Amazon’s Plan To Test All 840,000 Employees On Coronavirus May Pressure Other Companies To Follow Suit

As a growing number of companies vow to take employees’ temperatures, provide masks among different safety measures to flatten the U.S. coronavirus curve, Amazon’s latest bid to eventually test all of its employees may force other businesses to do the same.

“A next step in protecting our employees might be regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in his widely-followed annual shareholder letter on Thursday after the company first signaled its intent on that front last week. “Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running.” 

Amazon has begun building “incremental testing capacity” and has reassigned a team of its research scientists, program managers, procurement specialists and software engineers to work on the project, Bezos said, adding a lab Amazon has built could start testing a small number of its frontline employees. Amazon will share its learning with others, Bezos said. 

Amazon has 840,000 employees worldwide, including over 590,000 in the U.S. 

Amazon’s attempt comes amid reports of coronavirus cases at some of its warehouse facilities and reports of worker complaints and decreased attendance. 

It also comes as a group of major business leaders reportedly told President Trump on Wednesday that the U.S. would have to significantly increase the availability of coronavirus testing before the economy can safely reopen. 

As a large swath of the U.S. economy has shut down and non-essential services and stores were ordered to close, and those restaurants that remain open are limited to only takeout or delivery orders, the latest business scorecards showed coronavirus’ heavy toll on the economy.

For one, the Commerce Department on Wednesday reported March retail store sales plunged 8.7%. from February, said to be the largest since these tallies began in 1992. While grocery store sales surged 27% as American consumers stock up to hunker at home, restaurants and other food services or drink places saw March sales plunge 27%; clothing stores a whopping 51%.; department stores 20%, and furniture and home furnishings stores a 27% decrease. 

Amazon, for its part, has also temporarily closed Amazon Books
AMZN
, Amazon 4-star, and Amazon Pop Up stores that don’t sell essential products while keeping its acquired Whole Foods stores open, Bezos said. 

One exception, as stay-at-home consumers order groceries and other staples online, squeezing even Amazon’s industry-leading logistics network and causing many delays, Whole Foods’ much-hyped 36,000-square-foot emporium opened in 2017 with seating overlooking New York’s popular Bryant Park—which the company has said boasts of one of the highest pedestrian traffic in the U.S., closed its doors temporarily beginning Wednesday night to “service online shopping orders only,” a sign said on the store’s doors.

 “The demand we are seeing for essential products has been and remains high,” Bezos said in the letter. “But unlike a predictable holiday surge, this spike occurred with little warning, creating major challenges for our suppliers and delivery network.”

While other Whole Foods stores remain open on reduced hours, they also have been busy playing the role of online fulfillment centers. A case in point, at the Whole Foods store in New York’s East Village recently, employees walking around the store using mobile devices to fulfill customers’ orders numbered just as many, if not more, as mask-donning shoppers.

An employee was seen spraying shopping carts while plexiglass shields also can be found at registers, a feature I also observed at some other supermarkets and drugstores.

Amazon said it has prioritized the stocking and delivery of essential household staples, medical supplies, and other things at its fulfillment centers and has made over 150 process changes to ensure employee safety.

Since March, it’s also announced hiring of an additional 175,000 full-time or part-time fulfillment and delivery employees to meet the increased demand. The company also has said it’s halting Amazon Shipping program that delivers for third-party merchants that had been handling shipping themselves. Amazon, like other retailers including rival Walmart
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, also has distributed face masks and is checking employee temperatures. 

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