by Patrick Schroeder, Prepared Foods Category Manager
Historically, in times of stress or mishap at work, I liked to remind myself that, “we’re only selling groceries, not saving lives.” This statement fails to soothe me these days. There is definitely a heightened sense of gravitas in our work and our dealings with customers than there was before the health crisis. We feel our shoppers’ tension and anxiety while we are working through our own. We are still grappling with how to serve them and ourselves in this business of selling food. One of the major undertakings we’ve wrestled with is how to get food to customers who simply cannot risk exposure in our stores. Enter Home Delivery. Since being reassigned to our Home Delivery program at Willy North, I have borne witness to as massive a scaling-up as our business has seen, outside of opening a brand new store. Ten weeks ago the program was serving only a handful of customers each week. This week of writing, we are going to achieve more than a 30-fold increase over that.
Last week, I walked out of Willy North to head home for my weekend after helping run a team of 8 to 15 hard-working, team-oriented people every day who considerately selected product, rang it through our registers, staged it for delivery and pick-up, and delivered it to homes and cars waiting curb-side, so that our community could be served in a way we were unable to in the past. It is strenuous work, fraught with breakdowns, errors, last-minute solutions, urgency, and repetition. It is also deeply rewarding work, full of customers’ gratitude, solidarity with co-workers, a strong sense of shared purpose, and an enlivening level of challenge.
It has taken its toll on our people, as many have invested overtime, come in on days off, and performed tasks outside their physical norm. It has taken its toll on our infrastructure. Our phones ring off the hook as our Customer Service staff fields new and different concerns with grace and aplomb. We’ve taken over whole swathes of Willy North. The Commons dining area is now our headquarters, filled with scales and grocery bags and paperwork. We’ve annexed huge footprints in almost every department’s coolers and freezers, as well as a large portion of our already-small receiving area. In the midst of this controlled chaos, we also have to stay mindful of staying clean: sanitizing equipment, washing hands, wearing gloves and masks. We don’t want to be the reason anyone gets sick—only the reason they get the food they need! As the bags and boxes pile up each day, as the orders grew from single digits to multiple dozens in a day, we have risen to meet the challenges and accepted our co-workers’ understanding of our encroachments.
Our e-store
Yet the work goes on. Our e-Store website (shop.willystreet.coop), which we previously thought to have the next 8 to 12 months for the refinement and redesign of, has had to be slap-dashed with work-arounds and creative solutions from our in-house IT and Communications staff so that it could serve such a rapidly expanding base of users. It hasn’t been pretty. Many of you have struggled to use it. I know, because I speak with you almost every day. For that, we continue to ask for your patience and understanding and we urge you to reach out to us at Willy North in the Home Delivery department for assistance. We do not have full control to change the idiosyncratic nature of this platform, but we can help explain to you how to work within it. We will continue to improve this aspect of our business. Efficiency and stability are the next goals for Home Delivery, and we look forward to getting into that work.
Questions for the future
Now, we begin to look to the future. It’s hard. We don’t know what’s out there. Will we, as a society, re-open this summer? Fall? Will you all demand Home Delivery even if we do? How do we reopen parts of the store that have lost staff to our program? How do we track the shifting priorities of our customers? How do we continue to keep our staff as safe as we are able? We have made more sweeping, organizational changes in these past two months than we probably have in the past two years, or even ten. Now we have to painstakingly evaluate each one of those changes and decide its future applicability to your Co-op. Home Delivery highlights this existential inquiry because we’ve had to move mountains (of paper and people) to get it to its heightened state.
New and changed retail work
In part, I wrote this essay so that you all might know a piece of our lives in this new and changed retail food work that we all find ourselves in. I find it validating and comforting to be able to express the experience to you. I hope it gives you context. On a more personal note, I would also say that I’ve been humbled by this experience.
I deeply appreciate the warmth that you all have offered myself and my co-workers during this time. Whether it is an emphatic “thank you!” after we load your groceries in your trunk, or a benevolent understanding about a mis-pick we made on your order, we really do appreciate the energy and intention behind those communications. I have also been humbled by my many co-workers, within Home Delivery and without, who have unquestioningly shed the norms of their previous work to throw themselves at this, who had to adapt to new staff (including me) joining their team and their store and mucking all about in their world, and those who managed the program and offered their trust to myself and my co-workers to take parts of it over. To all of you I say: Thank you! Let’s do it again next week!