Our local Co-Op (the new store in Haworth) has been completely bare over the last week - On Sunday there was nothing fresh at all.
So many shortages, doing real damage, and yet nobody seems to give a damn.
So, three things have caused an impact, two temporary and one longer term
The longer term one is the ongoing impact of staff shortages, particularly with drivers. It affects the amount of stock we can ship to stores, and it also affects our suppliers’ ability to deliver to us
The two short term ones:
- last Saturday the depot that supplies that store (and about 425 others) had a catastrophic failure of its chillers that meant the entire day’s fresh pick had to be binned
- last weekend was the 9th of 11 weekends where the Coop is migrating products from its old systems to its new ones. When we do this, we lose the ability to supply the cutover products for 24 hours
Recovering from these takes a few days - you can’t just let the systems order what they’d like to, or the network would be overwhelmed. But it will get better.
I’ve no idea how much of that is communicated to the stores (or indeed how much they’d understand if they were told, nor what they’d choose to tell customers)