Working in the Covid Era

Working in the service industry can tend to be an underappreciated job but since the pandemic has hit, it has made it a little more frustrating at times. 

Working at the grocery store Sendiks has been difficult at times for people. Whether they don’t feel safe working due to Covid-19 or just the extra stress that has been added to the job, it’s been tough for people. 

When talking to Cody King, a manager at Sendiks, said that at first when the pandemic started it was wild and hectic. Customers would just bombard the store. Many people were wanting to buy toilet paper and cleaning supplies in bulk, and it made all the managers jobs super difficult. “In general customers are more on edge and getting upset about things that they normally wouldn’t get mad about like a price being wrong,” Said King. 

With requiring customers to wear masks Sendiks has a store mandate that requires customers to wear a mask when in the store. Most of the time, customers wear their mask and are not making a fuss about it when asked to put one on. Surprisingly there has been less issues with customers not wearing masks. 

The bigger issues Sendiks faced during the beginning of the pandemic was getting in cleaning supplies. Sendiks had to limit customers to buying only one thing of cleaning wipes, or one bottle of hand sanitizer. Same with toilet paper and paper towels as well, there had to be a limit for customers to one each to ensure we wouldn’t run out and could weather the storm. 

According to King, the only shortages that Sendiks suffered food wise were pork items and Boars Head items, but never had any ground beef shortages. Now though we don’t have any shortages of items and customers aren’t limited to a certain number of items either. 

Sam Albert, a deli associate, said how different work has been for him since the pandemic has started. 

Albert says that there is no more salad bar, they don’t give samples out anymore. Salads instead were premade and packaged safely for customers to grab. Also, since the hot bar was closed down for a while, they had to fill that area with more items which lead to them having more responsibilities and making work a bit more stressful. 

“My sanitation responsibilities really haven’t changed, but it’s just more cleaning, doing it more often, cleaning more often, changing gloves more often and being more careful in general,” Said Albert. 

Cleaning has become more of a top priority around the whole store not just in areas where people work with food. The employees who work the registers clean their areas more often, they clean all the baskets and carts as well after the customers use them. They also go around and clean all handles in the store as well. 

When it came to the people who work customer services and the registers at Sendiks, it can tough for them some days. 

Kayli Humphrey, customer service, said it felt like at times there were two different extremes of customers. There were the people who were super nice and thankful for us being at the store and working. Then there’s the other extreme where they don’t want to wear a mask, or they just don’t appreciate they we are coming to work every day in a pandemic. 

“It’s very frustrating at times because they don’t allow associates to enforce the policy when someone isn’t wearing a mask, it feels like we don’t even have a policy, because when a managers comes up to a customer no wearing a mask they customer can say no or the person is gone by the time a manager comes to deal with the issue,” Said Humphrey. 

This doesn’t happen very often where we have customers coming in with no masks or refusing to wear one when they are asked. 

There are times though that a customer will make a stink about it, and it just makes everyone else day harder. Other customers sometimes become upset or just unhappy with the fact that they are in store following the rules but then this one customer wants to prove a point or just be difficult.