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RETAILERS ADDRESS THE PANDEMIC Retail World spoke to some of our retailers to find out how they’ve been faring during the COVID-19 pandemic. OUR RETAILERS SIMON PADOVANI ALDI Australia Customer Interaction Group Director T hroughout these challenging times, our employees and business partners have shown resilience and dedication. This is what we’re most proud of. The collective effort of our dedicated employees and hard-working business partners, who have come together to ensure Australians have access to essential grocery items, has been truly impressive. We’ve learned much about the resilience of the community, including the kindness of our customers, who have shown genuine compassion to one another through this difficult time. We’ve navigated these times together and learned new ways to safely supply groceries to the community. As the circumstances of COVID-19 unfolded, we worked quickly to introduce a number of social distancing and hygiene measures. This includes screens at each store register, as well as hand sanitiser and antibacterial trolley wipe stations at the entry to our stores. Our stores also have 1.5m social distancing markers at the checkout and our employees are managing the flow and number of customers entering our stores. Everyone’s cooperation up to this point has meant we’ve been able to slowly restore the stock levels of most products. A selection of items continue to attract increased demand, which is why we’ve maintained restrictions on some products. We’re continuously monitoring the situation and plan to remove these restrictions as demand normalises. The industry has come so far in a short period of time, but there’s still work to do to ensure we don’t fall back into old habits. We’ll continue to remind all Australians that we have sufficient stock of grocery items to supply everyone in Australia if we all shop sensibly. We’ll continue to ask customers to be mindful and only buy what they need. And we’ll continue to work closely with our employees and business partners to support them through this unprecedented time, as we’re all in this together. “The collective effort of our dedicated employees and hard-working business partners, who have come together to ensure Australians have access to essential grocery items, has been truly impressive.” APR, 2020 RETAIL WORLD 7