“Unlike the surge buying of early 2020 (who could forget the toilet paper),” said Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci in a note to customers. “This is because of the number of people in our supply chain in isolation – from suppliers to truck drivers and distribution centre team members – which in turn is causing material delays to store deliveries.”
One logistics industry source,who was not authorised to speak publicly due to commercial sensitivities,said many of the country’s largest trucking companies were missing between 10 and 50 per cent of their staff because they either had COVID-19 or were in isolation.
Linfox,one of the largest trucking companies,declined to comment. Toll Holdings was contacted for comment.
Problems are most severe in NSW,which reported 38,625 new coronavirus cases on Friday,but with growing infections across the eastern seaboard,both Woolworths and Coles acknowledged that shortages could last for weeks.
In an emailed statement,a Coles spokeswoman said there were product outages across all of its departments in stores and forecast it would be several weeks before shelves return to normal. Like Woolworths,Coles blamed the number of people in isolation throughout the supply chain.
“We have also seen an increased number of our own team being required to isolate,and we continue to monitor team member availability across our business,” the spokeswoman said.
One Coles customer in Sydney said on Friday the supermarket had cancelled all of the meat products she ordered but notified her it would be delivering the rest of the order,including vegetables,as usual.