I think that by now the Corona virus has started to affect the lives of most people across the world in some way of another. I know in my country we went though the original stage of panic when schools and businesses shut down in an unprecedented move. I work in retail and while we had been busy up to this point it hadn't been full on madness.
After the announcement it all changed in a flash. I had gone for my break at about the same time and everything was under control. Fast forward one hour and all hell had broken loose in the shop. When I stuck my head out the door it was like a scene from WW2.
Every checkout in the store was open. At the end of every checkout was a queue half way down the store. Every person in the queue had a trolley full to the brim with shopping. All week we had been selling extra stock but we had it well under control. Some items were missing for a day or two but they were still coming in at regular interval. Not at this stage. While it was thankfully all done in good humor and without and fight breaking out, our customers proceeded to strip the shelves of every bit of valuable food over the course of that evening.
11 years working in the company and I had only seen the likes of it once before. A week when we opened the first of our stores in a heavily populated area that had only expensive smaller shops until then. We had put on lots of offers to get people in and they responded magnificently. A steady flow of people from Wednesday to Friday and tills ringing non-stop for every second of that.
That however was a well planned and well stocked siege on the area with an army of staff and multiple deliveries every day to keep stock on the shelves.
This was an unexpected wave of shoppers that flooded every one of our stores at the same time and brought our warehouse to it's knees as they played catch up for the next week to get stock back onto the shelves.
We do have lots of stock in our distribution center but if you buy four times more than usual it's going to be a struggle to fill all of the stores as we don't have the man power to arrange all of the stock transfers and we don't have enough trucks to move it across the country. Thankfully people have calmed down and we are getting back up to full capacity in the stores. We even have toilet paper and it wasn't sold out when i was leaving today.
That's right. We stocked it up this morning and it was still about half full when I left at 3pm.
( Who's stuck out there? For an extravagant price in STEEM I'll post it out by the roll to other countries. )
It's funny today as there is huge uproar over pubs being full at the weekend which is our natural response to every situation happy or sad. There was advice to keep buildings at less than 100 capacity but no laws on it. Thankfully most are shutting themselves down voluntarily as anything else will cause huge damage but it is always the way in Ireland. Emergency strikes. Head to the pub.
We have one Asian girl at work and she asked me if it was OK to wear a mask and gloves while working which was obviously fine by me as it's her heath and I will fully support it.
It did however really have me laughing at the different approach from Asians to Irish in the face of disaster. She was trying to get full protection and follow the guidelines. I filled my trolley with whiskey and wine in case we get locked into the houses for the next few weeks.
I stocked up with a little food, a lot of whiskey and some crisps to snack on. I don't want to drink beer as I'll put on two stone before we can go do anything interesting again.
As a retail worker I will probably not get the chance to stay inside anyway unless I contract the virus but for a lot of people it's going to be a reality in the near future.
Stay safe out there and hopefully we all get through it before it gets too bad. Nobody knows for sure how bad it's going to get but with all of the countries (Except the UK) shutting down i'm hopeful it will be brought under control sooner rather than later.
