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April 5, 2020

Already stressed, food stores struggle to enforce new, stricter state mandates

PHOTOS | New Haven BIZ Shoppers outside Ferraro’s Market on Grand Ave. in New Haven on Friday, the first day of the new restrictions.
By Michael C. Bingham

On Palm Sunday this year most churches were closed due to the coronavirus crisis. Instead, some of the few people out and about on this quiet overcast morning were pursuing the 2020 version of the liturgy of the palms — shopping for scarce hand sanitizer and other household staples.

At the Dollar Tree store in Milford’s Devon section, a manager in face mask and rubber gloves struggled to keep his customers separated by the state-mandated six feet of personal space. On Friday morning store employees placed strips of orange duct tape on the floor two yards apart to illustrate the new rules to shoppers, most of whom were now wearing face masks of one type or another.

It wasn’t always working.

“Please move back!” he yelled to customers in line at the single cash register that was open. “We all have to do this together.”

On Thursday Gov. Lamont ratcheted up the restrictions on commerce, intended to enforce “social distancing” and slow the spread of the COVID-19 contagion. Executive Order 7S mandated that grocery stores and supermarkets restrict the number of shoppers to 50 percent of store occupancy, make aisles one-way, mark floors to show six feet of spacing and restrict shopping-cart use to no more than two people per cart.

At the time of the announcement, a spokesperson for the governor said local and state police “have the authority to respond” if the rules are disregarded. 

In addition, under the “Safe Stores Rules” retailers were ordered to discontinue all self-service offerings such as salad bars and product samples, and to make employees wear face masks and gloves when dealing with customers and handling food products.

“We’re not really first responders, but we’re pretending like we are,” Stew Leonard Jr. told WVIT-TV on Friday outside his Norwalk store.

At Ferraro’s Market in New Haven, shoppers Friday afternoon lined up in the rain to enter the Grand Avenue store five at a time on cue from a store employee in white butcher’s coat and protective face mask. The store that calls itself the “Meat King” was doing its best to play by the rules.

But not everyone else was falling in line.

“We’ve gotten a number of complaints about grocery stores not practicing social distancing,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker reported during his Friday afternoon media conference. “We’ll be working to reach out to grocery stores to make sure that they are limiting the number of people who go inside at any one time, making sure people waiting in line [to check out] are six feet apart.”

The City of New Haven’s director of public health, Maritza Bond, added that “Obviously, closure [of stores] is not what we want to do. However, we do interventions [when complaints from the public are received]. We’re asking grocery stores to please follow the recommendations and adhere to them so that we can safeguard the community that are shopping at their grocery stores.”

On Palm Sunday morning, shoppers began to queue outside a Dollar Tree store in Stratford.

On Sunday, Elicker said that he had a day earlier "put out a robo-call to all the stores we have on our list for being non-compliant" with the new rules. However, he added, "We are prepared to close down stores if this continues to be a problem."

Faced with forced compliance of the new mandate, grocery store and supermarket workers already stressed from coping with inventory shortages now face an additional new challenge: crowd control of customers who don’t necessarily understand the new rules — or don’t care to comply.

“Everyone’s being unnecessarily aggressive,” reported another dollar-store manager (who asked that his name not be used) of customers. “The rule of one [shopper] per household, they come in with two or three kids, and their grandparents, and they don’t understand.” That is, if they even know. Many, maybe most, shoppers “don’t listen to the news, or they don’t read the sign on the door” communicating the new strictures.

So-called social distancing “has been spoken about for months now, and people still don’t keep their distance — even arm’s length,” the manager says.

On the bright side, panic shopping seems to have subsided as wholesale deliveries stabilize and shoppers conclude they now have enough toilet paper and hand sanitizer to last until perhaps the dawn of the 22nd century.

But there’s another factor.

“There’s less money around now” for shoppers to spend, the manager observed, as restaurant and store closings approach the one-month mark and job losses mount. “With all the gig workers, and lots of restaurants in the area, [it’s evident] how much that’s affecting them.” 

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