Soon, You Will Need To Wear A Mask To Enter Virtually Every Major Retail Store In America
If you are adamant about not wearing a mask, you are not going to like this news one bit. Coming into this week, Costco, Starbucks, Best Buy and Panera Bread were requiring customers to wear masks to come into their stores, but most other major retailers were still giving people the freedom to choose whether they wanted to wear a mask or not. I know that a lot of people appreciated this freedom to choose, but it is about to come to an abrupt end. On Wednesday, Walmart and Kroger announced that they will be starting to require consumers to wear masks in all of their stores, and the National Retail Federation is pushing all of the rest of their members to do the same thing. In the days ahead it is expected that most of them will follow suit, and that means that soon there will be very few major retail stores that you are able to enter without wearing a mask.
Walmart says that they decided to make this change in order to “bring consistency” across all of their stores. The following comes from the official Walmart website…
As the number of confirmed cases has spiked in communities across the country recently, so too have the number and types of face covering mandates being implemented. Currently about 65 percent of our more than 5,000 stores and clubs are located in areas where there is some form of government mandate on face coverings. To help bring consistency across stores and clubs, we will require all shoppers to wear a face covering starting Monday, July 20. This will give us time to inform customers and members of the changes, post signage and train associates on the new protocols.
In the region of the country where I live, there are a ton of people that feel very strongly about not wearing masks, and this announcement is going to hit them really hard.
There is only one Walmart within a 90 minute drive of where I live, and virtually everyone in the region pops in there at some point. But now those that do not want to wear masks will be excluded, and there will be some very hard feelings over this.
If you try to enter a Walmart without a mask next week, you will be greeted at the door by a “Health Ambassador” wearing a black shirt. I find it very interesting that they specifically chose the color black, and I think that it would have been helpful if they had chosen a more friendly color. In any event, these new positions are being created in order to ensure that only people wearing masks are able to get into the stores. Of course Walmart is trying to make this sound as non-threatening as possible…
In addition to posting clear signage at the front of our stores, Walmart has created the role of Health Ambassador and will station them near the entrance to remind those without a mask of our new requirements. Our ambassadors will receive special training to help make the process as smooth as possible for customers. The ambassadors, identifiable by their black polo shirts, will work with customers who show up at a store without a face covering to try and find a solution. We are currently considering different solutions for customers when this requirement takes effect on July 20.
Needless to say, this announcement by Walmart is likely to spark an avalanche of other announcements by major retailers.
In fact, Kroger and Kohl’s made an announcement just hours after Walmart did…