When they are good...

[nwhiker]

I heard this poem recited AT me a lot during my childhood.

There was a little girl
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

It's pretty much the same about shoppers.

I went out today, first time in over a month. I'm still coughing, but pretty much only in the evening, and not a lot, and it never got any worse than it was in the first few weeks, so eh, I'm continuing my self-diagnosis of coughing as a result of two months of seasonal allergies and seasonal allergy snot. :)

Went to Costco and Safeway.

Costco was pretty good, I'd almost everyone was wearing a mark and attempting to self distance.

My local Safeway? NSM.

There I'd put mask usage over 3/4, but not "almost everyone".

The people who were wearing masks pretty much did everything as expected: went down the aisles in the marked direction, avoided other people, took stuff from the shelves and put in their carts.

The people who weren't wearing masks? Did nothing of the sort. Up down aisles and down up aisles. One mother and daughter we ended up encountering three or four times were taking all sorts of stuff off the shelves, passing it between themselves and putting it back. Ice cream aisle was the worse. I think they opened every freezer door to take something and get something. It was the last aisle we had to go down (Linnea had a request) so we waited but OMG. I watched carefully to see what they were taking out to make sure that I didn't take the one they'd touched. Turns out they were out of what Linnea wanted anyhow. Also, scratching faces, re-doing pony tails, etc.

I'm going to say it, and hopefully this doesn't sound racist. The people without masks? 100% white, except for the mother-daughter pair at Safeway.

Comments

[camelsamba]

I went to Costco the day before our 2nd (stricter) say-at-home order went into effect back in March. They were metering entrances - they let in something like 30 or 50 people at a time. Not all the shoppers were in masks (had not yet been pushed so much here in MI) but checkout lines were essentially non-existent. Aisles were relatively clear.

Went back this past week, more than a month later. No metering at the entrance. Most people were in masks but the aisles were so much more crowded. The only directional arrows were in the refrigerated rooms (produce and dairy). There was a guy stocking produce so he was able to re-direct the oblivious people, but one woman went halfway around the dairy section before noticing she was against traffic flow and finally looked down to see arrows on the floor. But worst of all was the checkout. They had Xes on the floor to separate people, but the lines waiting to get to checkout stretched back past all the chips and etc aisles, and some of the canned goods etc, so I had to wind through those people to shop. Ugh! I liked it better when they were metering people at the entrance.