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Parents Need to Be Able to Grocery Shop
Outside every supermarket in my area, and in all of Maryland, there are signs: One person per family can enter, and everyone in the store must wear a mask. The only folks I see not abiding by the mask rule are the employees, who often have them hanging around their necks. And I understand it; the second I get outside I rip it off and gasp for air; I can’t breathe with anything over my face for just the amount of time necessary to go grocery shopping; I can’t imagine being expected to wear it all day (new respect for the healthcare professionals who always did).
The other day, my husband was working and I needed to run out to the store to grab some food. He asked me to take the baby with me; I could just wear her while I shopped, and that way, he could continue working without having to entertain her. But I couldn’t, and he had to take two hours off of work to play with her because we had run out of milk, yoghurt and bread.
While I was in line to enter the store, which went around the long way and was 80-100 minutes wait, I saw a woman enter standing there with a baby in a stroller. I wondered what the store would do, and I got my answer about half an hour later. I was at that point at the front of the store and she was still waiting around the back; I saw an employee walk around and then ten minutes later, watched as she buckled her baby into her carseat across the parking lot and drive away. It happened quickly, and not close to where I was standing. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but I’m fairly confident that she was told that she would not be allowed to enter the store. I have been kicking myself for not telling the person behind me in line to hold my spot and approach her. This story came across my Instagram feed and I realized I wasn’t the only one who had an experience like this:
I can’t stop thinking about my mother during all of this; a woman who raised me alone after my father moved out when I was almost three-years-old. I can’t stop thinking about my friend Mary who was widowed at 8 months pregnant several years ago, and who had a two-year-old at home at the time. I can’t stop thinking about my friend Diana, home with her three young children while her husband is deployed.
This situation is unsustainable for parents. Many cannot afford to only online grocery shop, and for those who can, delivery slots are few and far between. If you’re lucky to land one, what you actually end up with is a crapshoot; I average about 40-60% of the order I made because the stores are out of so many items. When I’m shopping I know what substitutions work for our family, and what don’t. Those substitution decisions take a micro-second; but when an online shopper is making them, they required an extended back and forth that one cannot expect from an online grocery shopper.
What if my husband wasn’t working from home and able to help with childcare for these grocery shops? Even in our ideal situation, where I work from home part-time and my husband is earning his regular paycheck while exclusively working from home, it isn’t working. I can’t spend two hours a week to do one grocery shop; leaving him to mind all four kids while trying to work. The day I went grocery shopping, I wasn’t able to get much else done after we did school and I got the bare minimum accomplished for work (public thank you to @blueyeti, @jongabriel and @Max for all of your patience, always).
Expecting only one family member to grocery shop and for them to wear a mask is not a reasonable requirement moving forward. We need to find a way to live our lives while accomodating everyone, and while parents with young children may not be at high risk for serious complications or death from COVID, our society needs to recognize the impossible situation our families have been thrust into by this pandemic and the associated lockdown. Moving forward as we make policy decisions on rules regarding public spaces and schools, these issues need to be considered. And in the meantime, communities need to offer practical help wherever possible (stores have seniors hours, can they also have young families hours? can community organizations pair folks able to shop with those who cannot enter a store – even if they aren’t elderly or high risk?).
Published in General
Of course you’re right. Some of this stuff is just downright silly.
In addition, there are plenty of studies that say the mask recommendation is not, actually, all that helpful. Cloth masks, which most people have, are actually almost useless. So the original position of the CDC was, actually, correct. This new position that everyone should wear a mask is, in my mind, only about making people feel as if they are doing something.
See excerpts from just one CIDRAP article below, all written about studies conducted by medical experts, not my Uncle John in his basement:
“Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), who contributed to the paper along with Sundaresan Jayaraman, PhD, of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said in his weekly CIDRAP podcast yesterday that, because aerosols likely play an important role in coronavirus transmission, cloth masks will do little, if anything, to limit spread of the disease.
Even more, he worries that encouraging cloth masks is emboldening people to try to get surgical masks for better protection, taking them away from frontline healthcare workers, who desperately need them. ‘If we’re right now in a major shortage status—and we will be for the kind of N95 and surgical mask protection—the public should not ever try to get these,’ he said.”
In Pa the grocery stores let you order on the phone and they’ll bring it to your car, but several days later. If you must go in they have huge slow lines that keep everyone in close quarters for long periods. The whole thing shows how easily we can be herded, abused, lined up, shut down because organizations can’t use common sense. How many folks who aren’t old, like me, or ill, who can easily order on line, or go at specific hrs, die from the virus?
I played through this scenario in my head. I would rather tend someone’s child than go shopping for them. But how would a woman trust some strange guy with her child? Within the observant Jewish community, this would happen without hesitation. But for someone who is not within the tribe… I don’t see it.
Great rant. Hour and a half waits to get into the grocery store? Wow. Mrs. Tabby has said no more than 5 minute wait at one of the two grocery stores she patronizes. They ask, but do not mandate, patrons to limit to 2 people per family. When I described the one person per family limit placed on shoppers in your area, she also immediately said, “That’s ridiculous. What’s a mother supposed to do? It’s not like she has a lot of reasonable alternatives.” (and then proceeded to described the same problems you listed with on-line ordering and the likely difficulty or impossibility of having someone with which to leave a small child).
The “lives” we are being ordered to “live” in order to maybe delay some deaths are increasingly looking like lives that many may decide aren’t really lives worth living.
Thank God I live in Arizona. The Safeway and Costco are supposedly limiting the store to 50 people at a time but I have not seen any problems with this for the past three weeks. Masks are optional and I don’t use one. They are theater just like the TSA.
Good point. No queue at 7 Mile in Baltimore. Worth the drive?
I have only had to wait in line at Trader Joe’s in Utah. I didn’t have to wait long because the line moved quickly. I had a hard time shopping before quarantine. Going shopping wears me out. I do have to be choosy about when I go, though. I’m high risk, but I am not a morning person.
I think the one person rule is absurd and wrong. I also hate the limited hours. There are only two grocery stores that don’t shut down at 8:00.
I go for a bicycle ride very early most mornings (4:30 – 5:30 am). One of my routes goes by a Walmart. It is very weird to see an almost empty parking lot (10 – 12 cars, presumably belonging to employees) and closed doors when during normal times even at that early hour there’d normally be 75 – 100 cars in the parking lot, with people entering and exiting the store at a regular pace. The store now opens at 7 am, and on Tuesday at 6 am for people aged 60+.