Evergreen Reporter

Amazon.com issued the following announcement on April 12

With the new world of social distancing and stay-at-home orders in place for most of the country, customers have generated unprecedented demand for grocery delivery. Our Amazon associates, Whole Foods Market Team Members, and delivery partners are among the many retail heroes of this COVID-19 crisis. Throughout this process our top priority has been the health and safety of customers and employees, while also working around the clock to expand services, launch new features, and open stores in order to serve the dramatic increase in customer demand for grocery delivery.

To keep our people safe and healthy, we have implemented increased safety protocols, including:

• Performing daily employee temperature checks and distributing masks and gloves across our Amazon and Whole Foods Markets stores.
• Providing plexiglass barriers between cashiers and customers at checkout in Whole Foods Market stores.
• Enhanced cleanliness and sanitation protocols across all stores and facilities, on top of our standard stringent protocols.
• Enforcing social distancing guidelines, including restricting the number of customers and employees based on the size of the store.
• Adjusting store hours giving team members more time to restock shelves and sanitize stores.
• Temporary changes to in store offerings including no longer allowing personal, reusable containers, no self-serve offerings or sampling, and seating areas are temporarily unavailable.

While these changes have made facilities and stores a safer place, it has also created limits in our ability to increase the capacity of our delivery services. Despite these challenges, we’re working hard to improve the grocery delivery experience with the following measures:

• In the last several weeks, we have expanded Whole Foods Market grocery pickup from roughly 80 stores to more than 150, and we will continue to quickly expand grocery pickup in the coming weeks.
• On March 16, we announced that we would hire an additional 100,000 people to help meet demand, including for grocery delivery, and invest more than $350 million to support employees and partners during the crisis. Ramping hiring enables us to more quickly receive, restock, and deliver products to customers and continue increasing delivery window availability.
• We will adjust store hours for select Whole Foods Market locations to focus exclusively on fulfilling online grocery orders during this time. In addition, we have opened our Woodland Hills, California grocery store as a temporary online-only store, focused exclusively on fulfilling grocery delivery orders.
• We are temporarily asking new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market delivery and pickup customers to sign up for an invitation to use online grocery delivery and pickup. We’re increasing capacity each week and will invite new customers to shop every week.
• We are releasing delivery windows throughout the day and have made it easier for customers to see when the next delivery window is available by including it on the homepages of Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market.
• In partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we have expanded online access to SNAP (food assistance benefits) in multiple states including Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, and Washington, and are working with them on further expansions.

While we have increased order capacity by more than 60 percent due to COVID-19, we still expect the combination of restricted capacity due to social distancing and customer demand will continue to make finding available delivery windows challenging for customers. To help, in the coming weeks, we will launch a new feature that will allow customers to secure time to shop. This feature will give delivery customers a virtual “place in line” and will allow us to distribute the delivery windows on a first come, first served basis. Simultaneously, we will continue to add capacity as swiftly as possible.

Finally, our Whole Foods Markets stores remain open and Team Members have done incredible work ensuring a safe and well-stocked shopping experience. If you are able to do so safely, we kindly encourage our customers who can to shop in-person.

Original source can be found here.