With stay at home orders in place allowing only essential travel, Summit County grocery stores are one of the few place’s residents can still go to.
Owner Manager of the Park City Market Mike Holme has decades of experience in the grocery business. His team is dedicated to cleaning and sanitizing, but he says it’s hard because they can’t keep the disinfectant wipes in stock. He says when they run out, they use a strong spray solution to sanitize shopping carts.
“I feel like we’re workhorses, galore. But you know what, we've stayed healthy and we’re sanitizing cleaning every day, every night, and trying to keep everybody going. Equipment, gloves, lots of just sterilizing registers, doorknobs, carts.”
There are about 40 employees in his store on a typical day. They use health screening to make sure everyone is well before they come to work.
“Every day, we ask them the questions. Are you feeling any symptoms? Do you have a fever? We actually take a temperature and take their temperature when they come to work and so we record that, log it in and we won't let our workers come to work if they're showing any symptoms at all.”
Holme is carefully following cues that come from the County Public Health Department and the CDC.
“The CDC and the health department have restricted reusable bags for the next indefinite period. People cannot bring their bags back to the store currently. That came out last Friday and so we are frantically trying to get the word out on that. What's frustrating for us is we just trained a lot of people to bring their bags to the store and now we're telling them please don't.”
Holme says there’s a possibility there will be new guidelines dictating how people flow through the store.
“The flow of the store has not been implemented yet. They’re talking about possibly doing that, where there are arrows and it flows in a certain direction, where you couldn't double back. Once you pass the produce you can't go back to get it. They haven't done that yet, but they are talking about it.”
Smith’s Food and Drug has adopted capacity limits by 50% in all stores. They will monitor the doors with a special technology already in place that they use to count customers entering and exiting stores. Smith’s declined to comment further on the directive.
Whole Foods Market also declined comment for this story directing inquiries to their website which has a link showing the measures the market is taking to deal with COVID-19 health and safety requirements.
Fresh Market’s website directs customers to a page addressing COVID-19 in a letter to their customers and employees.
