by Julia Robins ‘20

With the coronavirus outbreak sweeping the nation, residents are encouraged to stay home to prevent its spread. But one place where many people are potentially in contact that is sometimes unavoidable is grocery stores. Despite protocols in place to encourage social distancing and sanitation, stores like Olney Giant fall short of succeeding to enforce these protocols and protect their customers and employees from each other.

 An issue Giant is running into is the attitude of the customers. They are sometimes disrespectful and verbally attack employees, according to senior Zoie Stevenson, who has been a bagger at the stores since last summer and works 12 hours per week. “I wish shoppers would be a bit easier on the employees when they limit [the number of customers in the store. {Many] started [to get] mad, frustrated and even yelled at the person who kept track on how many came in.” 

Another issue is the enforcement of purchase limits of high-demand items. Often in the mornings one or two customers would hoard a high-demand product, like paper towels, which is against the rules but is not enforced at self-checkouts. Just because there are policies in place, it doesn’t mean that they are followed- like elderly hours, for example. Some younger people come shop at elderly hour anyways, claiming to be shopping for their elderly relatives. “Most customers don’t follow [one-way aisles],” also according to Stevenson. But because the signage is not obvious, many customers forget or do not realize, while some others ignore them entirely. 

The abundance of children in the store, despite recommendations to only shop alone, is a concern to senior Samantha Pacheco, a cashier since March 31, working 5-6 hours a day. “Do not bring your children with you when you shop, and if you do, please take the necessary precautions, like putting masks and gloves on your children … [They] have a harder time of grasping the social distancing rules because they aren’t as aware of the pandemic.” Pacheco politely reminds customers to be more mindful when they shop.

Pacheco takes the coronavirus risk seriously, however, and tries to clean as much as she can. “I am worried about catching it but more so bringing it home. I am however taking extra precautions when at work, such as changing my gloves regularly, using sanitizer, and cleaning my station whenever I get the opportunity. We [clean] in our free time because we need to stay busy. We have been instructed to clean it as much as we can, but we can only do it so much until we get busy again.”

Giant does not clean the carts and relies on an honor system that the customers will clean their carts, which is a problem when the wipe dispensers are sometimes empty. There is no policy on how frequently self-checkouts are cleaned, according to a self-checkout employee, and while some employees clean after every person, many other employees wait to clean until after every hour’s dozens of customers- if even. With the self-checkouts being extremely close together, social distancing is nonexistent.