everyday is black friday

Each morning a long line forms outside of our doors, folks stand six feet apart stretching all the way down the side of our building.

At 7 AM the manager goes out to talk with the customers, urging them to stay at least 6 feet apart from each other and from any employees when they enter the store. She also informs them that they'll only be allowed to buy 1 or 2 of the most desired items. These hotly sought after items include milk, eggs, and bottled water in the grocery department but the real prize is toilet paper and any cleaning product with the word "disinfect" in its name. Oh and have you heard that Nintendo has been doing quite well through this corona season? Their Switch has been flying off the shelf. At this point we can't keep them in stock, selling the ones we get in each day about as fast as the toilet paper.

You can probably guess how well these requests for order play out in reality. The paper products and cleaners are located in the same corner of the store and as soon as folks are let in that's where they flock, giving the area the feel of some macabre Black Friday at the start of each day. With orders to stay six feet away from customers employees have to stop working in the area for the first half an hour or so.

This past week there were even folks standing in the pouring rain hoping to get their toilet paper prize. It is the unfortunate reality at this point that your only hope for scoring some tp is getting there within the first hour we are open.

To further encourage social distancing our store in theory is making announcements over the PA every thirty minutes reiterating to folks to keep six feet apart while shopping with us.

In reality the business of our normal day can lead to folks forgetting or having their hands too full with other responsibilities to make it happen. It doesn't help that you can't even hear the PA system in a third of our store.

Every thirty minutes we are assured that "the health of our customers, their family, and our employees" is the company's number one priority.

If you're someone who has followed this blog you know I'm skeptical that the company has any priority other than turning a profit. The health of its employees and customers might align with that aim in certain ways but it is not the ultimate aim, the store can't operate if its entire staff is too sick or upset about conditions to work and the negative press of an outbreak at one of their facilities wouldn't help sales.

If our store really wanted to prioritize the health of its employees and the public there are real steps to take. It could close off the parts of our store selling non-essential items or, like the Trader Joe's that shares a parking lot with us has done for more than a week now, limit the number of people in the store at a time. But its not good for business to discourage folks from buying things by either making them wait or limiting the trinkets they can take home.

Instead, every morning we face the depressing prospect of a toilet paper mob.