Some NC customers relished getting back to their weekend ‘normal’ — shopping
Mix cabin fever, near perfect weather and a lifting of some of North Carolina’s retail coronavirus rules and you’ll get some shoppers who couldn’t want to go out and do something that felt normal again this weekend.
Mother’s Day Sunday brought a wait to get into some newly reopened stores, which are only supposed to allow 50% capacity inside.
At the T.J. Maxx in Knightdale, Beverly Brown waited in line on the sidewalk out front as an employee counted how many people entered and exited.
Once inside, Brown noticed everyone doing their best to keep up social distancing. Customers followed arrows that directed one way down certain aisles.
“There’s still a lot of people in the store,” Brown said. “It’s still pretty full, but everybody was doing a really good job cleaning, and all the customers did a good job kind of backing away from each other when you got to a tight spot.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down retail stores across the country, Brown has done a lot of shopping online. A foster parent, Brown and her family took in four new children during the shutdown and still shopped in person at places like Target, which never closed, to find clothes. With T.J. Maxx opening, she took advantage of being able to look at “other options.”
Kimberlin Honeycutt and Haley Harper had multiple bags between them as they exited the T.J. Maxx. They said they like getting back to shopping — a regular hobby they were deprived of since March.
“I missed retail shopping,” Harper said.
Sunday was the better option to get back inside T.J. Maxx at the Knightdale location. On Saturday, the wait to get in was almost an hour.
The staff had been preparing for the wave of customers since Tuesday, when they were first allowed back inside to mark down prices and give the location a good cleaning. That continued on Sunday, as customers were handed a freshly sanitized shopping cart when they entered. After transactions were made, the staff at T.J. Maxx sprayed and wiped down the cash register before taking a new customer.
At the Marshalls store in Poyner Place across from Triangle Town Center mall in North Raleigh, the line outside was about 10 deep when Alicia Lion walked up on Sunday. Marshalls was the second stop of the day for Lion, who had just left the T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods stores on Falls of Neuse Road, where she said the lines to get in were way longer.
‘Something normal in my life’
T.J. Maxx was the first reopened store Honeycutt and Harper went in over the weekend.
“I needed something normal in my life,” Honeycutt said. “It’s hard on your emotions to not have things, or you can’t just go doing anything you want, so the reopening was nice.”
On a nice day a short wait outside wasn’t bad, but what if it became the norm for shopping? What if every time for the next few months shoppers had to wait in a line before they could enter a store? Would that change things?
Brown said she would adjust and would be OK if this is how it must be.
“It would be frustrating,” Honeycutt said. “But I understand.”
Safety concerns
Shoppers are still asked to practice social distancing while out and about, and protective masks and gloves are still recommended, but not required.
Outside T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, the employees counting the number of customers entering all wore masks and gloves. Inside of T.J. Maxx, everyone had on masks and the employees doing the cleaning wore gloves.
Brown, Honeycutt and Harper didn’t wear masks or gloves as they shopped.
“Yeah, we are kind of past the point of concern,” Brown said. “We were really scared and cautious at first, but with having so many kids you can’t be but too careful. You have to live life and not live life in fear. We weren’t afraid to come out.”
Harper and Honeycutt said they try to be considerate of others while shopping. They avoid an aisle if it’s too crowded and use hand sanitizer often and keep their distance. Both were happy to see the employees inside doing their part to keep the store clean.
As she approached the line outside a Target store, Lion was adjusting her black gloves. As she spoke, she pulled her mask to the side, but kept her distance. The number of people out and about not wearing protective gear was an issue for her.
“I am concerned because some people are wearing masks, some people aren’t,” Lion said. “Some people are wearing gloves, some people aren’t. The six feet, they aren’t doing it. The way the store has been marked up with arrows, they aren’t following that, so it raises eyebrows.”
Lion said what she saw during her Sunday recon mission might send her back into hibernation for a while.
“If I needed something I would (come back out),” she said. “But because I’m seeing people not practicing safety, I’m going back in hunker down-mode a little bit longer.”
This story was originally published May 10, 2020 at 7:26 PM.
