The Grocery

The grocery store just down the street from me by and large uses self-checkout stations. Presumably, this is to keep labor hours down, but also, in this period of pandemic, it helps minimize contact between employees and shoppers. If you ring up a large number of items, a manager will still step in and help out, but they’ll ask you to step back as they bag things for you. All this makes sense, and I appreciate it.

One thing that did throw me off, though, when I went earlier last week, was their policy on reusable bags. I’d brought a stack of paper bags with me because I was expecting to use a large amount of plastic otherwise, and got stopped at the door and told I couldn’t use them.

I get the idea. It’s a potential point of contact, a variable that the store can’t control. These things have to be minimized. I had already thought of this; if someone was going to ask to help with my bags, I was going to decline. They didn’t know that, of course, and outwardly, I looked like a young’un with no mask and some headphones on. I probably looked like I absolutely didn’t care.

It did get me thinking, though, as I went through the store, what other precautions were they taking? There was a maximum occupancy notice on the outside, for example (though I don’t know how they were keeping track), and there were stickers on the floor so you could stand a safe distance away from the deli counters, but also, policies I’ve seen other stores implement didn’t seem to be in effect here. Restricting aisles to one-way lines, for example, would help keep customers at a distance from each other. I didn’t see any of that, and there certainly were a lot of times it would have helped.

Or the most basic of cautions: If I had an item in my cart and changed my mind, what happens to the item I stuck back on the shelf? The freezer door handles, were those disinfected?

Obviously, I can’t expect any sort of public business to be absolutely safe, but I also know that this sort of business will do the bare minimum of safety if it thinks it can get away with it. I don’t really watch TV, but I assume they’re the type of business to praise the hard-working nature of their low-level staff in their advertisements without acting in their interest.

I don’t have a fix for this, or I didn’t in the moment, at least. It wasn’t like I was going to start an argument or try and run past with my paper bags. And I certainly don’t begrudge the effort that’s already been put in, nor do I want it to stop any time soon. If anything, I’d want more things like this. The thought of an essential service just keeping up appearances worries me, though, and that’s what I wanted to write about.

-F