Essential Service
Hour five of carting your steel three-tier over ice and pavement, it’s racket drowning out any sound but your own drive up hustle. Hop the curb with your foot on its axel, plough through snow and salt and weave past your guests in the automatic doors. Three faces glance your your way as you cut ahead, noses and mouths, breathing and talking and smiling and walking behind you. Park the metal cart and wade through a group of coworkers stocking shelves in the back room or behind the service desk. Five or six maybe? All the coworkers talk about how it’s bullshit once you have a minute to breathe. It’s tight quarters so you’re careful not to clip anyone with the 38lb bags of cat litter you haul to your cart. Four cars waiting, one order stocked. 12 bags, around 60 odd items total. You only have time for one more order, those precious 120 seconds ticking down, take too long and the store director will walkie your team asking what’s gone wrong. There’s only so much two drive up workers can do, and you’re lucky to have backup today. Weave your way through another crowd exiting the store through double doors. They tear their masks of in relief. It must feel good to feel the winter air on their faces.
According to the training videos, the average front of store Target employee greets 160 guests each day. Cashiers are protected by three panels of plexiglass, washed once at 6 A.M. Self check out attendants have less protection. They’re required to stand close to our guests as a form of loss prevention while assisting them at the register. Alcohol purchases, paying with cash, or an item not ring properly mean it’s time for the SCO to get close to a guest. Each of these actions involves touching their used computer screen as they stand roughly two feet away. It’s rare they move any further away. What compounds the danger for a self checkout attended is that guests from the regular check lanes filter through the SCO lane after they’re bagged and ready to leave. For an SCO, contact with guests comes from in front, behind, and nearly always less than three feet.
The overall level of contact the store has with guests is virtually unchanged from pre-pandemic life. Mask safety is mandatory for employees so long as they are customer facing. In the break room it’s enforced like a retail store’s dress code and social distancing rules are nonexistent. Most of Target’s employees wear their masks correctly, but the guests are a mixed bag. Only about 40 percent, even just from eyeballing it after 5 months, wear their masks properly. The others wear theirs below the nose. Maybe a dozen in store refuse to wear masks entirely. Asking them to leave is not permitted.
The life of the drive up crew is worse.
You cart your three-tier past the double doors, over the salt and careful to not drop an item — it wouldn’t be the first time a guest’s purchase had broken on the way to their car. Once across the lot, you scan for one of three silver SUVs and ready your MyDevice for the guest’s for digit code that confirms their order and charges them for the pickup. They roll down their window — no mask. You’re lucky to get more than 5 people a day wearing masks in their car. Sometimes they open the trunk for you, otherwise you touch their car’s handle. There are other times they request you simply hand their items over to them, or put them in their back seat. No mask.
Oftentimes guests comply for less than a minute when approached, then adjust it below their nose or remove it entirely. Other times they request to speak to a manager. Every second means exposure to COVID-19 by speaking to an anti-masker for minutes on end. No matter what they request or how they comply Target employees are unable to force them to leave the store.
The life of the drive up crew is worse.
You are burnt out from requesting your guests wear masks, correctly or at all. It is all you can think about, and that angers turns your mind places it’d rather not go. There is no manager you can request for assistance, no backup from any coworkers. You are at the mercy of your guests in the freezing cold. You’re head is in their cars, their kids are screaming at you. No masks. You unload their entire weeks worth of groceries as fast as you can. You do not request they comply to our state’s safety standards because it wastes precious seconds that would otherwise be spent working to exit their proximity. Get out.
Hour eight on your feet and you are out of breath. You no longer try to avoid your guests, you try to move the three tier outside as fast as you can, anything to be under 120 seconds. Lest your store director walkie you. God forbid a guest has words with you about your time. You no longer look at your guests’ faces because tuning them out eases the anxiety. If your store pretends everything is normal, so can you.
