My wife commented yesterday that in all our years of marriage, our fridge and pantries have never been this stocked. Dry goods, frozen foods and pasta sauces? Check, check and check.
But even with that (hopefully sufficient) amount of preparedness, there are still perishable food items that we go through pretty quickly. Milk, fruit, yogurt, etc. So we are still making trips to the local grocery store. On one such trip this week, we saw how our supermarket is going to new, extreme lengths to stay clean and reassure nervous shoppers that it’s okay to go in.
First, all the shopping carts are being sanitized. You can’t even bring the cart back into the store yourself. They stay outside, where employees then take them and give them a thorough wiping down before bringing them back into the store. The same wipe downs happen with the credit card machines after each use.
These same types of sanitation protocols are going at other retailers. We at The Spoon have seen it at our local Costco and PCC Market, and The Island Pacific Supermarket chain in California sent us a press release this morning announcing all of the new sanitation procedures it has put into place.
Like so many new behaviors this pandemic is creating, I wonder if these safety measures will just become the new norm. If you take two seconds to think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we all use the same checkout touchscreen without some kind of wipe down in between. The supermarket is the place sick people go to buy medicine! After this subsides, how many of us will carry around Clorox wipes in our pocket to give touchscreens or ATMs and shopping carts a quick once over?
There isn’t a lot of good to be found with this outbreak, but better hygiene procedures for the public places we frequent might just be one of them.
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