Sanitation in Real Life

Approximate Reading Time: 5 minutes

I went out to shop for groceries. Our county has been declared the epicenter of Covid-19 contagion for all of Pennsylvania. Hence only stores that serve the public with vital household necessities are permitted to remain open: groceries, pharmacies, etc. Even the state liquor stores in Montgomery County must close their doors (online ordering for shipping to one’s home is still possible) indefinitely by Monday, midnight.

Anyway, on my foray this morning, I visited an outlet for a chain (Trader Joe’s; we are regular consumers of a very short list of their generally excellent frozen products, and they are managing to keep themselves stocked, now that the initial tsunami of hoarders cleared out their shelves in virtually every TJ’s for a period of three days), and stocked up on what was unavailable my last visit. I also then visited two specialty purveyors: the gourmet cheesemongers Di Bruno Brothers, and Stoltzfus Family Farms, a Lancaster County-based business whose image and brand deploys memes that leverage an Amish heritage to be inferred, and which offers bakery goods, produce, beef, pork, and poultry. Most of the sales staff behind the bakery and produce counters are women, mainly young women, always dressed in frocks, aprons and bonnets transmitting the brand values. The butcher counters are mainly staffed by men in white coats and aprons.

What struck me (and with entirely containable levels of alarm at the signs of notable laxity in what I know from nine years now of patronizing both establishments—a laxity that is notable mainly as a baseline norm, and clearly not visibly altered in practice, even in a time when almost all other vendors are closed in the marketplace their counters are installed—and these two retailers probably dominate, I’m guessing, about 45-50% of the available retailing space) was how business was as usual.

Of course in the larger scheme of things, it’s probably good to adhere as much as sense permits to the usual ways of conducting oneself in transactions with others, including how vendors and retailers do business with us, the consumers.

However, there is the heightened awareness demanded by the conditions of a national state of emergency, of a general, if largely passively imposed, regime of the practice of social distancing, and of the repeated instructions about the most fundamental aspects of the disease we are trying to control: how it spreads, and sensible, doable, personal hygienic practice to ensure prophylaxis that will minimize the risk of infection of society at large.

We all feel most keenly the obligation to do so for our own personal protection, and most of us, I am sure, are mindful enough of the need to bear in mind our constituency as a whole as a community that owes to one another, as individual members, simple, most importantly easy, mindful practices.

Yet.

I noticed an absence in all the service areas of both retailers, and they occupy significant amounts of space for counters and displays, which show their wares for display and inspection, and to allow consumers either to make their own choices to be brought to a point of sale, or to allow consumers to interact with sales staff to retrieve the desired portions of desired products. I noticed no dispensers of any sanitizing products in any form: dispensers of sanitizing fluids or foams, dispensers of sanitizing wipes, etc.

Stoltzfus makes some tantalizing baked goods, pastries in particular, and among my favorites, fruit and berry pies, which they sell as whole pies or (to our advantage as a small household) half pies. Today they offered blackberry half-pies, and overcoming my mild misgivings (the pies are already packaged in clear polystyrene containers), I asked over the counter for the young woman who offered her assistance for one half-pie. She retrieved it, put it on the counter, offered me a bag, and recited the price.

I already had a shopping bag, half-full, which I had intended for any purchases on this foray, so I declined the bagging, and then, remembering their sales procedure, retrieved (with some chagrin) my wallet, and extracted a charge card, which I handed to her. She handed it back, and I declined the proferred receipt and went on my way.

One of my tasks thenceforward for my return journey home, was to remember everything that I had touched that also had been touched by others in my presence, and which I had to presume had been touched by yet others, an incalculable number of people, before being placed within my personal reach.

Fact is, I had come equipped with a pair of disposable clinical gloves in my pocket, for any, what I’ll call far more radical, contingencies, but I hadn’t donned them. There was nothing much such protection would do to avert the risk of spread by the touch of ungloved others.

For my other transactions this morning (at two other points of sale), I was able to rely on my usual and preferred mode of payment, Apple Pay, via my iPhone, which eliminates at least one, and possibly, usually at a minimum of other potentialities, three other people touching my personal belongings. I had retrieved the goods I purchased. I bagged them. They were touched only by sales staff only to be scanned for pricing—the possibly irreducible minimal risk we all face by submitting to the need to re-stock our household foodstuffs.



But Stoltzfus. Stoltzfus.

When I got home, I extracted the pie container, our treat and reward for later, to compensate for the continuing enforced sequestration. I wiped it down, on all surfaces with a Clorox brand bleach based disinfectant wipe.

I removed my wallet, and all the cards I touched and all the cards they touched, and wiped them down, and wiped down the wallet.

Is this infallible? Of course not. Is it safer than trusting to the vagaries of normal retail practice (images of all the signs in all the public restrooms in all conveniences and points of purchase you have ever utilized, saying, at a bare minimum: Employees must wash their hands before returning to work should be running in a stream through your consciousness; it does mine… often). You bet it’s safer. Though it, at the very least, annoys me to know I must do such things to compensate for what should be the far more conscientious practice of everyone who serves the public.

The fact is, people, most people, have no true conception of what the words “microscopic,” “aerosolized,” “disinfected,” “droplet-borne,” among others mean in terms of understanding the scrupulous practice we are all capable of, but in the main, in “real life” eschew as unnecessary, unreasonable, and tedious.

I’ll end by saying, the only things I would add to the short list of social distancing dos and don’ts are:

• Avoid all physical contact with others, directly or indirectly.
• Handle your own credit cards and allow no one else to touch them.
• Use a hand sanitizer, or, better, wash your hands, after pressing keys or in any other way touching public means of performing monetary transaction.
• If you’re particularly nervous, simply that scrupulous, wipe down all retail grocery packaging before restocking your pantry shelves after a shopping trip.

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3 thoughts on “Sanitation in Real Life

  1. Here in the Air France lounge in Paris airport, gloved and masked staff serve from what is usually an open buffet. Glad to see that, but coffee and tea are dispensed from push button machines but there isn’t hand sanitizer nearby. Of course we have it with us but still.

  2. Our local farmers’ markets instituted a full suite of precautions this past weekend. Increased inter vendor spacing, no sampling, no customer handling except of their purchase, one vendor per stand devoted to money handling, lots of gloves (including me) disposed of often, no hugs. Many of the farms are offering on farm drive by pickup. The local small farms group is working with local pantry groups to get food to people who need it. Our local very good distillery is freely supplying sanitizer to restaurants. Etc.

  3. Well…uh…the actual “short list” is:
    1. Stay home.

    And the best rule is:
    Act like you have the virus and are trying not to give it to anyone else. This works both because it is somehow easier to think about your actions in that way, and also because it might be true (incubation period).

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