Welcome news from Britain’s supermarkets
Image by analogicus from Pixabay.
There’s a double dose of good news in the job creation spree that our supermarkets are currently on:
Tesco, Asda, Aldi, and Lidl said they would hire thousands of staff after hugely increased demand saw shoppers clearing shelves…
Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket, wants to take on 20,000 temporary workers … Asda said it wanted to recruit more than 5,000 temporary staff … Aldi announced it was looking to fill 5,000 new temporary posts and take on 4,000 permanent new workers … Lidl said it would create about 2,500 temporary jobs across its 800 stores in the UK … Earlier this week, Morrisons announced it was creating 3,500 new jobs. [BBC]
The obvious good news is the number of new jobs being created which will go a little way to offsetting the big job losses elsewhere as businesses shut down thanks to coronavirus.
The less obvious but also very welcome good news is that the wave of job creation shows the problems supermarkets are facing are not to do with an underlying shortage of food to sell us.Rather, the problems are to do with getting food on the shelves and out in delivery vans fast enough as we go through an extended period of Christmas-levels of food shopping, all without the usual months to prepare that supermarkets have for actual Christmas.
That’s reassuring.
The Government should have taken decisive action as soon as the signs of panic buying were there. (toilet paper vanishing off shelves) We are lacking in leadership from the top particularly from Boris “Churchill” who is still sending out mixed messages about the effect that the virus is going to have on the community. We are getting good information from the medical and scientific community but lack the “crisis management” that is needed. At the very beginning a crisis management structure, lead by military planners, should have been set up to effectively put the country onto a “war” footing to ensure that key industries and workers were prioritised and the most vulnerable in society were protected. Boris’s “It will all be over in 12 weeks” will come back to kick him in the teeth. Too little too late could lead us into the same mess as Italy.