Dear Meijer Customer,
Meijer was founded on the belief that our primary purpose is to serve our communities. On behalf of our entire company and the Meijer family, it’s our privilege to serve our communities in this time of crisis.
We know you’re relying on us to help you prepare for the unknown and provide essential resources for your family. We take this responsibility seriously and appreciate your continued trust and patience. We are committed to staying open 24 hours to serve you, and are cleaning, sanitizing and stocking our stores continuously.
We’re focused on getting the products you need back on our shelves. Our supply chain and merchant teams are working diligently with our suppliers to expedite product flow. We are thankful to our suppliers – some of whom we’ve had relationships with since 1934 – for partnering with us on fast solutions.
We’ve been able to get some essential products back into our stores in limited quantities and are placing purchase limits on key items to ensure more customers have an opportunity to purchase what they need.
We continue to follow the CDC’s guidelines in response to this virus to ensure our stores are safe for you, including staying vigilant with our cleaning and sanitization practices, especially at high-frequency touch points like our check lanes, self-checkouts, and service areas, and in team member work areas.
For the time being, we’ve suspended full-service operations at our meat, seafood and bulk salad stations in stores. This allows our team members to prepare and package items for our self-serve refrigerated cases and ensures products can be made available more quickly.
And just as we’re following CDC guidelines, we’re asking our customers to do this too. Please practice social distancing while shopping in our stores, and as the CDC states, please stay home if you’re not feeling well. By working together in these ways, we can do our part to help prevent the spread of this virus in our communities.
There’s understandably been increased demand for our Home Delivery and Pickup services. We’re adding more pickup and delivery times and appreciate your patience as we work hard to fulfill your orders quickly.
Many of you have taken the time to recognize the hard work of our outstanding team members. Your thoughts of support online and in our stores have meant the world to them, and we appreciate your recognition.
I’m so proud of our teams, who are doing their best to keep our stores clean, stocked and orderly, while maintaining a sense of calm and compassion for our customers. I’m also proud of our supply chain, corporate teams and vendor partners, who are working tirelessly behind the scenes to get product flowing and address the needs of our stores and communities.
With all our teams are doing, we can still use more help. We’re hiring additional seasonal team members in each of our stores to meet the demands of the business. We’ve also been reaching out to local businesses affected by closures to help place their staff in positions in our stores until their businesses can re-open.
We care for our team members and want them to feel confident staying home if they don’t feel well. We have several programs to support them, many of which have been in place for some time. These include:
- A pay continuation program that allows those who are quarantined or who test positive for COVID-19 to stay home with pay.
- Free online COVID-19 screenings from a board-certified doctor for all team members.
- A backup care reimbursement program to offset the unexpected costs of unplanned care for children or adults.
- A team member relief program to help with unplanned expenses related to COVID-19.
Those in our communities who are food insecure need our support, too. We anticipate more families will rely on our food pantry partners during this time, so we’ve given an additional gift of $2.2 million to our Simply Give food pantry partners. They are receiving these funds this week, which will be divided equally among the more than 400 food pantries in our communities across the Midwest to help them continue their vital missions.
As a family company in business for more than 85 years, we’ve seen our share of difficult times. While these are admittedly uncharted waters, we’ll continue to make decisions that support our purpose of enriching lives in the communities we serve. We appreciate the trust and confidence you’ve placed in us.
Rick Keyes
President & CEO