Thank you, Community Deliveries & PR with Local Suppliers
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Published 31 Mar 2020 in Things that matter to you
Thank you, Community Deliveries & PR with Local Suppliers
Thank you
We know that you are doing an incredible job, going above and beyond to help our members, customers and fellow colleagues, whilst adapting to this ever-changing and challenging time. We continue to be really grateful for all you’re doing, thank you.
Community Deliveries
We have been concentrating on how we can best support the most vulnerable and those who are most ‘at risk’ amongst our membership through our food stores.
Each store is putting a local community group in touch with those customers on a local level to enable volunteering help with both the actual shopping and its delivery to these individuals.
We have commenced contacting over 54,000 vulnerable members that live within a short distance of a food store. We will also be reaching out through some 200 local Facebook groups in the coming days to ensure that even though housebound the vulnerable can purchase food from us at their time of need.
Since this activity launched at the weekend, we have completed over 650 deliveries and we have had some great individual feedback like below, well done!
PR - Local suppliers stepping up to the plate
We are incredibly proud of how we work with local farmers and suppliers and our collaboration with them in recent days has been key to us ensuring we can continue to meet the needs of our customers. We are now working with over 200 local suppliers, from meat and dairy farmers to drinks producers, to enable us to offer additional types of product and availability of some key lines to complement our normal ranges. We will be featuring some of these local suppliers over the coming days in local media, the first of which was about our new partnership with Alden’s Butchers in Oxford, which you can read by clicking here.
Colleague Protection:
Our priority is and will remain the protection and welfare of colleagues and we are doing everything we can to ensure we continue to have appropriate supplies of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for colleagues who need them. We have many supplies that have now been delivered to sites, with more stock of gloves and facemasks arriving daily and the protective screens continue to be rolled out across all stores.
In Food stores, to help protect our colleagues and reduce incidents of antisocial behaviour we have from yesterday deployed 4 mobile guarding teams giving full coverage of our stores. These teams will be used to proactively and reactively visiting sites providing our colleagues support to respond and manage antisocial behaviour.
Social distancing:
This is one of the most important areas for all of us. We have given guidance to each trading site on this already and many measures have now been taken and implemented. These actions include:
Limiting the number of customers at any one time in food depending upon the size of the store and taking similar measures in funeral and pharmacy branches.
Displaying point of sale to encourage customers to keep their distance in queues or walking around stores.
Encouraging the use of cashless payments wherever possible and the contactless limit will be increased to £45 from 1st April, with no limit already on Apple Pay.
Driving telephone contact rather than face-to-face across our Travel and Funeral groups.
Actioned temporary closures for a limited time during the day in Pharmacy and some food sites to enable shelf-filling and cleaning whilst maintaining distance.
Thumbs Up - #TeamMC
We’ve had a great response to the call so far, but want to continue sharing your messages and Thumbs Up, celebrating #TeamMC so please keep them coming in. Simply post a picture of yourself and/or their team on their trading group’s internal Facebook pages with their thumbs up. We’d like you to accompany it with one sentence outlining why you’ve given yourselves, your team or a team member a ‘thumbs up’ today along with the hashtag #TeamMC.
This could be some great feedback you’ve had for going above and beyond or something you’ve done to help the community that you’re proud of or just the welcome news that all your team is fit and healthy. If you don’t have access to Facebook you can email us at thumbsup@midcounties.coop.
Ziad Khwiss in Childcare pulled together a great video to show a thumbs up to all his colleagues, and although circumstances have changed since, I thought it was worth sharing, well done to Ziad and the team. You can check out the video and the latest messages here.
We want to ensure we are doing everything we can to help you at this time, and if you have any further ideas or comments then please, let us know using the comments section below or via your line manager. Thank you again for all YOUR efforts, it is appreciated.
John Street
Coronavirus Co-ordinator