Meanwhile, workers at Costco’s warehouses - what the company calls its stores - said the retailer didn’t do enough to prepare or protect them from thousands of customers who flooded in to stock up on toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and bulk groceries as coronavirus fears ramped up in March. According to employees, at least two have died after contracting the disease. In conversations with BuzzFeed News, both corporate and warehouse workers wondered why Costco management was so slow to enact firm coronavirus protocols at its North American locations, given what the global retail giant had seen in its stores in Asia, where the pandemic first spread.Īnd that hesitation may have let the virus spread further than it otherwise would have.Īccording to interviews and internal memos obtained by BuzzFeed News, at least 21 people at Costco’s corporate offices and at least 62 workers at warehouses across the US have tested positive for COVID-19. “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 last day Regina Lee was in the office, she was coughing so badly it rattled her whole body.

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