Twenty thousand boxes of 50 masks each would be on sale at FamilyMart convenience stores starting tomorrow, Taiwan FamilyMart Co Ltd (全家便利商店) said yesterday.
A box of 50 masks would cost NT$249 for those with FamilyMart memberships and NT$299 for those without, with no limits placed on how many boxes a person can buy, the company said.
Convenience store chain operator Hi-Life International Co Ltd (萊爾富) said that it would also start selling masks from tomorrow.
Photo: Chang Tsung-chiu, Taipei Times
It has yet to announce details about prices and quantity.
Hypermarket chain operator Carrefour Taiwan (家樂福) said that it would start selling packs of five and seven masks from today, with customers limited to one pack each.
Carrefour said that the 18,000 packs of masks it plans to sell are previously imported stock.
Cosmetics chain operator Poya International Co Ltd (寶雅國際) said that it has 1 million domestically produced masks to sell at its stores, with sales possibly starting as early as Thursday.
The masks would be sold in boxes of 50, as well as smaller numbers, and masks for adults and children would be available at NT$5 to NT$7 each, Poya said.
There would be no limit on the amount of masks a customer can purchase, Poya said.
Other retailers, including drugstore chain Cosmed (康是美), supermarket chain Simple Mart (美廉社), hypermarket chain A-Mart (愛買) and President Chain Store Corp’s (統一超商) 7-Eleven convenience store chain, all said that they are either waiting to judge consumer demand or are at different stages of ordering from domestic manufacturers.
After the nation’s first COVID-19 cases were confirmed, the government on Jan. 31 began requisitioning domestic masks, before launching a rationing system on Feb. 6 using National Health Insurance (NHI) cards.
Since then, daily production capacity has been increased from 1.88 million masks to about 20 million.
From today, the government is to requisition 8 million masks per day, while lifting sale and export restrictions on the remaining 60 percent of capacity.
If people struggle to buy masks on the open market, they would still be able to purchase nine adult masks or 10 children’s masks every two weeks using their NHI cards.
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