Britain's largest supermarket has hired 'very interesting' new employees — including pilots, race car drivers, and actors — to cope with surging demand for groceries

• Tesco, the UK's largest grocery-store chain, employed British Airways pilots, theatre artists, and racing drivers to cope with an increase in online deliveries, CEO Dave Lewis told the BBC.
• Lewis said social distancing measures have altered the way customers shop as they have returned to a pattern similar to 10-15 years ago when people would shop once a week.
• Although flour is still in short supply, Lewis believes the food supply chain is back in good shape.
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Tesco, Britain's largest grocer, says it has hired everyone from racing drivers to pilots to theatre staff into temporary jobs since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, its CEO said Tuesday.

Speaking to the BBC in his first broadcast interview since the coronavirus outbreak, chief executive Dave Lewis put the spotlight on how Britain's biggest retailer was adapting to changing consumer habits during lockdown.

Lewis said the willingness of people to come to work in a supermarket and help feed the nation was "humbling" to see.

"We've had some very interesting new colleagues — from British Airways pilots, West End theatre, to racing drivers... and we've trained them all very quickly," he told the BBC.

Tesco, which is the UK's largest private sector employer, has more than 300,000 employees and is currently welcoming the return of staff that had been absent while temporary hires leave, the British broadcaster said.

The supermarket chain hired 45,000 temporary workers to offset the staggering 51,000 number of employees who were away due to coronavirus-related issues.

Lewis said that the last six weeks have been "incredible" for the British retailer since everything about the food business had changed.

Changing consumer behaviour and shopping patterns

"People are shopping once a week, a little like they did 10 or 15 years ago, rather than two, three or four times a week that was happening before the crisis," Lewis said in the interview.

During the panic-buying period in the UK, customers had stripped grocery shelves of goods such as liquid soap, toilet rolls, and pasta, Lewis said. Although flour is still in short supply, he believes the food supply chain is back in good shape.

He also pointed to a big shift in shopping behaviour as consumers have returned to a pattern similar to a decade ago when people would make one all-inclusive trip to the supermarket.

Social distancing measures, he said, have made consumers shop less frequently as a result of which, the number of transactions in April had nearly halved but the size of the average shopping basket had doubled.

In regard to the retailer's online delivery capacity, Lewis said it had achieved an increase in online sales and had broken through one million online delivery slots a week for the first time.

The outgoing chief executive expects to add a further 200,000 online delivery slots in the next ten days, especially from "vulnerable customers."

Lewis said: "What this crisis has shown is the importance of food retail. I think in the past, perhaps, a little bit we may have taken that for granted. So I hope that as a nation, we'll think carefully about food, food strategy and distribution."