Hello Community,
Thank you for your support through the wildest week of running the Co-op that we've really ever experienced! We are grateful for everyone's patience as we've weathered receiving huge loads in rainstorms, daily changes to our store operations to keep up with health & safety recommendations, and a large reduction in our work-force as we've allowed anyone that needs to leave to simply leave.
During all of this, our sales jumped an average of 50% per day, or more. It has been an adventure in grocery on the highest level and we appreciate your understanding! If you're here and shopping, please THANK YOUR GROCER: some of our workers have been stocking every day, all day, since last monday.
Currently the Co-op is open modified hours of 9am-8pm, and we're using the extra time AM/PM for our full store sanitizing protocols as well to stock and clean after some huge sales days. We will update our hours on Monday once we reassess our full store staffing abilities.
As of yesterday all customers of UNFI (United Natural Foods, our primary distributor) have been asked to minimize orders as the supply chain has been exhausted, as well the capacity of the humans at our warehouses to keep packing pallets. In these times it's hard to remember that there are people at all parts of our supply chain, and humans are stacking pallets at breakneck speeds in order to keep up. While we're receiving our deliveries (THANK YOU
UNFI!) they will become smaller so all stores can receive food, as well to support warehouse workers ability to slow down.
We are therefore limiting purchases on some specific areas of the store in order to ensure equal access for more people (see the full list image on this post).
We also have to severely minimize our Volume Purchasing program, so we are sad to announce that no new Special Orders will be filled until after April 1st. Any orders already placed are in a queue to be filled, and will arrive between next week and the week after (we hope).
For those shoppers asking for curbside service, we are moving forward as quickly as possible and hope to roll out a pilot program within the next week. We're moving as quickly as we can, and appreciate patience while we ensure that we're doing things as well as we can.
For anyone shopping in the store, we ask you to stop and SANITIZE YOUR HANDS OR GLOVES upon entry. Yes, if you're wearing gloves you still need to sanitize. Please shop for as much as you can at once, and leave the store as quickly as possible. Now is not the time for large groups coming to browse together, we will ask you to kindly separate and keep a 6-foot social distance from each other and our workers.
We are operating on a high level of awareness about how serious this is, and how important it is that the Co-op is a beacon of support during this time. We ask our community to honor the difficulty of this work as we're also preparing for what's pretty unknown. Our goals are simple: offering our community consistent food access in a clean, stocked, and sanitized store that is prioritizing worker health and safety.
We're here and we're doing it, and we really appreciate your care and understanding of our care and understanding!
If you have any questions, concerns or thoughts please email gm@islavistafood.coop. Email response is taking a little longer due to operational store needs, but we will reply ASAP.
