Coronavirus: Elderly shoppers face empty shelves at Woolworths
In extraordinary scenes across Australia, elderly and disabled shoppers lined up for hours before dawn, but many were unable to buy basic items such as toilet paper.
Armed with trolleys and reusable bags, hundreds of elderly shoppers lined up before sunrise outside the Woolworths in Moonee Ponds.
But when the doors opened at 7am on Tuesday, they rushed in to discover empty shelves with not a single toilet paper roll to be seen.
Tony and Gina Guccione, 75 and 65 respectively, emerged from the guarded doors with only a box of tissues and a small bag in their trolley.
“We get up early, we want some toilet paper or tissues or something but nothing,” Mr Guccione said.
They’d come in search of toilet paper for their two daughters, one of which suffers from multiple sclerosis while the other has the degenerative muscular Charcot-Marie-Tooth disorder.
“The girls say to me mum I haven’t even got one piece of toilet paper,” she said. “For me and Tony’s it’s okay, it’s just for the sick girls.”
Woolworths have introduced a special shopping hour for the elderly and people with disabilities after anxieties over the spread of the coronavirus led to panic buyers stripping shelves of essential items.
Went to @woolworths early
— Jan Owen (@JanOwenAM) March 16, 2020
for my 86yr old father-in-law for the #seniorshour but the shelves are all empty. Too little too late #Woolies 😪 pic.twitter.com/qXpWebCQVn
#Woolworth toorak vic 😷😷😷shame on 😷you empty shelves for older people this morning 😷 most of your staff grumpy unprofessional 👽shame shame shame
— Lucy Rose (@lucyrose383) March 16, 2020
Glenhuntly Woolworths this morning @ 7am - no meat, no eggs, no pasta, limited rice, no toilet paper, long queues, disabled unable to struggle to end of queue - needs a rethink😢
— Jenny Redwood (@jenny_redwood) March 16, 2020
A tall man denied entry to the Moonee Ponds store retaliated by telling a Woolworths worker, a petite South Asian girl, that she was spreading the coronavirus.
Another man, also denied entry, intervened on behalf of the employee and said: “Mate, you're being a prat.”
Bernadette Stainsby, 70, said she considered going into the Woolworths store but was left bemused by the supermarket stampede.
“It’s like something from Monty Python isn’t it?” she said.
Ms Stainsby said at first she laughed at the panic buying and mad stockpiling of her fellow shoppers but the product scarcity was empty beginning to get under her skin.
“You say the world’s gone mad and you laugh about it but you know this is creating a level of stress,” she said.
“We were all stressed at dinner last night … I was stressed because I couldn’t get mince to make spaghetti bolognese.”
Several customers have told 2GB’s Alan Jones that hundreds of people have been lining since the early morning to get in, only to be met with empty shelves.
“I’ve just come from Burwood in sydney no toilet paper, no kitchen paper, no wipes, no sanitiser. there’s a little bit of pasta,” said one caller.
“One handler said people were there at 5.30 this morning.”
Coles, like Woolworths, has also committed to establishing a community shopping hour between the hours of 7 and 8am, starting on Wednesday. Concession cards must be presented to enter the supermarkets.
“I was first in through the doors at Woolworths at Casula, Liverpool,” a call told 2GB. “There were just 12 packets of toilet paper and a queue of well over 200 people there.”
Another caller said: “I’ve just come back from Woolies at Emu Plains. By the time they opened doors, they were at least 200 deep, they had no toilet paper at all.”
A woman said: “I’ve just come from Burwood in sydney no toilet paper, no kitchen paper, no wipes, no sanitiser. there’s a little bit of pasta.”
Appearing on Alan Jones’s 2GB show to answer to criticisms of “elder abuse,” Woolworth’s director of fresh food, Paul Harker, admitted that the supermarket got it wrong.
“We are really sorry that we have impacted people this way,” Mr Harker said. “What we’re trying to do, Alan, is to do something different ... we started a trial this morning to see if it would make a difference, it’s clearly not perfect.
“Day one, we got it wrong, we’re going to do what we can to fix it.”
Coles yesterday announced it would also launch a community shopping hour between seven and eight am, due to begin on Wednesday.
The supermarket chain on Tuesday also announced new restrictions on products to ensure availability for all shoppers.
Coles shoppers may now only purchase two packs per customer of the following: eggs, chilled pasta, frozen vegetables and frozen desserts.
Woolworths managing director Claire Peters acknowledged many customers were unable to purchase the items they needed on Tuesday morning and said the supermarket chain was working to get products back on shelves.
“It’s day one of our dedicated shopping hour and we know it wasn’t perfect across all of our stores,” she said
“While we've heard positive feedback from many stores across the country, we regret that many customers were unable to get all the items they needed this morning.”
In the Woolworths Moonee Ponds carpark, Karlee, who did not want her surname published, helped her grandmother June, 92, pack away the shopping.
“You wouldn’t want her [June] out at the shops any other time,” Karlee said. “It’s crazy, it’s so crowded and when you do go there in the middle of the day, there’s no one in there because there’s nothing left.
“So you end up not buying anything.”
The 22-year-old said Woolworths staff were lovely and were trying their best, and she’d managed to get her hands on some groceries including cooking oil and pasta.
“We managed to get a few necessities, it worked well [but] it was really crowded,” she said. “We’ve done pretty well this morning but we might have to come back another day to find toilet paper, tissues and paper towel.”
Over the last two weeks, Woolworths have sold seven days’ worth of toilet paper every day.
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