INDIANAPOLIS — Experts say some grocery store supply chains never quite recovered from the start of the pandemic. Many are still with empty shelves for different products.
"I've noticed just this past three, four, five months, it's just gone downhill. You have customers that get frustrated at us and it's like we can only do so much," Cheyenne Avila said.
Avila has worked as a shopper for Shipt, a grocery store delivery service for almost three years now. She said it used to be a lucrative job for her, but now the shelves are empty.
Avila said she's receiving fewer customers because items are so frequently out of stock.
"People are just so frustrated and they think it’s our lack of looking and it’s not our lack of looking it’s just there’s nothing here,” Avila explained. “There is not even adequate substitution that you can even make that would be appropriate.”
"Working in the Anderson area recently, I had a guy who had ordered 22 items and 19 of those items were out. There’s just nothing,” she said.
When she asked the grocery stores when items might be back in stock, Avila said, “You talk to any of the heads of these areas, the deli department or the meat department, you talk to customer service. They don’t know and they will tell you hey we get two shipments a week Tuesdays and Thursdays, we don’t know what’s on those trucks. We just kind of get what we get and we put on the shelves as quick as we possibly can.”
If things don’t change fast, as the holidays approach and people need specific food items, Avila warned, “You’re going to have a lot of angry people.”
WRTV reached out to both Kroger and Meijer for comments on this supply chain issue. Neither would provide us with information on how their stores are being affected.
