After a massive spike in Covid-19 cases over the holiday season in New South Wales, Woolworths is suffering from a logistics bottleneck across the state as more and more distribution staff are unable to work due to the “high levels of Covid in the community”.

With much of the retail group’s NSW operations hinging on a few key DCs in the Greater Sydney Area, many deliveries of necessary stock are unable to be sent through to stores due to high levels of staff “absenteeism”.

“We have stock availability within our network and our teams and suppliers are doing all they can to replenish stores as quickly as possible,” a Woolworths spokesperson said.

“[But] we’re currently experiencing delays with some of our stock deliveries to stores… We thank our customers for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience.”

Woolworths couldn’t confirm whether the logistics issue extended to other brands within its group, such as Big W or Catch, but said the business has a range of CovidSafe measures in place to protect its workers in these distribution centres, and that some NSW stores were unaffected.

According to a report in The Australian, rival supermarket Coles has not suffered the same issue.

New South Wales started seeing daily case numbers hover above 20,000 ahead of Christmas, which have stayed relatively steady since, once again causing a slight drop in customer and business confidence as the sector enters it’s third year of pandemic-impacted shopping.