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Overview of measures Colruyt Group
17
March
2020
1. New measures in our food stores (Colruyt Lowest Prices, OKay, Bio-Planet, Spar Colruyt Group and Cru)
We comply with the recommendation of the authorities and virologist Marc Van Ranst and join the measures proposed by sector organisation Comeos.
These precautions take effect as soon as possible to slow down the spreading of coronavirus COVID‑19.
- We ask our store employees to wear gloves. We are sending extra stocks to our stores. We also ask our store employees to keep washing their hands regularly, even when the store is very busy.
- The shopping carts and checkout stations are regularly disinfected.
- We ask our customers to keep a distance of at least 1 metre or the dimensions of a shopping cart from other customers and store employees.
- To guarantee distance and safety, we limit the number of customers to 1 per 10 m². The store manager can decide not to allow new customers in depending on the number of customers already inside.
- Our employees do not have to fill shopping bags for our customers; we ask our customers to take care of that. In this way, they can keep their distance.
- We ask our customers to shop alone if they can. This allows us to restrict the number of people in the store.
- We ask our customers to pay electronically as much as possible.
- Specifically for Collect&Go: we stop picking orders in our Colruyt stores until further notice. The large number of customers in our stores these days has made order-picking for Collect&Go impossible. We can still pick orders in our 2 picking centres and thus supply about 90 Collect&Go pick-up points. Consequently, we will have to disappoint customers again, and we truly apologize for that. We are working as hard as we can.
We ask our customers to stay calm and to have respect for our store employees. We are doing everything we can to serve everyone.
We emphasize that stocking up is not necessary. We have stocks and the logistics chain is in top gear. Our store employees make every effort to fill the shelves as fast as possible. We thank our customers for their appreciation.
2. Closing our non-food stores (Dreamland, Dreambaby and Fiets!)
Colruyt Group decided to close all brick stores of Dreamland, Dreambaby and Fiets! as of Wednesday 18 March 2020 until further notice.
- This measure also applies to the Newstory second-hand stores and the Garden & Patio pop-ups of Dreamland.
- The online webshops of the three store formats and Collishop stay open. The Collishop pick-up points in Colruyt Group stores remain available.
- We will contact all customers having a baby gifts list at Dreambaby to complete and deliver their list.
The group made this decision out of concern for the well-being of customers and employees. By reducing the number of physical stores, the group wants to contribute to the fight against the coronavirus.
3. New measures for our office employees
A. Teleworking is authorised
Our top priority is the health of all the people in society and in particular our employees; we want to be very clear about that. We have taken additional measures to help protect this health.
We have a social role to provide food and to make sure the food chain keeps going (production, transport, logistics, sales). We are doing our utmost to combine this social role with our other social commitment, contributing to the fight against the virus. This remains a balancing act forcing us to make decisions hour after hour and to adjust constantly.
To guarantee this operational continuity, we absolutely need sufficient employees in our stores, production plants, logistic centres and transport. We will need thousands of extra employees from other services to accomplish this.
Employees from supporting services have the possibility to work from home if their work allows it. These employees will receive the necessary tools (such as a VPN connection and a laptop).
We ask employees who have no role in the continuity of operationally critical business functions, to come and help in stores, production and logistics when necessary. Examples of critical business functions are stock management, IT systems, wage processing, internal and external communication.
Co-workers who no longer have work due to circumstances, have priority to help in stores or the logistic chain. The alternative is to check with their superior whether they can take leave (family, parental leave, overtime) or qualify for temporary unemployment.
Today, we are examining with our employees how we can organise to ensure that these new measures take effect as soon as possible.
B. Maximum spacing in office buildings (for those who want or have to come)
We have taken some measures for employees who must or want to come to the office, focusing on maximum spacing in our office buildings:
- We ask our employees to spread out over different offices and to use meeting rooms and canteens as office space.
- Because of the exceptional circumstances, the flexible timetable is expanded to the period between 6 am and 10 pm. We ask all teams to examine this and to be flexible so that the continuity of their service can be guaranteed and everyone can organise their private life.
- The opening hours of the canteens for lunch are expanded. Employees can eat there between 11 am and 3 pm. We ask our employees to leave an empty chair between them or to eat elsewhere (meeting room or outside) and to pay electronically as much as possible.
- Meetings (internal as well as external) are postponed as much as possible (we are now focusing on our operational continuity) or take place via skype.
- Our regional and shared offices remain available to our employees. We ask them to use them as much as possible. Also for the purpose of maximum spacing. Furthermore, our Colruyt Group Academy opens its houses as additional regional offices. They will be open from 7 am to 9 pm for regional work, another 400 places. We thus avoid regional offices and shared offices to be overcrowded.
- As from Wednesday 18 March 2020, the office bus will no longer run.
All measures above take effect now and until further notice.
We do not give audiovisual interviews until further notice. Please contact Comeos. We are now concentrating on supporting our store employees. Thank you for your understanding.
Colruyt Group press office
Press@colruytgroup.com of 0473 92 45 10 (NL) of 0473 82 27 15 (FR)
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Boilerplate Colruyt Group
Colruyt Group operates in the food and non-food distribution sector in Belgium, France and Luxembourg with approximately 570 own stores and 580 affiliated stores. In Belgium this includes Colruyt, OKay, Bio-Planet, Cru, Dreamland, Dreambaby and the affiliated stores Spar and Spar Compact. In France, in addition to Colruyt stores, there are also affiliated Coccinelle, Coccimarket and Panier Sympa stores. The group is also actively involved in the foodservice business (supply of food products to hospitals, company canteens and catering businesses) in Belgium (Solucious). The other activities comprise the sale of fuel in Belgium (DATS 24), printing and document management solutions (Symeta) and the production of green energy (Eoly). The group employs over 29.900 employees and recorded a EUR 9,4 billion revenue in 2018/19. Colruyt is listed on NYSE Euronext Brussels (COLR) under ISIN code BE0974256852.