Truthful version:
Over the past few days, so many of you have been in our stores and on our website stocking up on all the essential things you need to
keep your families healthy and safe sell on the secondary market.
I want you to know that your health and safety is our
first last priority,
too.
We’ve always taken great pride in our
clean and well-run stores, understaffed, underzoned & understocked stores due to hour cuts, and we
know this is more important than ever right now we will continue to cut hours as much as possible to try to keep profits up once the bottom drops out of everything. On top of our
daily rare-to-nonexistent cleaning procedures, we’re adding hours to each store’s payroll
to make our routines even more rigorous that stores will likely not use to clean, but to try to catch up on freight. This means
you should bring your own disinfecting wipes and wipe down the touchscreens and any other surface you might want to touch yourself more time will be spent cleaning our stores, including cleaning surfaces like checklanes and touchscreens at least every 30 minutes. Like many others, we’re
taking ignoring guidance from the
CDC, which recommends regular cleaning as one of the most important preventive measures we can take. And,
out of an abundance of caution because it eats into our profits just a bit, we’ve temporarily stopped food sampling in our stores.
We’re also
staffing up our teams pulling from other areas of the store to support in-demand services like Order Pickup and Drive Up.
And of course, we’re committed to taking
care advantage of our team. For weeks, we’ve provided
them the few people who have time and/or access to Workbench, with
up-to-the-moment generic, obvious guidance and information so they can keep themselves and their families safe,
except for offering sick time for those who are sick, which is the one thing that would actually help. We’re
encouraging sick team members to stay home not giving TMs sick time so they can stay home and pay rent, and asking our teams to travel only if it’s business critical. And, to help support our team in real-time, we’ve set up a forum where we’re sharing information and taking questions 24/7.
Speaking of our team, they are working
around the clock from 4-9am, if you're lucky, to make sure that the products you want are available when you need them. As demand for cleaning products, medicine, pantry stock-up items and more remains high, we’re sending more products to our stores as quickly as possible. And this weekend, we started to limit the number of key items per purchase, which will allow more guests to get what they need.
At the center of our company’s purpose is a commitment to
help all families maximizing shareholder value, and it’s something we take to heart in good times and bad. This is why we’ll be working hard to keep our stores open so we can be there to
support you and your families take advantage of your fear to line the pockets of upper management and our shareholders.
