Last week, I started my charity volunteering at Waitrose. As you may have read in my blog post from last week, I am raising money for a front-line worker statue that will be built in 2023 and will be completely funded by public donations. Despite the fact that I have only worked 4 shifts of 7 hours each (the 4th shift was today), I have already seen a lot of things that you might not have known before about the cogs that turn in supermarkets, especially about new regulations about coronavirus.
The first thing I was made to do when I started working was training. I have been volunteering at Barnardo's (the charity shop) for over a year now and most of the skills that I have learned from working there were transferrable, for example, how to respond to customer questions effectively and professionally. Despite my prior experiences, the training I received when I first arrived was very important, since the atmosphere in Waitrose, a large company, could not have been any different to Barnardo's, a charity shop. This training involved some online courses and reading about food safety, fire safety, how to properly lift heavy weights and more.
The majority of my time is spent stacking products on shelves and taking products from the shop floor to the storeroom. This may seem mundane and tedious, but in a big shop like Waitrose, it is rather fast-paced, since there is so much stock to put out. In Barnardo's, all of the stock is donated, so there is a) not as much stock, and b) we can choose what to put out at what time. This means that overall, there is less work, and we can spread out the work throughout the day such that there is always enough stock on the shop floor.
After coronavirus broke out into the world, some products went into extreme shortages - you would have heard about people stockpiling toilet paper and paracetamol, amongst other things. We still have lots of these goods in the storeroom as a result of this, and that means that we need to put out as much stock as we can to avoid losses. This leads me to my next point - running a supermarket is a logistical nightmare. You need to think about lots of things simultaneously, like the amount of stock on the shop floor at any given time and how many products need restocking, how many need to be removed due to 'best-by' dates (this is called date coding, and is very important to ensure that all the stock on the shop floor is of good quality) and many more tasks. If one step of this chain goes wrong, or a mistake is made, it can cause losses for the shop as either too much, or too little stock is ordered, but cannot be sold.
Apart from all of these things, the biggest difference between the two shops is the time that I am working in them. I worked in Barnardo's until schools were shut down, so there was not much pressure or many extra pieces of legislation that made working more difficult. There are now lots of laws, rules and pieces of advice that need to be followed now, such as masks being compulsory for customers or staff being encouraged to wear gloves and frequently hand-sanitize. All of these laws and legislations mean that you need to be a lot more cautious when working on the shop floor. The biggest one of all is the 2-metre distance that needs to be kept. When pulling out cages from the storeroom, keeping at least a 1-metre distance from others mean that your job becomes a lot slower as you need to be even more careful. Another rule that has made a big impact is the cap on customers in the store - in the Waitrose I work at, this is 20 customers. This means less now, but a few weeks ago, there were lots of queues coming out of all of the shops of the high street, with people waiting to go in due to the cap. This made the worker's job easier as it made it simpler to keep social distancing measures in place.
In conclusion, working in a supermarket has given me a new perspective on shopping - I finally know how much work goes into successfully running an effective store. When shopping as a customer from now on, I will always remember the amount of hard work that I had to do when I worked at Waitrose. I hope that once coronavirus is all done and dusted, we can go back to shopping and living normally.
If you would like to donate, the link to my GoFundMe page is here. I would also really appreciate it if you could share this link with your friends. Thank you in advance.
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See you next week