Despite strikes by U.S. supermarket and grocery delivery employees, grocery sales – including seafood – continue to break records across the country.
On 30 March, some workers for grocery delivery service Instacart began a nationwide strike to demand hazard pay of USD 5.00 (EUR 4.56) per order, along with better health protections.
The same day, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, walked off the job over concerns about their lack of protections against COVID-19.
"How many cases we got? Ten!” Workers chanted in reference to workers at the facility who had tested positive for COVID-19, USA Today reported.
"We are working long, crowded shifts in the epicenter of a global pandemic, and Amazon has failed to provide us with the most basic safeguards to protect us, our families, and the public's health,” Rina Cummings, a worker at the Amazon fulfillment center, told the newspaper.
And on 31 March, Whole Foods employees are staging a “sick-out” to protest the lack of protections from COVID-19 – as well as paid time off.
Whole Foods employees in New York City, Chicago, Louisiana, and California have tested positive for COVID-19, Vice reported.
The strikes could delay shoppers receiving their grocery delivery orders. Some shoppers now face wait times of up to a week for grocery pick-up times, just as customers are adopting grocery pickup and delivery services for the first time in order to practice effective social distancing, as recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Americans are setting records for their grocery-buying during the coronavirus crisis. Retail sales of frozen, canned/pouched, and fresh seafood broke records in U.S. grocery stores for the week ending on 21 March.
Frozen seafood was the biggest winner, surging an astounding 108 percent to USD 2 billion (EUR 1.8 billion) for the week ending on 21 March, compared to the same week in 2019, Nielsen data provided to SeafoodSource revealed. Every species of frozen seafood tracked by Nielsen increased, and mahi realized the biggest sales spike of 142 percent for the week.
Shelf-stable seafood sales also soared 87.2 percent for the week to more than USD 8 billion (EUR 7.3 billion). Canned/ pouched salmon and tuna dominated the sales increases.
Fresh seafood sales also climbed 30.4 percent to nearly USD 138 million (EUR 126 million). Fresh pollock had the largest sales gain of 88.3 percent, followed by herring at 54.2 percent, and salmon at 53.9 percent. However, fresh crawfish/ crayfish sales plummeted 45.9 percent for the week.
Sales have been so robust that both bricks-and-mortar and online retailers are running out of some products as demand soars, and Amazon customers have reported their orders being delayed by several days due to product shortages.
Photo courtesy of Andrey Burstein/Shutterstock
