These people, most of whom asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, said Costco left its workers unprotected and uninformed on the front lines of the worst global health crisis of their lifetimes. However, more than 100 employees and contractors told BuzzFeed News that the $140 billion global retailer placed thousands of workers at its corporate offices and stores at risk through its lack of transparency on confirmed cases, disregard for warnings, and inability to adjust long-standing policies during a critical period. With 547 retail warehouses across the US, Costco has become a lifeline for millions of people during the pandemic. The Lees are now three of the more than 31,000 people who have died in the US - and nearly 140,000 people globally - from the novel coronavirus. Lee was the first known Costco employee in the US to die of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, after she collapsed at the Everett, Washington, home she shared with her sister, Willa, and their mother, Susie. “Our jobs here are to support our retail business, and we’re not prepared at this point to have corporate employees work from home,” he wrote. That same day, Costco CEO Craig Jelinek emailed thousands of workers at the company’s sprawling corporate campus in Issaquah, Washington, to say that allowing corporate employees to work remotely wouldn’t be fair to the “great number of Costco employees locally and across the country” in its stores who could not. Ten days earlier on March 4, officials in King County, Washington - home to Costco’s headquarters and the initial epicenter of the US outbreak - called on businesses to let their employees work from home during a “critical moment in the growing outbreak.” Major Seattle-area companies like Microsoft and Boeing heeded that warning, shuttering their corporate operations and shifting employees to remote work. That day, though, her coworkers kept wondering why she was there. Beloved in the office, the 59-year-old rarely missed a day of work in her 20 years at the company. The Costco Travel agent didn’t often work on Saturdays, but she’d picked up an extra shift on March 14 to help field the barrage of calls from customers trying to cancel cruises amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hey, even if it’s not the full Costco experience that we once knew and loved, we’ll take it.The last day Regina Lee was in the office, she was coughing so badly it rattled her whole body. Richard said that it will be a slow roll-out-and it won’t be as we remember it (picking samples up with our fingers)-but it will begin in mid-June as well. In addition to ensuring access to fro-yo and foot-longs, Costco is also starting to bring back its famous food samples that make the warehouse shopping experience what it is. Though, keep in mind, the menus are and will continue to be limited until the cloud of COVID-19 fully lifts. On Thursday’s call, Richard announced that shoppers can expect almost all food courts to be up and running by mid-June. And, knowing just how much we all love their cheap and delicious hot dogs, that’s where they’re starting their efforts.Ĭostco began re-opening its food courts on April 30, operating at about 20 percent in the U.S. Nevertheless, the company is doing what it can to bring shoppers back into stores. However, gas sales (which don’t require close encounters with other shoppers) were up. On Costco’s third-quarter earnings call, which took place on Thursday, May 28, CFO Richard Galanti announced that in-person traffic was down 2 percent in the United States.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |