Monday, March 16, 2020

TW Perry has been engaged with our preparations for battling the Coronavirus. We take this virus very seriously. Our primary concern is the health and well-being of our team members, our families, our customers, and your clients.  I want you to be aware that TW Perry is doing all we can to fight the spread of Coronavirus while we go about our daily duty to take care of the material needs of our customers.  Here is a summary of our efforts to date.

Workspaces: We define workspaces as our facilities, trucks, our customer’s offices, and your client’s homes. Our Virus response activities are directed at all of these workspaces where applicable.  Our facilities have daily janitorial cleanings. We have enhanced this by scheduling team members to do enhanced cleanings an additional 3x daily. This includes bathrooms, doorknobs, coffee stations, time clocks, and other public facing devices.  Our sales counter teams are cleaning credit card terminals, computer terminals, counter sales phones, and sales counter printers hourly. All cleanings are done with disinfectant that is proven to kill viruses. Drivers have been issued disinfectant, paper towels, and hand sanitizer to clean their hands before and after delivery, and to wipe down their delivery trucks.

Tele-work: We have identified all employees that have the ability to work from home. We have a tele-work plan in place and will start having employees work from home when guided by the state department of health, or the CDC. Telework protects in two ways. It reduces the number of team members in our facilities that could spread the virus, and it protects the workers at home by reducing their potential exposure. Our inside salespeople that service your account have the ability to work from home. Should we go to a telework situation, our internal phones, and emails are automatically forwarded to our salespeople’s cell phones. Their response to your needs will not be affected by telework.  Store teams, and sales counter staff will report to work throughout this crisis to maintain store operations.

Virus response supplies: Please be aware that Hand sanitizer, disinfectant, wipes, gloves, and especially face masks are extremely difficult to get at this time. We have adequate supplies currently available for internal use to protect our team members and our customers. We are prioritizing internal use over selling these supplies to customers. In the event suppliers begin to catch up with demand, we will first make these available to our customers with whom we have ongoing business relationships. We are not offering these materials for public sales at this time.

Administrative Leave: We have committed an additional two weeks of paid administrative leave for our employees that may be affected by this virus. This pay will cover team members in the case one or more of our facilities is quarantined, or needs to be closed for any reason during this crisis. It also covers any individual that is infected with COVID – 19 and isolated, or is quarantined when a family member is infected. We don’t want any employee to feel pressured to come to work ill out of fear of losing a paycheck.  We have strongly advised all employees to stay home if they feel ill.

Business Process changes: We are no longer asking you to sign for receipt of delivery on our driver’s smartphones. Our drivers will take picture of the material at your job sites, but they will not hand their phone to your workers to sign for receipt during delivery. We have cancelled all large marketing events including Contractor College, and NARI events that were to be held later this month. We have also curtailed business travel to industry and association events. We strongly believe in maintaining relationships with our customers, and  business associates, but we consider this to be an extraordinary time that requires extraordinary response.

Thank you for your business. Coronavirus has the potential to be a big disruption to our business and our nation’s economy. We are watching all of these events closely.  If we all take prudent measures to care for our teams, we can continue to work, and stay healthy. 

Gary Bowman

President & CEO

TW Perry