if they are smart...

Keep the stocking teams as normal as not to increase payroll...and to not introduce anyone new to the group that could cross-contaminate.

We're dealing with this now on our production teams - it's all about making sure people are doing what they need to do from a hygiene stand point, separating groups so that if we have to isolate one, then we can do so without having to isolate the entire production department, so we're creating different work schedules that do not allow for an overlap of shifts. Between the shifts we are wiping everything down and cleaning as best we can.

We are not adding any new people to any teams unless absolutely necessary. We've told all of our employees that get visitors from vendors to kill that immediately, and we're monitoring all of the other tenants in our building.

Our situation is a bit unique as we have a 800k s/f facility that has our portfolio of companies within, along with a couple of other tenants that share common areas, and a total of about 400 people. There's a lot to choreograph right now.

quote:

---

Doubtful.. They’ll still have the same number of employees working overall, they can just shorten the shifts, having more people working at a time.

---

But they won't...

They are preparing for the inevitable, I assume much like my company, and that many people will start staying at home and self-quarantining and not wanting to come in and some will get sick and be forced to stay away. W've already had to deal with the self-quarantining with our locations in CA.

Partly, I get paid to think about worst case scenarios and how we will deal with them - we have been discussing situations since word first broke about how many people had been able to leave China that had been affected. I'm sure a company like Wal Mart has/is done/doing what we are doing at a massive scale.

quote:

---

there is a huge slack going on and this is just temporary (at least assuming our primary supply chain with China isn't permanently disrupted)

---

Luckily the vast majority of our food supply has nothing to do with China