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Grocery stores in much of the Bay Area are to reduce the number of shoppers they allow inside a store starting Monday under new home orders announced Friday.
San Francisco, Santa Clara, Marin, Contra Costa, and Alameda counties pass the ordinances as a pre-emption to a new state stay-at-home order, which could go into effect in the rest of the Bay Area in mid-December.
Orders require grocery stores to reduce capacity by 50% to 20%. They also ban eating and drinking in stores and require special hours to be available to the elderly and others particularly vulnerable to the virus – which many stores have already done.
Many people can’t afford grocery delivery, and it’s conceivable that the new rules – combined with the surge and the approach of the holidays – could help boost panic buying even more, according to expert Phil Lampert. from the food industry and editor-in-chief of Supermarket Guru.
“There’s no doubt we’ll see each other again (panic buy),” Lampert said. “But this time around, it won’t be mainly because of the influx of people into the stores – we might see a build-up of online orders that are helping to empty store shelves.”
Some stores are already keeping capacity below the current 50% limit – including in Santa Clara County, where health orders issued last weekend allow grocery stores to fill only 25% at a time.
In the East Bay, the two Berkeley Bowl stores are already operating well below the state’s capacity threshold as a precaution, according to general manager Steve Tsujimoto. The line to enter can take from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on demand.
“It won’t be difficult to reach 20% since we are already at 25%,” he said.
The store has stocked up in the event of a panic over buying essential items.
“We learned some valuable lessons from the last time around,” Tsujimoto said, referring to the frantic early days of the pandemic. “We have been proactive and have stored some selected items – toilet paper, disinfectants, wipes, beans, rice, grains, flour, bread – things of that nature.”
Rainbow Grocery and Bi-Rite in San Francisco and Piedmont Grocery in Oakland have already capped customers at 20% for months, for the same reason: increased security. Stores limit the number of shoppers indoors, demand masks and social distances, and offer hand sanitizer stations. All have found more suppliers and stocked up after the first wave of panicked shopping in March, which left shelves deprived of toilet paper, cleaning supplies and basic groceries.
“Panic buying may be a reaction (to the state health order), but I don’t think it’s going to happen like it did in March,” said Cody Frost, marketing coordinator at Rainbow Grocery. Although he said the shelves were unlikely to be empty, he added that the store was considering product limits to discourage hoarding.
Sarah Holt, director of marketing and community for Bi-Rite, said the store expects online sales to “increase again.” It is ready to receive more delivery orders, “and order accuracy should improve as Bi-Rite staff now do a large part of the purchasing for customer orders.” The company has also expanded its ready meals section.
Costco and Safeway did not answer questions about how health orders would affect them.
Lampert of Supermarket Guru said grocers should think of curbside delivery and pickup needs as more permanent options, rather than temporary solutions.
The overall food supply is healthy, he said, but packaging and transportation can be affected due to labor shortages as essential workers face higher risks of contracting the disease. virus. And on the consumer side, hoarding is fueled by fear.
“Americans’ stress levels have been high for months,” Lampert said. “People are nervous, they want to be sure they can feed their families and they worry about their jobs in times of uncertainty. With the groceries, they still have a certain sense of control. “
The uncertainty around the push is a factor.
“If this spike gets much worse, we’ll find new bottlenecks,” said Karan Girotra, professor of operations and technology and supply chain management expert at Cornell Tech in New York. “The big / unknown caveat, however, is still how much worse this peak will be in terms of the spread of COVID and infection rate than what we saw in the spring.”
Across the country, additional purchases have already started. The Instacart grocery service, which many customers use to avoid braving supermarket aisles themselves, has reported a double-digit increase in demand nationwide for some disinfectants and over-the-counter drugs over the years. last few weeks.
Battery sales, for example, have jumped 37% in the past four weeks, compared to the previous four weeks, Instacart said. Likewise, sales of diapers increased by 28%, sales of isopropyl alcohol by 20% and those of Pine-Sol by 10%. Demand for some drugs increased over the same period, with sleeping pills up 44% and pain relievers and fever by 33%.
At the same time, Instacart said it has seen more than a dozen retailers instituting caps on certain items, such as household and cleaning items, canned vegetables, flour, frozen foods and infant formula – the same items as limited retailers when the pandemic started in March and April.
The San Francisco-based company said it was ready to handle any further increases.
“We are operating on a different scale than at the start of the year, and with the adjustments we have made and refined over the past nine months, we are well positioned to safely and effectively respond to any growing demand associated with a COVID-19 winter wave, ”Instacart said in a statement.
Shwanika Narayan and Carolyn Said are editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] [email protected] Twitter: @shwanika @csaid Instagram: @shwanika
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