Things are mostly as they were last time in the shops; a bit better, a
bit worse.
On 4 June, the local Lidl had given up again on trying to
restrict the number of people in the shop. Fortunately they all know
what two meters looks like.
Well, some people do, though the aisles aren't wide enough to pass
with that separation anyway. No coughers this time, which is
something, but still barely any masks. Slightly more respect for the
large scary person who actually wants to keep their distance than I
saw last time. The children I saw were doing a better job than the
adults of trying to keep their distance.
The only green vegetable there was broccoli. Even cabbage had vanished.
And I got the last of the mushrooms, and of the cream cheese. Plenty
of meat and bread and so on, though.
In Morrisons, about one-third of people were masked (including all the
staff I saw), and about another third ignored separation and barged
through to wherever they wanted to go. (And they had a more normal
vegetable selection, so that's not a universal thing.)
Neither has anything like one-way sections (except the unified queue
for Morrisons checkouts); both have separation marks outside, but not
inside, but neither is trying to get people to stick to them any more.
Clearly The Problem Is Over and everybody can start to go back to
normal. (What other news stories last more than two months these days?
It's an alien concept.)
- Posted by John P at
11:22pm on
08 June 2020
Here you go, Roger. Steve Ferringo, a musician from Bury, gives a Northerner's take on shopping ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRare4nWLwY
(if the link doesn't get through search for "youtube ferringo t'shop" and you'll find it)
I'm off t'shop, d'you wan' 'owt?
- Posted by RogerBW at
01:59pm on
09 June 2020
Shades of Chas 'n' Dave…
and this would have been largely incomprehensible last year.
- Posted by John P at
11:04pm on
09 June 2020
An uncharitable person would say that with that accent, he's incomprehensible this year too. ;-)
Try Tesco, we've not noticed any shortages, they limit the people and there's a one way system (for the people who can understand the concept anyway).
- Posted by Owen Smith at
01:23am on
10 June 2020
I find wearing face masks immensely difficult, my face gets hot quite quickly and my glasses steam up every time I breath out. Trying to fit them to my nose does not work, I must have an odd shaped nose or face. So I've given up trying. This may make me a bad person but what can I do until someone makes face mask that fits my face?
- Posted by RogerBW at
08:33am on
10 June 2020
Get a better one. When I worked in operating theatres I met some people with very strangely-shaped faces, but a standard surgical mask accommodated them all with no problems.
- Posted by Chris Bell at
09:43am on
10 June 2020
John, the one-way system at our local Tesco is superb: both veg aisles are signed for you to go (as it were) north, so in order to get things from both of them you have to go north up one, swing round the top by the bakery and down the next south-bound aisle (bread and the like, I think it is) and then round by the self-service tills to the other north-bound veg aisle. So of course nobody does, and since they are the first two aisles in the store nobody thereafter pays any attention whatever to the arrows on the floor, on the basis that they are clearly nothing to do with people who are shopping.
Owen, you could make your own out of an old tea-shirt with a bit of kitchen towel between the two layers of it. You are not unique in wearing spectacles, so there must be masks which work for all the bespectacled surgeons; but an old t-shirt is near-enough free and doesn't require scratching around to locate it.
- Posted by John P at
05:17pm on
10 June 2020
Chris: What I mean is that there are people who are hard of thinking and can't grasp the concept of following arrows on the floor. Your Tesco must be a bit different. The veg section on ours is laid out so you can circulate round it in a sort of figure 8 until you get off and go on to the other aisles.
As he says in the video: "Follow arrers on t'floor"
- Posted by Chris Bell at
09:42am on
11 June 2020
I think it's more a case of "Oh for God's sake I'm not doing THAT!" followed by "They're daft, I can't be arsed" -- a variation of differently brained. They do quite happily all queue at two-metre distance in Aisle 12 to be told which till to go to, so it isn't inability as much as cussedness in response to unreason. Well, apart from people who want something in Aisle 12 and barge through for it, which is simply stupidity since they will be obliged to walk past whatever it is on their way out anyway.
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