As Amazon attempts to test all employees on coronavirus, the attempt may well up the game for other ... [+]
As a growing number of companies vow to take employees’ temperatures and provide masks among the safety measures to flatten the U.S. coronavirus curve, Amazon’s latest bid to eventually test all of its employees may force other businesses to do the same.
“A next step in protecting our employees might be regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in his widely followed annual shareholder letter on Thursday, after the company first signaled its intent on that front last week. “Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running.”
Amazon has begun building “incremental testing capacity” and has reassigned a team of its research scientists, program managers, procurement specialists and software engineers to work on the project, Bezos said, adding that a lab Amazon has built could start testing a small number of its front-line employees. Amazon will share its findings with others, Bezos said.
Amazon has 840,000 employees worldwide, including more than 590,000 in the U.S.
Amazon’s attempt comes amid reports of coronavirus cases at some of its warehouse facilities and reports of worker complaints and decreased attendance.
It also comes as a group of major business leaders reportedly told President Trump on Wednesday that the U.S. would have to significantly increase the availability of coronavirus testing before the economy can safely reopen.
As a large swath of the U.S. economy has shut down and non-essential services and stores have been ordered to close, with the restaurants remaining open limited to takeout or delivery orders, the latest business scorecards show coronavirus’ heavy toll on the economy.
For one, the Commerce Department on Wednesday reported that March retail sales plunged 8.7% from February, said to be the largest since these tallies began in 1992. While grocery store sales surged 27% as American consumers stocked up to hunker at home, restaurants and other food services or drink places saw March sales plunge 27%, clothing stores a whopping 51%, department stores 20% and furniture and home furnishings stores 27%.
Amazon, for its part, has also temporarily closed Amazon Books
One exception is Whole Foods’ much-hyped 36,000-square-foot emporium in Manhattan that opened in 2017 with seating overlooking New York’s popular Bryant Park. The company has said the store boasts of one of the highest pedestrian traffic counts in the U.S., but it closed its doors temporarily beginning Wednesday night to “service online shopping orders only,” a sign on the store’s doors said. The move comes as consumers’ online orders for groceries and other staples have squeezed even Amazon’s industry-leading logistics network and caused many delays.
With social practicing and crowd control the new norm, a long line of shoppers recently waited to go ... [+]
“The demand we are seeing for essential products has been and remains high,” Bezos said in his letter. “But unlike a predictable holiday surge, this spike occurred with little warning, creating major challenges for our suppliers and delivery network.”
While other Whole Foods stores remain open with reduced hours, they have been busy playing the role of online fulfillment centers. At the Whole Foods store in New York’s East Village recently, employees walking around the store using mobile devices to fulfill customers’ orders numbered just as many as the mask-donning shoppers, if not more.
An employee was seen spraying shopping carts while plexiglass shields could be found at registers, a feature I observed at some other supermarkets and drugstores as well.
Amazon said it has prioritized the stocking and delivery of essential household staples, medical supplies and other things at its fulfillment centers and has made more than 150 process changes to ensure employee safety.
Since March, it’s announced the hiring of an additional 175,000 full-time or part-time fulfillment and delivery employees to meet the increased demand. The company has said it’s halting its Amazon Shipping program that delivers for third-party merchants that had been handling shipping themselves. Amazon, like other retailers including rival Walmart
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