It’s holiday shopping season: How well are stores and customers practicing COVID safety?
In the Home Depot in Hillsborough earlier this week, every employee and every customer but one wore a mask while moving through the aisles on a bustling work-day afternoon.
The same was true across the parking lot at Walmart, where early holiday shoppers mingled with grocery shoppers. A single customer in the busy store, an older white male in a black “MAGA” hat, was not wearing a mask.
Seven months ago, it was a very different scene. When The News & Observer surveyed nearly 50 businesses across the Triangle in May to observe how customers and stores were adapting to new safety protocols designed to stem the spread of COVID-19, only half of the customers in both stores, at most, wore masks. Almost all employees did, but many wore them incorrectly, leaving their noses exposed or chins protected.
The two stores sit propped along the Triangle’s urban-rural divide, along Interstate 40, within reach of dense populations in Durham and Hillsborough as well as expanses of farmland in Orange, Alamance and Durham counties. The observations there were typical of the Triangle at large, where compliance to mask directives and other health measures was half-hearted at best.
The difference across the Triangle from May until now is striking.
Just as we did then, members of our newsroom visited more than 60 businesses in the Triangle over a five-day period, Friday through Wednesday (Dec. 4-9). We observed how many customers and employees were wearing masks and whether stores were continuing to implement safety measures like capacity controls and social distancing guidelines, especially during the busy holiday season at a time when North Carolina is setting daily records for new COVID-19 cases.
Our observations found employees are nearly universally masked (and most wear them correctly), especially at mass-market retailers. Shoppers who are not masked are now the rare exception instead of a narrow majority.
There are still issues with social distancing, just as there were in May, especially in self-checkout areas and places where people gather. And in stores that have used one-way aisle markings, they are invariably ignored. Something as simple as Plexiglas barriers at checkout stands, a novelty then, are ubiquitous now.
As are our concessions to our new reality: At the Walmart in Morrisville, the ear-piercing station is closed, and a banner advertises “fun fashion masks” instead.
People are wearing masks
In May, the recommendation — or requirement, in some areas — to wear a face covering was new, and ran contrary to what guidance had been earlier in the pandemic, when there was a run on surgical masks. We observed then that about 80% of the stores we visited had either more than half or all employees wearing masks, but that customers were far less likely to comply, with fewer than half wearing masks in the majority of stores.
That has changed dramatically.
In almost two-thirds of the stores we visited in the past week, we observed universal compliance, with every employee and every customer wearing a face covering. In only two locations — a Lowe’s in Pittsboro and the Cotton Company, an artists’ collective in Wake Forest — were any employees at all seen unmasked, and the one at the Cotton Company was an artist working alone in his studio. At a Walmart in Clayton, there were issues with employees wearing masks, but not masks correctly.
At a Compare Foods in Durham, all employees in the checkout area, the produce section, bakery and meat department were masked. There is a full-service hair salon inside the grocery store where two people were getting their hair cut, and masks were being worn by both the hairstylists and the people receiving haircuts. The only person not wearing a mask of the roughly 100 inside the store was the jewelry case clerk, who was surrounded completely by a Plexiglas casing.
Triangle residents have also adopted mask-wearing as part of their routine. In May, about a third of stores were observed to have about half or fewer customers wearing masks. There were only three in the latest survey that didn’t clear the 50% mark. One was the CVS on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, a busy drug store heavily patronized by N.C. State students and employees. The store itself has been diligent about COVID protocols; the customers not as much.
Most stores we visited were like the two stores in Hillsborough, where the unmasked were outliers. At a Target in Holly Springs, there were only two customers not wearing masks. At a Walmart in Garner, there were three: an elderly woman, a toddler and a construction worker who had been working outside the store. In Cary, cafe customers at Barnes & Noble would take off their masks while eating, and some would then leave them off while they wandered the store with a cup of coffee.
Where there are issues, they tend to be endemic. One afternoon at a Target in Garner, 26 customers were either not wearing masks or wearing them incorrectly, about a third of the total in the store.
At the Crate & Barrel at The Streets at Southpoint mall in Durham, an employee at the door charged with limiting the number of customers in the store offered masks to shoppers without one and refused entry if they weren’t worn.
Social distancing remains an issue
The vast majority of retail outlets now have Plexiglas shields at registers and floor markings to keep patrons distanced while waiting in line. Whether those markings are followed is another story.
If there’s one observation that has remained the same since May, it’s that we’re still not very good at staying apart from one another. In stores that have one-way directions in the aisles, they were routinely if not continually ignored. (Food Lion puts those markings on the shelves instead of the floor, where they’re harder to see.)
Customers also were observed to have trouble staying 6 feet apart in checkout lines, even when marked, especially when lines run parallel to each other. At a Target in Raleigh, efforts to keep customers socially distant while in line actually created a queue that forced people to stand very close together in a longer line. In several places, checkout lines were observed to extend across main aisles, causing congestion. And even where spacing is clearly marked, like the Walmart on Glenwood in Raleigh, customers routinely ignored it.
Employees, meanwhile, were often observed to work closely together, whether stocking shelves at the Lowe’s in Pittsboro or helping people load Christmas trees onto cars at several locations, a holiday-specific issue. The same was true at Needmore Farms in Fuquay-Varina, where families mingled as they shopped for trees outside.
The availability of hand sanitizer at checkout areas continues to be hit or miss. Some stores have it widely available, or distinguish between “clean” and “dirty” pens.
At a UPS store in Durham, a customer had to ask for it after using a community pen. An employee produced a bottle, squirted it on the customer’s hands, then put it back behind the counter.
But there are other stores that have placed a premium on safety. Pet Supplies Plus in Raleigh has lines of “sanitized” and “unsanitized” shopping carts.
And at DECO, a downtown Raleigh gift shop, Christmas shoppers are welcome, but only a few at a time. Customers without appointments made online have to wait for someone to leave if the store is busy. The store also asks that if you pick up an item you ultimately decide not to buy, you put it in a bin rather than back on the shelf. Staffers clean the items before restocking them.
Staff writers Chip Alexander, Jessica Banov, Danielle Battaglia, Virginia Bridges, Carli Brosseau, Brooke Cain, Will Doran, Tyler Dukes, Zachery Eanes, Jessaca Giglio, Tammy Grubb, T. Keung Hui, Ethan Hyman, Anna Johnson, Dan Kane, Sophie Kasakove, Kevin Keister, Thad Ogburn, Martha Quillin, David Raynor, Aaron Sanchez-Guerra, Jordan Schrader, Ben Sessoms, Josh Shaffer, Scott Sharpe, Lucille Sherman, Richard Stradling, Robyn Tomlin, Dawn Baumgartner Vaughn, Adam Wagner and Julia Wall contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
