I wrote to you last week to update you on how we are supporting elderly and vulnerable customers with access to groceries online. I wanted to share some progress we have made on this over the past few days.
When I wrote last, we had offered 450,000 elderly and vulnerable customers priority booking to online delivery. At the end of last week we received the government database, which includes details of all the people in England who have registered with the government to say that they are vulnerable and need help getting a food shop.
Since then we have been able to match almost 150,000 additional customers against our database. We have already contacted almost 30,000 of those and so we are now contacting almost 120,000 additional customers to offer them a priority delivery slot.
We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.
We know many elderly and vulnerable people who need to self-isolate are relying on the kindness of family, friends and local communities to shop on their behalf and we encourage this.
You wrote to tell me that product limits were a barrier to being able to shop for other people. We understand that it can be difficult to buy what you need and shop for someone else with the 3 item product limit.
We have now lifted buying restrictions on thousands of products and hope that this will help more of you to shop for others. I also want to reassure you that stock levels are now much better right across the store.
We are keeping limits on the most popular items for now, including pasta, UHT milk, antibacterial products and some tinned and frozen foods. But you can now feel confident in shopping in our stores at any time of day and being able to find most of what you need.
To help people shop for others easily, we will be introducing a new volunteer gift card and online voucher in the next week or two. I will share more information on this soon.
Many of you have also written to me to tell me about food banks and community groups near you that are struggling in this crisis. We know from our ongoing support of food banks that this is a particularly tough time for them right across the country.
To help with this, we have donated £3 million to Fareshare, who will use that money to distribute donated food to the people who need it the most.
We are also partnering with Comic Relief and the BBC on The Big Night In which aims to raise money for people impacted by COVID 19. We’ll be sharing more information on this in stores and online.
Best wishes
Mike
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