John Oliver has taken aim at the meatpacking industry in a fiery new episode of his HBO series Last Week Tonight. The host decided not to focus on the horrific conditions facing animals as “they do get talked about a lot” and instead look at how the humans working at [...]
A year ago this month, during the early days of the pandemic, Susan Hernandez, a cashier at Food 4 Less in North Hollywood, found herself in a sea of panic-buying shoppers. The coronavirus hadn’t claimed any lives yet in Southern California, but the scenes in stores gave a certain dawn-of-the-apocalypse [...]
Despite the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations, hazards for frontline workers continue. Early in the pandemic, many large companies increased pay for essential workers, but many of those raises have now expired. Seattle and several cities across California have passed mandatory hazard pay for employees at some large grocers, a move [...]
Grocery store workers are facing a greater risk of getting COVID-19 now than they were 60 days ago, according to the union that represents 1.3 million food workers in the US. Altogether, nearly 400 food service workers have died from the virus and 77,600 have been infected or exposed to [...]
It has been an exhausting 10 months for Toni Ward Sockwell, an assistant manager at Cash Saver, a grocery chain, in Guthrie, Oklahoma. She has been helping to oversee about 40 anxious employees during a deadly pandemic, vigilantly disinfecting counters at the store and worrying about passing the coronavirus to [...]
Two Northwest grocery industry trade groups are suing Seattle over the city’s new law mandating $4-an-hour pay raises for grocery stores. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleges the city’s law interferes with the collective-bargaining process between grocery stores and unions and also “picks winners and [...]
Concern about the ongoing spread of COVID-19 is far from over, but the panic buying of many cleaning and other nonfood products that strained the supply chain last spring seems to have subsided. The surge in infections that emerged this fall and winter has created more demand, but the entire [...]
When the state shut down around her in March, 67-year-old Joyce Babineau, a supermarket employee in Dartmouth, Mass., was among the many workers who stayed on the job providing basic needs during the pandemic. She felt pride walking into Stop & Shop at 6 a.m. five days a week. She [...]
Despite COVID-19 impeding its typically brisk expansion pace of 20 new buildings a year globally, Costco logged 13 openings in 2020 and posted its biggest year ever—$163 billion in sales, Costco Wholesale Corp. President, CEO and Director W. Craig Jelinek reported in the company’s first virtual shareholder meeting. In addition to [...]
Shoppers raided grocery store shelves in 2020, stocking up their pantries and dining increasingly at home as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Now analysts and investors are concerned that sales will come back down to Earth in 2021, driving comparable sales declines across the sector. “Food and discount retailers were COVID-19 [...]