Panic buying leaves stores with long lines, empty shelves
On her way out of a Freschco in Toronto, a woman paused in the parking lot to give a warning.
“It’s madness,” she told a passerby, smiling tightly, as if from adrenalin.
Inside, the 60-person long lineup curled around half the store, into the frozen food aisle, as anxious shoppers with carts piled high waited to check out. It was a scene that repeated itself in supermarkets across the country on Friday, according to the Retail Council of Canada.
Panicked by the incessant stream of COVID -19 news, shoppers emptied shelves and overwhelmed check-outs, pushing grocers to issue public statements in an attempt to quell fears that they’d run out of stock or close entirely.
Galen G. Weston, executive chairman of Loblaw Cos. Ltd., the biggest grocery chain in Canada, wrote a letter to his customers on Friday, pledging to “do the right things in a complicated time.”
“There is a great deal of uncertainty right now with everything going on around COVID-19,” he wrote.
Weston said he has assigned a team to concentrate on “rapidly restocking ” key products.
Loblaw has also mandated that high-touch surfaces — checkouts, cooler doors, pharmacy counters
— are to be cleaned three times daily. And to cater to those who don’t want to be inside a store at all, Loblaw won’t charge a fee for its grocery pick-up service.
“You will continue to find the same value-for-money in our stores, no matter what happens in the coming weeks,” Weston wrote.
At the Freshco in Toronto, the odd cough clanged like a gong through the crowded store, one from a woman picking out bags of baby carrots, another from someone in the bread section.
“Grab a couple of them,” one man said to another, standing over a bin of $1 toothpaste tubes. Their cart was filled with tins of cat food, bars of soap, boxes of macaroni and cheese, pizza pops, frozen chicken fingers. Another, older shopper passed them and tapped his fingers on the box of chicken fingers. “They’re good,” he said.
The two men behind the cart seemed to tense up.
As they joined the back of the line the two said they don’t usually shop, but showed up on Friday out of concern. “Just wanted to have enough food in case they shut everything down,” one of them said.
Marc Fortin, president of the Quebec wing of the Retail Council of Canada, gave dozens of media interviews on Friday. He swore stores won’t close. He scolded Canadian politicians for not including that same assurance in their public statements earlier this week, as the cascade of travel bans, major sports cancellations and school closures made clear that COVID-19 had become a serious domestic concern.
“Canadians were in the mindset that grocery stores were going to close, so everybody rushed into stores and they bought everything that they could get their hands on,” Fortin told the Financial Post. “They will remain open. Our warehouses are full and we continue buying goods and flowing them into stores. So Canadians have to stop being in that panic mode.”
The empty shelves reported in major supermarkets around the country aren’t a sign that the country is running out of products like toilet paper, it’s more an issue of planning ahead, Fortin said.
“It happened all of a sudden. It’s not like we beefed up employees, we beefed up inventories in the back of the store and in the warehouses. It just happened,” he said. “The only problem is a lot of people are basically over buying. Buying nine months worth of rice is not going to help you. It’s not going to help anybody.”
Grocers typically can’t send special deliveries each time a store runs out of something, Fortin said. To restock, they’ll need to increase the order in their next scheduled delivery, likely on Saturday or Monday.