Question

Amidst the current pandemic, how can supermarkets adjust their supply chain/logistics strategies on grocery product categories such as grab-and-go/convenience items?

Answer 1

Under the situation of pandemic covid 19, negatively affect the super market especially small scale super markets. Supermarkets supply chain and logistics affect a large extent due to lock down. The first week of the lock down, demand of groceries suddenly increased by the fear of people regarding the food shortage. People think may occurs food shortage in coming days they buy over the limit. This created supply shortage. Due to the lock down the negatively affect the logistic or movement of goods and inventory.This also create supply shortage, this destruct the supply chain and logistic of supermarkets. Besides these, on the circumstances of covid 19 supermarkets need to fix lot of condition to the consumer as part of social distancing this also make inconvenience to consumer while but the product from supermarkets, due to this number of supermarkets are closed in these days.

Such situation supermarkets receive new strategies to maintain the supply chain,logistic and distribution management, like E.commerce,home delivery, Tele- marketing, and they reduce the differentiation of product, procure more demanding commodities and deploy the employees to the sudden implementation of such new strategies. These strategy changes promote sales to the large extent, Because people are more health conscious so that they depend online super markets or e-commerce like Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart etc rather than offline markets. Virtual shopping is more convenient and they provide home delivery, not only the easiness or convenience but virtual shopping can assure the people health by low physical interlink. However, the altering demand such as the first days of lock-down demand was high but later demand was decreasing drastically due to unemployment increase and customers health fear also affect the whole economy negatively. The luxury goods, prestigious, and other consumer durable goods demand is significantly declined during these period, People demanding necessary items only so that the existence of supermarket become questionable today's. E commerce and supermarket s are mainly concentrated in necessary items like groceries. however, they try to do perfect supply chain policies to avoid supply shortage and logistic problems.