To want Sainsbury’s / Waitrose to pull their finger out with regard to home delivery booking for ‘vulnerable customers’

[Vole3]

Got the letter on Saturday telling me to go into 12 week exclusion.
Registered immediately on the gov.uk website as being a ‘vulnerable’ person.
Haven’t heard from either of the supermarkets named above who are meant to be ‘working with the government to identify our vulnerable customers and prioritise delivery slots’ and there is no other way to book a home delivery with them.
Nothing available for click and collect with them or any other home delivery / click and collect with other providers in a 20 mile radius.
Luckily picked up enough stuff for this week after I finished my shift as a front-line key health worker, but my main issue is non-food items like cat litter & cat food which my local farm shops don’t do.

What I want is a contact number to ring to confirm I am on the list and be able to book a delivery, even if it’s for after Easter, and then I will be able to plan how to survive until then. I’m a single parent to a hungry almost teenager with no family within 150 miles.
The local help team did phone yesterday, but as I have enough until next week I didn’t feel I was a priority case for a volunteer to be sent out. I’m an independent sort, I’ve had to be, and just want to be able to sort myself out as much as I can and leave the help for those who really need it.

I work for one of the big 4 supermarkets (not in store). Please, please believe me when I say we are doing absolutely everything possible to help as many people and get systems in place as quickly as possible. Our customer contact centres have been taking hundreds of thousands of calls a day, we are working with the government as closely as possible to identify vulnerable customers. We are all working so, so hard to get the infrastructure in place but at the same time also having to work around the same restrictions in place for everyone else and look after our staff.

I know it’s hard - I’m high risk but not ‘extremely high’ so haven’t been able to get any help at all and live alone, so I’m struggling. But I know we’re doing as much as we can

@Hearhoovesthinkzebras I don't work for the government?

Someone said they shouldn’t have offered it, what do they want me to say? That there are thousands of delivery pickers, vans and drivers just ready and waiting to spring into action.

There aren’t.

What do you do if the letter is for your child not for you? I am a lone parent but the letter is for dd so I won’t be recognised as extremely vulnerable but I can’t leave her alone to do shopping she has SEN but the letter says she shouldn’t go out for 12 weeks

I have a close acquaintance working for one of the supermarkets doing this and they are inundated. You can only book 1 slot at a time and once you use your slot you then can’t book another until a week has passed (poor mangement has meant this is not being communicated correctly). Go online and there will be a number to call and they can help.

I registered last Monday on the government website. Nobody has contacted me. Sainsbury's won't accept anybody new. Nobody seems to care. The system is failing badly. I am not supposed to leave the house for 12 weeks. No slots on Tesco, Asda, Iceland, Morrisons, Sainsbury's.

@Hearhoovesthinkzebras You've made a really good point there and it's got me thinking a little....

We are now connecting the most vunerable in society with 'volunteers'...over a million people as far? I would love to think that all of the volunteers are doing this out of kindness, but there just might be some who have ulterior motives.

Who is checking credibility? Are there any background checks being done?

Prescription collecting, grocery deliveries, financial errands...? There surely needs to be safety measures in place protecting the vunerable who are now fundamentally inviting strangers to their door?

I'm also not comfortable with the compiling of lists being shared between government and supermarkets, but this has to have been taken into consideration?

(Or, becoming more and more apparent, not...)

Not all supermarkets will be allowing payment via a helper, just FYI. Hopefully a workaround will be devised.

Taddda

Exactly. And round where I live groups of volunteers started organising on various neighborhood Facebook pages and then they stuck notes through doors offering help. Hopefully everyone of those people has the best of intentions and is only doing it for good motives but how easy is it to exploit? Especially if the vulnerable person doesn't have on line banking and can't get out to a cash machine. I work in a supermarket and I imagine three or four times a week an elderly person asks me to help them type in their PIN number or hands me their wallet or purse for me to get the money out. It breaks my heart to see just how vulnerable some people are. I can just imagine some of those people handing over bank cards for a volunteer to get their shopping with or to draw out money.

I know the government is meant to be offering food deliveries to the shielded group who can't get any other help but that doesn't help all of the vulnerable group who might have relied on shopping deliveries for years and now can't get them - the elderly, people with disabilities, people who are housebound - they won't necessarily be part of the shielded group and qualify for any extra government help.

@ExclamationPerfume your totally right, the system is failing because there is literally no system, it's a mess, with potential disaster written all over it.

How are you doing for food/supplies?

(I care , your not alone in this)- I honestly cant believe out of the billions these supermarkets have made in the past 4 weeks they can't sort out how to get their produce to their customers- even with apparent government backing!!??

@Taddda Thank you

We are doing ok at the moment thank you. It's just so frustrating that the system isn't doing what we were led to believe would happen. We have quite a few tins left so we won't starve. It makes me worried for vulnerable people who don't have internet access and who don't have anyone checking in on them.

@ExclamationPerfume I fear we're going to hear many stories of the like in the coming weeks.

We're the 5th (6th?) richest country in the world, a tiny island by comparison to all and we have no idea how deal with a crisis- we had warnings (did anyone read of the trial they did if a pandemic hit, 3 years ago? We failed, shockingly ).

I can't watch the briefings anymore, they just keep feeding us lines like 'we have put this money towards.....', 'we are currently planning too'....'we are expecting....'

I just want to know what they have put in place, that's accessible now!