I did my usual Sunday weekly shop yesterday at Sainsburys @ 2:00 pm ish, a small queue outside, (took less than ten minutes to get in) pleasantly quiet inside, still shortages of rice, pasta and passata, but there was some of all available, chicken is making a bit of a comeback too, no flour to be seen. Boxes of Merlot were back in stock thank God. There was no queue at all when I came out at 3:00 pm ish.
I went to Tesco in the morning as I always do to stock up on baccy and also got a 3kg bag of Basmati Rice. Both shops had toilet paper, the shelves were looking far more normal, but still a few blank spaces.
Key workers ‘turned away’: Carer and NHS worker say they couldn’t get in to Aldi priority shopping slot while surgery staff member says she was refused entry to Tesco because she worked at ‘just a GP practice.’
Marion Kilmurray ‘denied’ priority access to Aldi in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire.
Frustrated carer filmed a tearful video begging for carers to be treated properly.
Hospital worker says supermarket worker in Liverpool snatched her NHS pass.
The security guard allegedly told Belinda Brown she had wrong type of pass.
Have resigned myself to not being able to get any online shopping slots now
Tesco has just emailed my hubby to say they now have the clinically vulnerable list from the government and they have been able to match the list to 75 %, of their existing customers.
So despite the fact as myself being in the vulnerable group who are told to stay in for three months I cannot any longer get online shopping.
Government shouldn’t have it both ways it’s ridiculous!
Our last slot is in two weeks time.
Forgotten about carer again with underlying health condition. Like many others on this site.
Just hope a volunteer if I can get one will accept paypal for payment as so difficult to ring bank.
Are there not going to be slots for vulnerable carers?
Carers UK can you assist please? We should be able to do online shopping. If we get the virus who’s going to step in and look after our carees
Coronavirus : Thousands missed off government’s ‘high risk’ list.
Thousands of people have been missed off the government’s high risk list for Covid-19 despite meeting the criteria.
Among them have been transplant patients, people with asthma and some with rare lung diseases.
Many are worried it will affect their ability to access food and medical supplies as they shield from the virus, unable to leave their homes for at least 12 weeks.
Supermarkets have been using the list to give priority to vulnerable customers, meaning those not included have already missed out on opportunities for which they would have been eligible.
Perhaps not for the Official " list … hundreds of thousands now waiting for the first payment from UC ( An advance payment will only shift the problem down to the next months ) / readjusting
to a much lower income ?
Cutting expenditure … drip by drip … cutting income … almost instantaneous for many ?
Falling between the crack … enough money to eat / not immediately eligible for the food banks ?
Isn’t this yet another example for the need for a carers card?
As not all carers get CA, a scandal, everyone receiving a disability benefit could be sent a card instead, for them to hand to their carer?
The government keeps telling us to stay at home, I have tried constantly to get a delivery date or even a click and collet. The length of time that I have spent trying has been having an effect on my Open University studies. My brother is disabled and nearly 70,and I have just been diagnosed with a heart problem , but it makes no difference. Luckily by chance last night I was able to order one of the boxes from Morrisson’s. You don’t have a choice of what it contains, but it is for two people for one week. Delivery on Thursday. Has anyone else had one of these boxes?
Might be a good time to compare against a standard food bank parcel ( Thanks Trussells … again ) … PRIOR TO the lockdown :
A typical food parcel includes:
Cereal
Soup
Pasta
Rice
Tinned tomatoes/ pasta sauce
Lentils, beans and pulses
Tinned meat
Tinned vegetables
Tea/coffee
Tinned fruit
Biscuits
UHT milk
Fruit juice
Many food banks also provide essential non-food items such as toiletries and hygiene products.
Bread … some food banks will include it , a few will provide ethnic alternatives.
Coronavirus : Tesco tells people to visit stores to get food.
Tesco has said that most food will still need to be purchased in-store amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The supermarket giant said it wasn’t able to meet demand as more shoppers stay at home, despite the fact it has increased its online grocery shopping capacity by more than 20%.
It said in the first weeks of the virus, there was “significant panic buying”, with sales up almost a third.
Tesco said that had now subsided with food stocks “returning to normal”.
“Between 85% and 90% of all food bought will require a visit to a store and here significant changes to the store environment have been implemented to maximise safety for colleagues and customers,” chief executive Dave Lewis said.
The chain said it would continue to try and “prioritise home delivery for the most vulnerable in society”.
Mixed messages there then. Food, and therefore shopping, is so important to any housebound person.
I’ve said previously that lots of people don’t need charity, they just need someone to sort out their shopping for them.
Surely those who are furloughed should have to do some community service??
My son is working his socks off at work, working for the council, he’s getting really miffed that he’s working harder than ever whilst some people are getting 80% of their salary for doing nothing!
Email received today from Sainsburys CEO, Mike Coupe
I wrote to you last week to update you on how we are supporting elderly and vulnerable customers with access to groceries online. I wanted to share some progress we have made on this over the past few days.
When I wrote last, we had offered 450,000 elderly and vulnerable customers priority booking to online delivery. At the end of last week we received the government database, which includes details of all the people in England who have registered with the government to say that they are vulnerable and need help getting a food shop. Since then we have been able to match almost 150,000 additional customers against our database. We have already contacted almost 30,000 of those and so we are now contacting almost 120,000 additional customers to offer them a priority delivery slot.
We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.
We know many elderly and vulnerable people who need to self-isolate are relying on the kindness of family, friends and local communities to shop on their behalf and we encourage this.
You wrote to tell me that product limits were a barrier to being able to shop for other people. We understand that it can be difficult to buy what you need and shop for someone else with the 3 item product limit. We have now lifted buying restrictions on thousands of products and hope that this will help more of you to shop for others. I also want to reassure you that stock levels are now much better right across the store. We are keeping limits on the most popular items for now, including pasta, UHT milk, antibacterial products and some tinned and frozen foods. But you can now feel confident in shopping in our stores at any time of day and being able to find most of what you need.
To help people shop for others easily, we will be introducing a new volunteer gift card and online voucher in the next week or two. I will share more information on this soon.
Many of you have also written to me to tell me about food banks and community groups near you that are struggling in this crisis. We know from our ongoing support of food banks that this is a particularly tough time for them right across the country. To help with this, we have donated £3 million to Fareshare, who will use that money to distribute donated food to the people who need it the most. We are also partnering with Comic Relief and the BBC on The Big Night In which aims to raise money for people impacted by COVID 19. We’ll be sharing more information on this in stores and online.
Best wishes
Does the Government data feed to the big food retailers such as Sainsbury’s et al include details of those who receive Carers Allowance?
By definition & by proxy through stringent assessments of the original claimant of benefits, the recipients of the Carers Allowance benefit are providing ‘essential’ care to people who chronically ill &/or disabled, & May be regarded as vulnerable or ‘shielded’ during the Coronavirus crisis.
Maybe this reasonable step has already taken place.
But no-one I know who receives Carers Allowance has been written to by the Govt, & the general messaging from the big supermarkets has not been explicit about supporting unpaid carers (careworkers maybe) either by shopping hours or online delivery slots.
I am one of the many who don’t get carers allowance, I am on sickness pay clashing benefit. But I have immune system problems technically I am classed as vulnerable but had no letter or anything.
None of my carees, diabetes, asthma, heart problems have received a letter from the NHS.
One who shops at Sainsburys received a vulnerable telephone number but doesn’t internet shop anyway .
So I am classed as vulnerable, have to have immune system checks every year and flu jab, and am providing essential care but am not allowed any help.
The difficulties with this system of declaring persons as vulnerable are very apparent.
As suggested…sending a letter to those receiving particular allowances or benefits would probably be a much better better approach. You can of course ATTEMPT to contact your GP as they are also authorised to assist acquiring this status. Once again the government has tried to do a quick fix by sharing databases but if you share incomplete or incorrect data this is what happens. On the other hand, perhaps they don’t want it to be made too obvious how many vulnerable persons there actually are in the UK right now.
In my own experience I know of 2 vulnerable people who have ordered online for years at Tesco and Sainsbury, simply because they cannot get out and visit the supermarket on their own. Under the new scheme Sainsbury have more or less locked one of these people out of the system making it impossible to get a delivery slot. Tesco hasn’t done this though they are extremely busy.
Somebody in government should be sorting this out also.
I’ve just done my weekly shop, now home again. All very civilised, they had everything I wanted apart from Stork margarine for cake baking, so I bought some cheap butter instead, they even had some strong flour for bread. Grandson and I weighed up all the fruit ingredients for our Easter cake yesterday and soaked it in a quarter of a pint of sherry. It’s supposed to sit for a week before using, but I discovered some years ago that half an hour in the microwave on defrost setting does the job just as well. I’ll finish making it today.
Even if you have the shielding letter from the government, registered on the vulnerable people’s register and we have “not been recognised as vulnerable” by Sainsburys and there is absolutely no way to contact them.
I have been trying to get home delivery set up for my shielding daughter and I’m trying not to go to supermarkets and bring anything home to her. So I thought sensibly I would make plans - god forbid anything happens to me (she has a medical condition which needs care when she has flare ups) - she’s 19. She’s also a vegan so whilst I can get fruit/veg from a local place which I can phone up and order and collect in the outdoors Tofu/quorn not available easily.
I finally had to go yesterday during the allocated carer hour 8-9am. Which as everyone says is very busy so not ideal when I’m trying to shield. I went to customer services to ask why not being recognised - completely useless no help whatsoever saying nothing to do with them to ring. So, so helpful - you ring and get another number after a 2 minute recorded message to ring another number to go back to the original 2 minute recorded message.