“No higher priority than your own well-being”Ĭostco employees said the company should have seen this coming. They say, ‘We take care of employees.’ Bullshit.” “Is business that much more important?” Regina’s brother Raymond Lee told BuzzFeed News. These people, most of whom asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, said Costco left its workers unprotected and uninformed on the front lines of the worst global health crisis of their lifetimes. However, more than 100 employees and contractors told BuzzFeed News that the $140 billion global retailer placed thousands of workers at its corporate offices and stores at risk through its lack of transparency on confirmed cases, disregard for warnings, and inability to adjust long-standing policies during a critical period.

With 547 retail warehouses across the US, Costco has become a lifeline for millions of people during the pandemic. The Lees are now three of the more than 31,000 people who have died in the US - and nearly 140,000 people globally - from the novel coronavirus. Lee was the first known Costco employee in the US to die of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, after she collapsed at the Everett, Washington, home she shared with her sister, Willa, and their mother, Susie. “Our jobs here are to support our retail business, and we’re not prepared at this point to have corporate employees work from home,” he wrote. That same day, Costco CEO Craig Jelinek emailed thousands of workers at the company’s sprawling corporate campus in Issaquah, Washington, to say that allowing corporate employees to work remotely wouldn’t be fair to the “great number of Costco employees locally and across the country” in its stores who could not. Ten days earlier on March 4, officials in King County, Washington - home to Costco’s headquarters and the initial epicenter of the US outbreak - called on businesses to let their employees work from home during a “critical moment in the growing outbreak.” Major Seattle-area companies like Microsoft and Boeing heeded that warning, shuttering their corporate operations and shifting employees to remote work. That day, though, her coworkers kept wondering why she was there. Beloved in the office, the 59-year-old rarely missed a day of work in her 20 years at the company. The Costco Travel agent didn’t often work on Saturdays, but she’d picked up an extra shift on March 14 to help field the barrage of calls from customers trying to cancel cruises amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Biden administration last week extended the federal mask mandate for all transportation networks, including airlines, until April 18.The last day Regina Lee was in the office, she was coughing so badly it rattled her whole body. While masking and vaccine requirements have been dropped in cities across the country, some industries have maintained their pandemic-related policies. Health care workers and other first responders such as police officers and firefighters will also be allowed to shop during the special hours.Ĭostco and many other grocery giants began holding special shopping hours at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 for people at higher risk of contracting the virus.Ĭostco’s decision comes as many other companies and industries have started to loosen their COVID-19 restrictions as case numbers decline across the country. Weird – Off Beat: These are the names people change the most, Social Security saysĬostco will offer the designated hours for senior shoppers on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m.

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