The coronavirus pandemic has had a massive effect on the behaviour of shoppers across Australia, and nearly every supermarket and pharmacy has had shelves stripped bare of the basic essentials.
In fact, Woolworths has reported that last weekend saw an unprecedented amount of shoppers rush through the supermarket’s door, with sales exceeding that seen over Christmas or any time during the past 12 months.
With shelves empty and stores devoid of toilet paper, paper towel, pasta and rice, Woolworths has made the decision to close all 1000 of its Woolworths stores early on Wednesday March 18 at 8pm, as part of a plan to manage panic buying in Australia, and give the retailer an opportunity to restock shelves. Store will reopen no earlier than 7am on Thursday March 19.
Woolworths plans to have all stores returned to their usual orderly state by putting more trucks on the road to get food to stores, making better use of distribution centres and doing more deliveries direct to the stores, to cut out the warehouses in the middle. However, we should start to see the depleted stocks coming back into Woolworths stores over the next few days and weeks.
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