Crisis Management and the Coronavirus: Changes in Shopping Behavior

In WWD’s latest chapter of its special webinar series, “Crisis Management and the Coronavirus,” Arthur Zaczkiewicz, executive editor at WWD, led David Sykes, head of U.S. at Klarna, and Mike Butler, president of operations and strategy at Providence, in a conversation about changes in shopping behavior. The goal of this conversation was to gain a deeper understanding of the consumer during this aberration as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Providence, which serves 51 hospitals with its 119,000 caregivers, is one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the U.S. While hospitals today are under immense stress as they work endlessly to care for the hundreds of thousands who have been affected by COVID-19, Butler says the U.S. supply chain needs serious attention. “It’s an absolute disaster,” Butler said. “I think if you go back to 2008 when we were recovering from that financial crisis, a lot was pushed offshore in terms of manufacturing. And that was really focused on how to have lower unit cost, how to just have in time inventory, and roll forward to a crisis like this, and what happened on the U.S. supply chain side was that our inventories are very low as a result of the

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