CLOROX WIPES ARE STILL THE HARD-TO-FIND PANDEMIC ITEM
For some on social media, finding the cleaning product has become like winning the lottery
For six months, May Vanegas hunted her prey.
She scoured grocery stores. She arrived at Target and Walmart early in the morning, hoping to catch a delivery. She followed social media accounts, searching for clues on where her quarry was last sighted in her area.
And then, finally, one day in mid-September when the 41year-old mother of two teenagers stopped at her local Target in San Antonio, she stumbled across what she had long been stalking: Clorox disinfecting wipes.
“My daughter and I started screaming in the store, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’” Vanegas said. “I had given up looking for them in the last month. I had lost all hope.”
Informed that the store was allowing shoppers to buy only a single canister, Vanegas and her daughter each grabbed one. The two canisters of Clorox wipes are now displayed on the kitchen counter at Vanegas’ home, trophies from this strange time when American life has been completely upended by the coronavirus.
Most shoppers these days are able to routinely buy common household items like toilet paper, paper towels, pasta and beans that had been in short supply in the early weeks of the pandemic, when consumers were loading up their pantries. But Clorox wipes remain stubbornly elusive.
“We know our products are not everywhere everyone wants them to be,” said Andy Mowery, who, as Clorox’s chief supply officer, is in charge of figuring out how to make more wipes. “It’s a point of personal frustration for me.”
With cleanliness on the minds of many guarding against the virus, the wipes have become the pandemic version of the musthave toy of the holiday season. Across social media, shoppers share where and when to find wipes made by Clorox, or Lysol — which is owned by Reckitt Benckiser Group — or wipes from other brands. (Only Clorox and a handful of other wipes have been approved by regulators to kill the coronavirus.) Shoppers show up to stores early when deliveries are made and clear out shipments in a matter of minutes.
All of the hullabaloo around its disinfecting wipes has been a strange turn of events for Clorox, which started making and selling liquid bleach as a household cleaning product in 1916, and presents a big challenge for Linda Rendle, a 17-year veteran of the company who took over as its chief executive officer in mid-September.
The company said it was struggling because demand for the wipes had surged 500 percent in the past few months. After increasing production, Clorox is making 1 million canisters of disinfecting wipes each day. (Executives wouldn’t say how that compared with before the pandemic.) It plans to further increase production early next year.
Before the pandemic, Clorox — which also makes Glad trash bags, Kingsford charcoal and Pine Sol cleaner — told Wall Street analysts that, at best, the company would see a 1 percent increase in sales for its fiscal year 2020.
Its stock and financials were lagging its peers, said Kevin Grundy, a research analyst at the investment bank Jefferies.
But as the pandemic swept across the United States, sales of Clorox wipes and other household products soared. For its fiscal year that ended June 30, Clorox reported an 8 percent increase in total sales from last year; in the fourth quarter, sales in the category that includes its cleaning products jumped 33 percent from a year earlier. Clorox’s stock price has risen 40 percent this year.
“The pandemic hit, and we saw consumer shopping habits change abruptly, not only around cleaning products and wipes but also in areas like Brita water filters, which had not been doing well,” Grundy said.
The demand wasn’t coming from consumers alone. Companies, hoping to reassure nervous employees and customers that their locations or services were disinfected, formed partnerships with Clorox.
For instance, Uber Technologies received 600,000 canisters of wipes for a pilot program in Atlanta, Chicago and New York. Wipes have been distributed to 68,000 drivers in those cities, and the program has been expanded to include Washing ton and Dallas.
“All of our f light attendants are using Clorox wipes on all mainland aircraft,” said Maddie King, a spokeswoman for United Airlines, which also formed a partnership with Clorox. (She declined to provide details about the partnership.) Customers are also given individually wrapped wipes (not made by Clorox) on the f lights to clean their own seats and areas.
For Clorox, meeting the heightened demand not only this year but well into next year will remain a challenge.
Only one of the five plants that Clorox owns in the United States assembles the finished canisters of wipes; the company also contracts with third-party manufacturers to make the wipes. This summer, Clorox added a third shift to the plant it owns in Atlanta, running it around the clock, and increased the number of outside plants it used to make wipes.
The company also reduced the number of products it makes to focus on high-demand items like wipes. For instance, a new wipe that can be composted but doesn’t disinfect was sidelined.