Clorox Wipes Won’t Be Back in Stock Until This Summer
Clorox Disinfectant Wipes will not be fully in stock until summer.
Chairman and CEO Benno Dorer said, despite increasing the company’s production, Clorox can’t meet consumer demand for wipes.
Dorer said Clorox factories are operating 24 hours a day to produce more wipes.
As confirmed cases of COVID-19 continue to rise in many parts of the country, shelves once fully stocked with essentials like toilet paper, paper towels, diapers, and cleaning products remain vacant in most stores. And, according to Clorox’s Chairman and CEO Benno Dorer, this won’t change any time soon, even though the company is “making tremendous progress.”
“We think we will be in substantially better shape by the summer,” Dorer told Today.
Not long after the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., Clorox Disinfecting Wipes were immediately swept up in a panic-buying frenzy. While the product has not been specifically tested on SARS-Cov-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has it included in a list of disinfectants to use because it is effective on similar harder-to-kill viruses.
Dorer told Today that Clorox saw a 500% spike in consumer demand for their disinfectant wipes, and despite increasing their production by 40%, they can’t produce enough of the product to meet the current need. In an interview with Yahoo Finance, he also explained that the company made adjustments and found new ways to “speed up [their] lines” to try and fill shelves. “We’re activating party suppliers who produce for us to help us. And we’re investing in further capacity,” he said.
Additionally, Clorox factories are working 24 hours a day to make wipes. “In some cases we sold as much in one week as we normally sell in one month,” Dorer told Today.
The CEO also commented on the issue of price-gouging, which sparked police investigations among states after high-demand items like hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper were sold for unreasonable prices.
“To be very clear, we do not condone price gouging, we want to make sure that consumers at all times are able to buy our products at the regular prices, especially during this time during the pandemic,” Dorer told Yahoo Finance.
He said Clorox has worked with third-party sellers and major online retailers to crack down on price-gouging. “We’re continuing to get people offline, every now and then it keeps popping up. But I would say it’s no longer a broad scale issue,” he said.
Still, frequently disinfecting high-touch surfaces—like doorknobs, counters, and phones—is more important than ever. The EPA’s list of recommended disinfectants includes products from Lysol, Purell, and more. You can also use isopropyl alcohol (as long as the concentration is 70%) or hydrogen peroxide to clean hard, non-porous surfaces if you can’t get your hands on other cleaning products.
Click here for a full guide on how to kill coronavirus germs in your home.
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