Photo courtesy Cash Saver
While there’s plenty of uncertainty surrounding the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on our health and the economy, one segment of business is, for now, busier than ever. You can see it in numbers from the Kroger Co., which reported a 30 percent increase in identical-store sales for March. Despite gaps, the supermarket industry is managing to meet the needs of the marketplace.
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Still, as Rick James says, “It’s a bit of a strain.”
James is owner of Castle Retail Group, which operates several Cash Saver supermarkets in town. The increased business brings increased challenges in the current situation.
“We’re anticipating an extended period of time of the stores being extremely busy,” he says. “As long as there’s a stay-at-home order, you’re going to have entire families that are home all day or for extended periods of time.”
That means a certain kind of consumption goes up. One of the metrics used by grocers is “share of stomach.” When James started in the business 40-plus years ago, about 85 percent of meals were prepared at home and 15 percent were consumed outside the home.
“Today I’ll take a wild guess and say it’s probably 50-50. The restaurants, although not closed, are certainly hampered as far as having people come in and sit down and have a meal,” he says. “Now you’ve got 35 percent of meals that have been transitioned to the supermarket because all the family is home.”
Another boost to his operation is that many of his customers rely on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits for food purchases. “Tennessee has increased the SNAP distribution for April and May by about 25 percent, so that’ll be an increase that comes in the supermarket. And then you add the number of people applying for SNAP benefits who have recently been unemployed and that number goes up as well and comes into the grocery store. It’s an extraordinary amount of business at one time.”
He expects that to last for several weeks, or until people can start coming out of quarantine.
That increase in business has put a spotlight on the supply chain. James says the first thing people ask him is, “Did you get any toilet paper yesterday?” He’s as eager as anyone to see the day when there’s normalcy in distribution.
“We order toilet paper every day,” he says. “We order paper towels every day. We order sanitizing wipes. We order all of the things that we currently don’t have. And we get trucks every day. But we’re never sure until we open the door whether that item was available to us at the time of the order.”
Paper products are running at full production and have been filtering back into the system. “The problem for paper manufacturers frankly is trucking,” James says. “Truckers and logistics deal with cubes, which is how much product goes on a tractor-trailer. You can put a bunch of five-ounce cans of tuna on a tractor-trailer, whereas a 24-pack of toilet paper fills it up pretty quick, so you don’t get a lot of units for every tractor-trailer load that you’re pulling.” And it hasn’t been easy getting enough trucks or drivers to move product.
Then you’ve got crop products, like dried beans and rice. When they’re gone, there won’t be more until the next crop.
But produce hasn’t been as much of an issue, he says. “Produce crops are grown and harvested at a certain time and shippers are planning to move that product to market at certain times. So for the most part we’ve had a consistent and good supply on produce.”
James says supermarkets are also calling on sources that normally sell to restaurants. “They’ve got suppliers and they’ve got a product, so they’ve been able to supplement for us quite a bit as well,” he says.
He says that after the first of June, he hopes they will have caught up. “That’s the date I’ve got circled on my calendar when things are going to start looking a lot more normal. Hopefully, all the measures being taken will have the right impact as far as the spread of the virus as well.”
And if there’s one thing James would suggest to shoppers, it’s this: Please don’t use a trip to the grocery store to beat cabin fever. “Don’t bring the whole family,” he says. “Designate a shopper to come to the store for the safety of other customers and the safety of our employees.”
