Coles CEO Steven Cain says the supermarket giant is bracing for difficult months ahead because of severely disrupted supply chains and covid regulations forcing staff to isolate.
Steven says 3000 Coles staff are currently at home isolating, while many of its suppliers were also struggling with staff challenges due to the strict stay-at-home rules.
“At this point, with Delta, we’re at our most difficult stage. We’ve got many team members in isolation, we’ve got severely disrupted supply chains, and we’ve got people working very hard,” he adds.
“Right now across the country we’ve got 3000 team members in isolation, which we have to manage, and then we’ve got a lot of our suppliers in similar situations so thinking about how we plan for Christmas is really important.”
The Coles boss says Victoria is at the start of supply challenges, as the country’s supermarkets push for government to relax 14-day quarantine rules.
“We’re working with the six health authorities, the federal and the states and territories, to try and get consistent rules and regulations, particularly around where there‘s been close contact,” Steven says.
“If a team member of ours has caught Covid outside of work, and they come into work, the whole shift goes down. So we lose 50 people at a time for 14 days, because one person has turned up.”
Alongside the supply chain and staff challenges, Coles is also feeling the impact of restrictions in place for the construction industry.
“We’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of projects, almost frozen at the moment in New South Wales and Victoria because of construction stoppages or delays,” he says
“You just have to work around it and so I think we‘ve all become a lot more agile and flexible in how we think about the business.”