A regular customer at my store wraps every item in a plastic produce bag before checkout.
By every item, I mean not just obvious foods such as fresh vegetables or poultry, but toilet paper, potato chips, and boxes of cereal.
I don’t know why he does this. Wegmans workers are too polite to ask. All I know is that it was his custom long before we became gripped by fear of contagion.
Every cashier knows him and dreads him. The bags cover the product barcodes, so the plastic has to be pulled back for scanning. This means that cashiers need to handle the products more because they’re in bags, undoing any intended protection from OPG – other people’s germs.
(Such a precaution would also fail to take into account the many people handling an item from the source to the store shelf. If you’re worried about surface contamination, you can wipe down your groceries before stocking your refrigerator and pantry.)
On a recent night, the man was our last customer. Because he buys a lot, and because each purchase takes extra time to unwrap and scan, he didn’t leave until after our 10 p.m. closing time.
It’s not that he slipped into the store at the last minute. He arrived at 8:30.
An hour and a half in the grocery store during a pandemic? More foolhardy than bagging everything.
Fairly or not, this man has come to symbolize for me the often irrational responses to the coronavirus. The shoppers who consider a trip to the supermarket an outing. The people who are outraged that they must wear masks. The protesters flocking to state capitals to demand their “freedoms.”
All dazed and confused.
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colo., on Sunday, April 19, 2020. Photos by Alyson McClaran pic.twitter.com/yanunDrVKj
— Alyson McClaran (@McclaranAlyson) April 20, 2020