Marks & Spencer has warned it may be forced to slash opening hours at some of its shops if the number of staff being forced to self-isolate rises further.
M&S boss Steve Rowe said the number of people being told to isolate by the NHS Test and Trace app was rising “exponentially”.
More than half a million alerts were sent to users of the app across England and Wales during the week to July 7, a 46% increase week-on-week.
Rowe said the impact was being felt even more widely at M&S, suggesting that its covid cases were “roughly doubling” every week.
He told The Times that the so-called ‘pingdemic’ was “a major issue across every industry at the moment”.
Rowe added: “Our Covid cases are roughly doubling every week and the pinging level is about three to one of Covid cases, so we’re seeing that growing exponentially.
“If there’s shortages we’ll have to manage it by changing hours of stores, reducing hours.”
Iceland closing stores because of staff shortages
The warning comes after Iceland boss Richard Walker suggested that, although deaths and hospitalisations were decreasing thanks to the vaccine rollout, the ‘pingdemic’ had left him “facing the biggest challenges to running my business since the pandemic began”.
Writing in The Daily Mail last week, Walker said: “The looming difficulties could result in disruption even greater than what we faced during the chaotic panic-buying sprees of March 2020 — when shelves were stripped bare and trolleys piled high.
“Today I am in the unprecedented position of being forced to close our stores because I do not have enough people to staff them.”
From 16 August, anyone who has been fully vaccinated will not need to self-isolate if they receive a notification to do so on the NHS Track and Trace app after coming into contact with someone who has Covid.
However, British Retail Consortium boss Helen Dickinson urged the government to bring that date forward.
She said: “We are already seeing a serious impact on retail operations as a result of staff having to self-isolate and this will only get worse right across the economy, as cases are already rising fast and the final restrictions are eased.
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