Sobeys Hack

As the winter season rapidly approaches, some may be trying to buy their Christmas groceries early, but these people may be in for a rude surprise if shopping at one of New Brunswick’s biggest grocery chains. The Sobeys corporation recently had been hacked. A confidential source has told reporters. The facts surrounding the hack have been held close to the chest as there has not been a public acknowledgment from the corporation to date. This however doesn’t take make the effects any less profound. As of today the hack has been resolved and business has once again resumed as usual

The reason that the company has been so tight lipped about the situation is hard to say, but stores across the nation had already begun to feel the effects mere days after it had occurred. It would not have been uncommon to walk into any Sobeys and see empty shelves and slow checkouts. Many customers across the nation have noted that their local Sobeys were not selling gift cards.

 

“It is crazy to imagine something like this happening, I’ve worked here for 19 years and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this” said Jo Ann Cornell, an employee of Saint John Sobeys since 2003. Other Sobeys employees like Michael Agnew, the produce manager of the regent street Sobeys, doesn’t believe a hack has happened at all, stating, “we don’t know at this point, they haven’t told us anything, people always just assume the worst.”

 

Regardless of the actual circumstances that have made the computers unusable, the repercussions are all the same, that being families unable to purchase the food and other products they want.

 

The hack completely disabling the computers had a major effect on employees as well, many workers for the company spend their entire days on computers ordering stock, creating schedules, discarding product, and calculating payroll, while the computers were down, these people have no reason to be at work.

 

“It is kinda scary, if this had gone on for long enough, could they cut my hours?” Jo Ann Cornell said. With how quiet Sobeys has been on the matter they may have just been hoping on fixing the problem so that this worst case scenario didn’t occur, but all the same, it has left employees fearful of the prospect that something like this could happen again.

 

There were some fail safes in the system that were able to keep the stores open for now such as a minimum order that was sent to each store as a baseline, and alternative ways to deal with discarded product, but these were only temporary measures that didn’t fix the main problem. This recent debacle has left many clamoring for answers which have not been received. Making the employees and costumers worried about the idea of another hack, possibly even worse, that could affect, not only Sobeys, but retailers as a whole.