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Employees who are selected to make the switch can make $19 per hour, a $2 raise on top of the pay hike Amazon announced earlier this month.

“As we continue to see a significant increase in demand for grocery orders, we are offering temporary opportunities for associates across our fulfillment network to provide additional support,” an Amazon spokesperson said on late Friday, confirming the action.

Amazon has been doubling down on the grocery industry since its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017.

Since the outbreak, grocery delivery has become a lifeline for people to get household staples while trying to avoid stepping outside.

So far, coronavirus has spread to at least 17 Amazon warehouses in the U.S., prompting workers and lawmakers to question if enough safety measures have been taken to protect employees on the frontlines.

Grocery stores are competing for workers to fulfill online orders. Walmart, with a fast growing online grocery business, plans to hire 150,000 employees at stores, distribution and fulfillment centers through May.

Wipes can also be used for other high-touch areas in the store like freezer handles or tongs used in self-serve bins.

all Americans to wear cloth face masks when out in public, which includes when in the grocery store.

wash your hands with soap and water before going out and when coming home, and use hand sanitizer when out.

If you use gloves, choose disposable ones and throw them before getting into your car or as soon as you get home

Try not to use your phone when in the store. If you do, clean it when you get home.

it’s a good idea to bring your own, mainly to wipe the grocery cart

Try to avoid exchanging money or credit cards with the cashier. Use a credit-card reader when possible.

To be extra cautious, you could heat food in the oven or microwave, though this hasn’t been specifically studied so it’s unclear if there’s a particular length of time needed.

People over 65 and those who have medical conditions that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and serious illness should avoid going to the grocery store, if possible. Try to order groceries online or have a family member or friend deliver them while taking precautions.

Though there have been no documented cases of transmission of the novel coronavirus through food packaging, a recent NEJM study found that the virus can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on hard surfaces such as plastic and stainless steel for two to three days.

the studies were done in a laboratory with high doses of the virus, so it’s unknown if in real life the virus can be transmitted that way. Most likely if someone were to sneeze or cough on a cardboard container, the virus would degrade more quickly due to environmental factors, such as sunlight.

experts say wiping down cereal boxes and other packages isn’t necessary. “Use the wipes when you need them,” says Dr. Chapman. If you’re home you can easily wash your hands. “That’s going to reduce your risk as much if not more than trying to wipe everything down,” he says.

instead of being preoccupied with wiping down packaging and containers, focus on washing your hands. “It’s much better to treat your hands, wash your hands, rather than dealing with all the surfaces,”

Your mouth is a gateway to both your respiratory system (your lungs) and your digestive system (stomach). Respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus are believed to enter the body and reproduce through the respiratory tract, not the digestive tract.

Experts say it is possible that if the virus rubs off from any object to the inside of your mouth, it could infect you if it goes into your respiratory system. But there doesn’t appear to be any risk of infection via your digestive trac

doctors say getting the virus through ingestion of contaminated food seems unlikely. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., speculates that the gastric acid in the stomach would kill it. “My own speculation is that the GI route would be very low likelihood compared to known and efficient methods of infection,”

use self-checkout when possible and use hand sanitizer when you’re done.

If you touch virus particles on raw food and then touch your nose, eyes or mouth, that is a potential source of transmission. But experts note that is very unlikely. To be vigilant, thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water, and don’t eat your food with your hands.

Experts urge people not to wash fruits and vegetables with anything but water. The chemicals on wipes and chlorine solutions especially can be dangerous—don’t ingest those.

There’s no evidence that the virus can be transmitted through clothing, but it hasn’t been specifically studied

The good news is it can be killed by doing laundry. So if you were in a grocery store where people near you were coughing, it’s a good idea to remove your clothes when you get home. Don’t shake clothing. Place it in your laundry hamper.

The CDC recommends laundering contaminated clothes in the warmest appropriate water setting and drying them thoroughly.

The CDC says there are no known cases of the novel coronavirus being spread through the fecal-oral route, which is a common route of transmission for stomach viruses like the norovirus.

But a recent study that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet found the virus in the stool of some patients. This route of transmission remains unknown, and experts say it’s unlikely to be contributing significantly to the pandemic.

“As a venture-backed scale-up that will need to fundraise again in the future, we therefore need to adjust our business plan to reduce costs and accelerate our path to profitability.”

The recent raft of layoffs in the industry highlights a broader shift in investor sentiment toward high-growth tech companies, many of which have taken steps to cut down on costs recently against the backdrop of a sharp plunge in global stock markets. Earlier this week, buy now, pay later firm Klarna said it would lay off about 10% of staff following reports the company was seeking a new round of funding that would reduce its valuation by a third.

Meanwhile, New York start-ups Fridge No More and Buyk — which both raised money from Russian investors — wound down their operations after facing issues with fundraising after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, London-based grocery service Jiffy said it would stop making deliveries and instead shift its focus toward in-person grocery collection, in a bid to convince investors that it can achieve profitability. The company has since announced plans to resume deliveries through a deal with Zapp.

ate which products the big-box chains stock.

But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they di

more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.

April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales

Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.

H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them

placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.

Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian

“I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.

The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,”

Herold said the suspect's injury was a "through-and-through" wound to his leg.Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio reported that Alissa has a police record, having been arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge in 2018. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine to resolve that case, according to court records.

An "extensive investigation" is now under way into Alissa's life, Dougherty said. He added that the suspect has "lived most of his life in the United States," but he did not elaborate on the suspect's history.The arrest warrant affidavit for Alissa says he purchased a gun less than a week before Monday's shooting, citing official databases that show the suspect bought a Ruger AR-556 on March 16.

The U.S. flag was lowered to half-staff atop the White House on Tuesday in honor of the victims. President Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were "devastated" to learn of the shooting. Speaking from the White House, Biden also said it's time for Congress to tighten U.S. gun laws.

Biden acknowledged that the inquiry is still in its early phases, but he added, "I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act." Lawmakers' priorities, Biden said, should be once again to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and close legal loopholes.

The arrest affidavit provides new details about what took place inside the store, drawing from 911 emergency calls and interviews with people who were present when mayhem erupted at the King Soopers grocery store on Table Mesa Drive.Store employees told Detective Joanna Compton that they saw the suspect shoot an older man in the parking lot.

The weapon used in the shooting is legally classified as a "pistol" in the U.S., but many people would likely consider it to be a rifle — and the affidavit repeatedly refers to it as one. The gun has the same lower receiver, the shell-like piece that houses the trigger, as AR-15 rifles that have been used in many other mass shootings in the United States.

Alissa surrendered to police after he was shot in the leg. An officer said the suspect took off most of his clothes and walked backward toward a SWAT team at the store."The suspect did not answer questions, though he asked to speak to his mother," the affidavit said.

As the scene was being cleared, authorities worked to account for people and locate victims. While most of the victims were inside the store, police found a dead person in the parking lot, next to a Mercedes sedan that Alissa had apparently driven to the grocery store.

Polis, who is from Boulder, noted that he has shopped at the same store where the violence erupted Monday. Herold later added that she lives about three blocks from the store.

Speaking about the slain officer, Herold said that just weeks ago, she had Talley and his family in her office so she could present an award. The commendation, she explained, was for one of his sons who had saved another boy's life by performing CPR.

The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal agencies are helping to investigate, mainly by processing evidence at the crime scene and conducting interviews with witnesses, said Michael H. Schneider, FBI special agent in charge. He added that the effort is ongoing to determine what could have motivated the attack.

As a teenager in Arvada, Alissa was on his high school's wrestling team. Tyson Crosby, the father of a boy who competed against Alissa, remembered him as being nice but also "a little frustrated with life."Despite Alissa having some "anger management issues," Crosby told Colorado Public Radio, "I would have never expected to hear what I heard [about the shooting], that came as a complete shock."

The first reports of shots fired at the King Soopers grocery store reached the Boulder Police Department around 2:30 p.m. local time Monday, Herold said that evening. She provided more details on Tuesday, saying that with a "barrage" of calls coming in, officers were dispatched around 2:40 p.m. and arrived within minutes.The officers "immediately entered the store and engaged the suspect," the police department said in a news release. "There was an exchange of gunfire during which the suspect was shot. No other officers were injured. The suspect was then taken into custody at 3:28 p.m." and taken to a hospital, the agency said.

In the wake of the shooting, other state and local agencies offered to handle service calls for the Boulder police, Herold said. But she added that while her department appreciated the gesture, it declined the offers.

When the chief was asked what she's telling her officers now, Herold said, "I tell them that I'm sorry, we're going to get through this. Don't lose your compassion, and we'll get through this. And we'll come out of it stronger."

He recommended misting produce with a very diluted bleach solution (a teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water) and letting it air dry. Or, if you’re nervous about using bleach on something you’ll eat, he said you could use a disinfecting wipe.

Other goods are less risky, but it’s still worth wiping down cardboard boxes of crackers or other packaged items.

the best thing to do is stay away from other people, particularly if you’re part of a vulnerable population.

one thing to watch out for is your reusable grocery bags: “When was the last time you sanitized your favorite bag?

if you go to a store, touch a contaminated surface, then touch your hair and then your face, even once between hand-washing, you could become infected.

if you’re really concerned, it might be worth throwing your clothes in the wash and showering after you get back from the store. (Your shoes, he said, are probably fine to bring into the house.)

Hand soap really will protect you.“One thing about this coronavirus,” he said, is that “it’s very susceptible to disinfectants and soap and water.”

Although state health officials released guidelines for grocery stores saying they should limit how many customers are in a given store and should keep people at least six feet apart even when they’re in line, this is proving to be easier said than done.

he suggested calling the store you’d like to visit before you leave, both to inquire about the wait and what’s in stock.

In 2013, Talley and two other officers drew a crowd – and eventually, a round of applause – when they rescued ducklings that had been swept out of a creek and into a caged drainage ditch. It was Talley who waded into the water to coax the ducklings to a spot where his colleagues could scoop them up.

"I am heartbroken to announce that my Dad, my hero, Kevin Mahoney, was killed in the King Soopers shooting in my hometown of Boulder, CO," she wrote on Twitter. "I'm so thankful he could walk me down the aisle last summer."

Teri Leiker was a dedicated King Soopers employee who had worked at the store for more than 30 years, her friend Lexi Knutson wrote in an Instagram tribute, calling her "the most selfless, innocent, amazing person I have had the honor of meeting." Knutson said the two met in 2017 through the University of Colorado Boulder chapter of Best Buddies, a program that aims to create one-on-one friendships between students and members of the community with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Rikki Olds worked as a front-end manager at the King Soopers grocery store, according to The Denver Post. Her Facebook page identifies her as a graduate of Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colo., and a student at Front Range Community College, which has multiple campuses in Colorado.

United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 7, which represents grocery store employees including those at King Soopers, confirmed that Olds was a worker at the store and a former union member. It also confirmed that "a few" of its members were working during the shooting, and, citing the ongoing investigation, said it would share more details as they become available.

Lynn Murray, a retired photo editor, was at the grocery store working as an Instacart shopper when she was killed.Before moving to Colorado, Murray lived in New York City and worked for magazines, including Glamour, Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, according to The Denver Post. She grew up in Mentor, Ohio, and attended Ohio University.

Tralona "Lonna" Bartkowiak was a founder with her sister of Umba, a clothing and art store in downtown Boulder.

Suzanne Fountain was an actress who had performed with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' theater company.

She was also a house manager at eTown Hall, a music venue and community center that produces a radio show.

Denny Stong's Facebook profile describes him as a resident of Boulder and an employee of King Soopers since 2018. "I can't stay home. I am a Grocery Store Worker," his profile picture says.A fundraiser for Stong's family said he was "a kind soul with a funny sense of humor and unique interests," and said that he had risked his life to protect others during the attack.

Jody Waters had an eye for style and design, which she channeled into a career in fashion. Her friend and business colleague Stephanie Boyle said Waters would help her set up booths at local events for her leather accessories business, and gave her advice on stores with which to collaborate.

the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.

as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.

One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.

This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category

he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt

the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.

Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.

“We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.

There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”

the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.

Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”

arl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated

Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”

in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.

Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”

In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.

1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)

Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies

Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.)

Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.

As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”

By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”

“Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”

As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”

All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels

Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost.

Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.

Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation

in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)

In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger

In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.

The global-manufacturing apparatus now has the capacity to churn out near-endless stuff. The industry’s output has ballooned 75 percent since 2007 to $35 trillion, according to one analysis, and millions of livelihoods depend on its continued growth.

. The internet-shopping boom has spawned an excess-stuff economy, in which retailers such as Overstock.com buy up extra product from full-price retailers

n the arms race to sell as many sandwich bags or beach towels as possible, a problem has become clear: Variety isn’t infinitely valuable.

Contemporary internet shopping conjures a perfect storm of choice anxiety

Research has consistently held that people who are presented with a few options make better, easier decisions than those presented with many. It has also shown that having many options is particularly confounding when the information available on them is limited or confusing

Those infinite, meaningless options can result in something like a consumer fugue state

Helping consumers figure out what to buy amid an endless sea of choice online has become a cottage industry unto itself

choice fatigue is one reason so many people gravitate toward lifestyle influencers on Instagram—the relentlessly chic young moms and perpetually vacationing 20-somethings—who present an aspirational worldview, and then recommend the products and services that help achieve it

Review videos, too, are popular on YouTube, and plenty of niche websites perform similar functions for products that serve a particular interest, such as hiking or photography

. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things

They have a strong precedent for believing that their type of extreme curation is what consumers want: Trader Joe’s sells many times fewer products than most of its suburban grocery-store competitors, but still tops consumers’ rankings of their favorite places to grocery shop.

stuff’s creators tend to focus their energy on those who already have plenty. As options have expanded for people with disposable income, the opportunity to buy even basic things such as fresh food or quality diapers has contracted for much of America’s lower classes.

That food waste in landfills generates carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide

you are not just wasting calories and money. You are wasting all the resources that went into growing, packaging and transporting that food.

The FDA, researchers and the grocery manufacturing industry largely agree on an initial solution to this particular part of the food waste problem: clearer package-date labels.

In 2017, the grocery industry, led by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute, announced a voluntary standard on food-date labeling. They narrowed the plethora of date-label terms down to two: “best if used by” and “use by.” “Best if used by” describes product quality, meaning the product might not taste as good past the date but is safe to eat. “Use by” is for products that are highly perishable and should be used or tossed by that date

while the FDA is encouraging manufacturers to use “best if used by” as a best practice, it is still not required by law. There is no federal law that requires dates on food, except for infant formula.

to have an effect, these changes need to be federally mandated.

“They’re trying to bring clarity to the descriptor of the date. Okay that’s great, that’s better than what we have now,” he said. “But I think some things just shouldn’t be dated."

The fact that Amazon’s retail operations are functioning at all is a testament to the flexibility of the company’s infrastructure during a health crisis that few if any companies were prepared for.

But the crisis is laying bare the cracks in Amazon’s ability

Those cracks include times when up to half the workers in some of the company’s facilities haven’t shown up, with some saying it was due to their fear they wouldn’t be adequately protected from coronavirus.

It’s also due to Amazon’s just-in-time supply chain, reliance on third-party sellers and largely automated systems of buying and selling that were never designed to handle such a crisis.

Amazon shoppers are unable to get many of the essential products the company says it’s prioritizing now.

everything considered nonessential takes more time than the two days Amazon conditioned us to expect.

as of March, 55% of Americans polled had ordered groceries online, compared with 36% two years ago.

One-third of respondents said the first time they had ever ordered groceries online was in the past 30 days, and 60% of respondents used Amazon to order groceries.

The infrastructure Amazon built pushed the entire e-commerce industry toward ever broader selection delivered ever faster.

In the mid-2010s, Amazon initiated a program called “hands off the wheel,” which replaced many of the functions of Amazon’s white-collar retail workers—those responsible for managing inventory and negotiating with sellers—with AI and automated systems

Amazon’s systems respond more quickly to increases in demand than humans could, but it also leads to breakdowns when they encounter unexpected shocks—e.g., a global pandemic

In the week ending March 28, Americans spent 47% more on consumer packaged goods purchased online when compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen and Rakuten Intelligence.

Amazon has hired 80,000 additional workers in just the past few weeks, as part of its pledge to hire 100,000 new permanent workers. It has also raised its base wage from $15 an hour to $17, through April.

with more workers pouring into Amazon’s facilities, and more forced to stay by the lack of alternatives, there could be more protests by employees and more concessions from historically union-averse management

Already, the company has instituted double pay for overtime, paid leave for associates with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19, a tripling of its janitorial staff and audits of its own facilities to comply with these measures.

Consumers felt, in good times anyway, that “I can trust the item, I know it’s a good price, I have transparency on when I’m going to receive it, and if I have issues Amazon will work on my behalf,” he adds.

A big edge Amazon holds over competitors is that it can cover losses or scant retail margins with a combination of good will from investors and a cross-subsidy from its booming cloud business, Amazon Web Services.

Of all cloud providers, Amazon is the best positioned to benefit both in the long and short term from surging demand, Eric Sheridan, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a Monday note surveying the industry.

All this increased usage means more revenue for AWS and more profit for its parent company. In turn, that means more opportunity for Amazon to, as Mr. Bezos famously put it, turn its retail competitors’ margins into Amazon’s opportunity.

for Amazon, a company that may already be too big for its own good, it could lead to more of the regulatory scrutiny that its success was drawing even before coronavirus.

An ever greater variety of customers will view Amazon as a basic utility but, wary of overreliance, will explore alternatives, too. The bill for Mr. Bezos’ possibly Faustian bargain with the universe—that everyone loves an innovative and ruthless competitor, even when it becomes dominant—may finally come due.

Officers saw the man leave the bathroom and quickly held him for questioning. According to police, his weapons included two long guns and three pistols, all of which were concealed.

the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property

The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.

“The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.

Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.

Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.

Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.

The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.

In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.

by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”

That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”

Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.

majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.

“Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.

In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”

“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.

the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth

The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.

But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability

Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.

Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization

But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.

The vast majority of waste — more than 80 percent — is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants.

The hype surrounding this movement is inflated by the public’s ignorance of the food supply chain.

Despite the dramatic anecdotes about truckloads of landfilled crops, little of farm waste is due to merely “cosmetic” blemishes. Much of it is bruised or weeping goods that can quickly break down and rot the entire crate. With many crops, misshapen produce knocks against its neighbors during transit, poking holes and jeopardizing entire bins. “Drops” (produce that’s fallen on the ground) are left behind because otherwise they tend to cause food-poisoning outbreaks. Farms till excessively damaged produce back into the soil along with the crop’s stems and leaves, recycling their nutrients.

North America’s packinghouses discard about 1 percent of the produce that enters their doors, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — usually because it’s straight-up rotten.

For the most part, ugly-produce initiatives are simply gentrifying second-grade produce that was already being eaten — just not, perhaps, by upscale shoppers. It’s the food equivalent of Lyft “inventing” a bus.

The most effective ways to tackle that

“Approximately 20% of organic and conventional produce in the U.S. never leaves the farm just because it looks a little different. . . . We think that’s crazy.”

The single biggest source of U.S. food waste, accounting for 43 percent of the problem, is our own homes

Most of all, we should sync our shopping habits with our eating habits. Affluent shoppers waste the most produce because of how much of it they buy and then trash

The most important behavioral change consumers can make to address food waste isn’t to buy certain kinds of produce. It’s to actually eat what we bring home.

Homes, food service and grocery stores generate 7.8 million tons of food waste per year that can’t be salvaged, accounting for 12 percent of the problem. This waste needs to be recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency says that the United States composts only 5 percent of its food waste. (Compare that with 15 percent in the European Union.)

Biochar — made by heating inedible food and other organic waste until it becomes inert, odorless, nutrient-rich charcoal — could be a very effective way to recycle food waste, but it’s underutilized, because the equipment to do it at municipal scale is so new. Like composting, biochar can be used as a fertilizer, returning food waste’s nutrients back to the soil. Unlike composting, it can handle food waste that’s mixed with general nonhazardous trash — no need for costly separate collection and handling. Biochar also sequesters carbon for centuries.

But the infrastructure — donation matching software, cold storage and refrigerated trucks — to handle large donations of eggs, dairy, meat, bread and produce is still being built. Funding more food bank infrastructure, educating potential donors about liability laws, creating more donation tax incentives and standardizing food safety regulations would recover up to 996,000 tons of food, or 1.7 billion meals, per year, according to ReFED.

For certain crops like berries, tomatoes, leafy greens and cucumbers, farms can take advantage of state and federal funds that would help them switch from open-field to hoophouse or greenhouse methods. Already common in East Asia and Europe, these methods boost yields and dramatically reduce how much of the crop is too damaged to leave the farm

As long as we eat fresh food instead of shelf-stable nutrient bars, perishability is part of the bargain. The only way to completely eliminate food waste is to abolish fresh food. Beyond that, all we can do is manage the waste.

The concept is simple: Those practicing social distancing should stay home as much as possible and look to keep a gap of six feet or more between themselves and others if they do leave the house.

The reasoning: Fewer interactions with people and the added distance when you must interact means less chance of exposure and hence infection with the virus. If you do get infected, social distancing lowers your chance of spreading the infection to someone else.

In 2003, my triplets were born extremely early. Aidan died at birth and my two surviving boys, Oliver and Victor, born at 26 weeks, were admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit

After almost three months, the boys were ready to come home on oxygen. My husband and I were told to limit their interactions with society — especially with other children. Even a cold could be devastating, never mind influenza. The best medical advice was to do everything possible to keep them from getting an infection in their first year of life.

How did I do it?I never shook hands, I nodded and smiled.

I used a lot of hand sanitizer — getting a twin stroller laden with oxygen tanks in and out of a public bathroom made hand washing a challenge.

Grocery shopping took place primarily late at night, long after my partner came home.

Everyone who entered the house — whether medical professional, friend or family — was required to be fully vaccinated and to either use hand sanitizer at the door or head straight to the bathroom to wash their hands

We declined visits from people with children in day care or school.

Some friends drifted away. A few stuck around.

This was pre-Facebook. Smartphones and home Wi-Fi didn’t exist. There were no video chats. I called friends and family from our landline

I coped by going for drives with my boys after medical appointments — they were already loaded in the car with their oxygen tank

I took them for long walks in the double stroller.

When the boys came off oxygen at 9 months, we relaxed a little and occasionally went to restaurants.

Social distancing is an effective infection-control practice for those at high risk

During our 18 months of social distancing, I kept two weeks’ worth of food at home in case one of us got sick. Assuming most illnesses run their course in a week or less, this was enough backup so the sick parent could quarantine in the basement and the other wouldn’t have to take the boys to the grocery store

I never hoarded toilet paper (honestly, I have no idea what’s up with that). As a gynecologist, I can confidently tell you that if you do run out of toilet paper, a bottle of tap water squeezed on your anus is a fine hygiene hack for a bidet

Just blot dry with a face cloth, which can be laundered for reuse. The panic-buying of hand sanitizer also stumps me, given the effectiveness of a 20-second wash with soap and water.

Social distancing is a privilege, but it shouldn’t be. It should be supported by the government as a public health measure. The faster and the more efficiently a society can practice social distancing in the face of a viral pandemic, the less severe the eventual impact for everyone.

Steve Meyer, an economist with commodity firm Kerns and Associates, agreed that a one or two day disruption could cause wholesale meat prices to jump. But if the problem is resolved within a few days, he said, restaurants and grocery stores are unlikely to pass those costs onto consumers.

"Then you're probably going to have some buyers, whoever depends on JBS for their supplies, that probably could be short product," he said. In that case, for consumers, it would depend on where their local grocery store sources its meat. "If they buy it from JBS then you might see some shortages. If they don't buy it from JBS, you might not see anything at all."