The manager of Burnham-On-Sea’s Tesco store has thanked customers for their patience and also praised his dedicated team of staff during a ‘hugely busy’ period due to the Coronavirus outbreak.
The store has seen a huge upsurge of trade in recent weeks and, like supermarket across the country, it has introduced new safety guidelines to protect customers and staff.
Speaking to Burnham-On-Sea.com, store manager Martin Rose said: “Our current focus is all about segregating people and keeping our customers two metres apart, in line with the government’s guidelines.”
“We have a full queuing system outside the store to restrict the number of customers inside and maintain social distancing.”
“We have addressed colleagues’ safety by only opening every second checkout to give enough space around each checkout.”
“The checkout queuing system has been improved this week and we have staff managing the queues going through the checkouts to maintain social distancing.”
“We are also cleaning around the store all the time to try and obviously eliminate the risk of Coronavirus spreading.”
“The feedback that we have received from members of the public has been really positive.”
“Our older persons’ hour, when the store is open just to older shoppers, has been well received – I know there have been long queues at times, but everyone I talked to has felt they were being well looked after.”
“Next week, we will be providing dedicated hours for certain shoppers. There will be older shoppers’ hours on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9am-10am and there will be NHS worker hours on a Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday from 9am-10am.”
He says the store’s heroes have been its hard-working team of staff over recent weeks.
“I’ve got to say my Tesco colleagues are doing a fantastic job. At the end of the day, they are at risk too as we have over 30,000 customers a week coming through the Burnham store.”
“They are doing a fantastic job and we are more thankful for them than ever.”
“We are putting in extra measures to protect them – there will be new plastic guards coming around the tills soon to protect them and they will also have gloves and face masks coming. If they have their own masks, they can wear those at the checkouts.”
“They are also being asked to do regular hand washing and sanitising as part of the education about how to handle things.”
“A big thank you goes to our customers for all their patience – they have been really thankful for what we’re doing.”
“It’s been like Christmas, our busiest trading period of the year, so some products have been restricted, particularly during periods of panic buying.”
“But we’ll see the national distribution chain improving over the next few weeks and I am already seeing a lot of the product areas coming back now which we were struggling with. We should see the distribution chain catching up.”
With no immediate end in sight to the Coronavirus pandemic, the Burnham-On-Sea store’s staff look set to be busy for some time yet before normality can return.
