If you think coronavirus closures at Smithfield and other slaughterhouses will mess up our food supply at the production end, what will happen when sick Walmart workers close down the consumer end?
An employee in the electronics department at Walmart on Arrowhead Parkway in Sioux Falls reported working April 4 through April 7; the employee worked during these times:
- Saturday, April 4 – 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
- Sunday, April 5 – 4 p.m.-10 p.m.
- Monday, April 6 – 5 p.m.-10 p.m.
- Tuesday, April 7 – 5 p.m.-10 p.m.
A cashier at Walmart on S. Minnesota Ave in Sioux Falls reported working April 4 and April 5 during these times:
- Saturday, April 4 – 10 a.m.-7 p.m.
- Sunday, April 5 – 10 a.m.-7 p.m.
Customers who visited these Walmart locations during the specified dates should monitor for symptoms for 14 days after the date they visited [“COVID-19 Exposure Warning for Two Walmart Locations in Sioux Falls,” KELO-TV, 2020.04.13].
Those two Sioux Falls Walmarts may not generate the same infection spike that Smithfield has. We’re up to 350 Smithfield Sioux Falls workers with coronaavirus, out of 654 cases in Minnehaha County and 868 statewide, in part because meathackers work in unavoidably close, messy conditions. Working at Walmart may suck, but at least you aren’t shoulder to shoulder with sweaty co-workers all day long. Walmart can maintain operations and still keep employees apart—dispatch stockers one to an aisle, direct them to keep a safe distance from customers—and take other precautions that don’t slow commerce down too much—put up cashier shields, urge more people to the self-check lanes, and wipe down the scanner and debit card keypad after each purchase.
But there will still be plenty of people who hear this news and say, “Maybe I’ll just go to the Marion Road Walmart or Target or Hy-Vee for the next couple weeks.” And suppose one case at each store did turn into ten or twenty tomorrow, and the city decided it had to order a quarantine of those stores. How would we go about distributing essential goods to the people of Sioux Falls with two major outlets for provisions shuttered? One of the last things we want to do is crowd more people into fewer stores.
What if we needed to simply declare a city-wide shutdown, including the grocery stores, to starve the virus of contagion opportunities for two full weeks or more? Could we come up with a safe way to distribute basic provisions to every resident of Sioux Falls that didn’t involve thousands of people going in and out of a few giant commercial spaces each day? Could the Sioux Falls Police and Fire Departments with maybe some backup from the National Guard (Don Jorgenson doing airdrops!) organize a citywide Meals on Wheels to deliver sanitized ration boxes to every household?
The more I think about it, the more I miss capitalism, that magical force that makes things like my full fridge happen without any real plan. Our pantry plenitude spontaneously arises from the Brownian motion of millions of molecular buyers and sellers with mostly happy outcomes and minimal risk to all participants aside from morbid obesity and maybe climate change (which— dang it!—is still happening). Neither my grocer nor I had to put on surgical gloves and masks to engage in a simple transaction, and we didn’t have to think about what we would do if it wasn’t safe to go to any store in town.
But here I am, hearing about two sick Walmart workers and thinking about the how we might manage to keep everyone alive if shut down everything and had the police (or drones! drones!) deliver rations to everyone’s door.
In addition to all workers wearing masks, barriers between cashiers and customers, spacing and other things I’ve seen in many stores, they could put sign on their doors that say “No Masks, No Entrance.” Perhaps even more restrictions- “Failure to Maintain 6 Ft Spacing Will Result in Your Removal from This Store.”
I’m sticking to smaller, less busy stores. Today in Dollar Tree the manager was barefaced and the cashier wore her mask over her mouth, but not her nose! 🙄
Thankfully, Costco, Fareway and Aldis have put a halt to the Walmart/HyVee grocery monopoly in SF.
There is an Aldi here in Northfield and it’s a great store. No frills, small $, nice people. There are a few things I have to get at other stores, but not many.
In Madison, we just have the one full grocery store, Sunshine Foods. I went there on Sunday, wearing a face mask covering both my nose and mouth. I only saw about five or six other shoppers wearing masks. Staff wasn’t wearing masks at all, and there were no sneeze guards in place at the registers. The place was packed, making social distancing difficult if not impossible.
Can’t vouch for Lewis Drug or Dollar General as I haven’t been to those places since the pandemic began.
The red snow queen of “we’re on meth’ infamy made the front page of the Washington Post for her bungling by not having a simple public health order.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/south-dakotas-governor-resisted-ordering-people-to-stay-home-now-it-has-one-of-the-nations-largest-coronavirus-hot-spots/2020/04/13/5cff90fe-7daf-11ea-a3ee-13e1ae0a3571_story.html
There are 2 reasons for the spread of COVID-19:
the density of the population, and
the density of the population.
Somebody primary her. Please.
John gets the prize for Best Turn of Phrase of the day. :-)
Wade, I’m disappointed to hear Sunshine and its Madison customers aren’t taking the coronavirus seriously. Are they at least managing to stay apart from each other in the store?
Is Madison Pizza Ranch still open?
Aldis, Fareway… I wonder… is there an argument to be made here, in the discussion of agricultural distribution, for decentralization and increased competition as there is in agricultural production? Would coronavirus be easier to control if grocery shopping were parceled out among lots more small corner grocery stores?
Why would someone come to work sick? The pandemic has brought old questions back into focus because the consequences of illness have magnified. Unfortunately, the old answers to that question remain: workers do not have sick leave, so staying home costs them wages; workers in these positions live on tight budgets, so cannot afford to lose days of wages for proper recovery; our health care system — especially for these workers — focuses on treatment, not prevention and health.
Low wages and benefits keep business competitive and profitable.
kremlin annex wants to help out big ag by lowering guest worker’s pay…
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/10/832076074/white-house-seeks-to-lower-farmworker-pay-to-help-agriculture-industry
Cory: Sunshine doesn’t even seem to have a system in place for keeping people 6ft apart while waiting in line. As for Pizza Ranch, I believe they have gone take out only like many other fast food restaurants. Unfortunately, there are still a few places that have open dining rooms, such as El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant downtown. They just reduced their hours. Stadium Sports was also late to the game, only closing the dining room last week.
There’s also a closure that’s rather sad too. Just a few days before the pandemic was declared on March 11th, China Moon closed their doors indefinitely. The sign on the door indicates the “current situation” (read: Coronavirus spread in other states) as the reason. Rumor has it their business had gone down since the Coronavirus started spreading in the US back in January and February. Who knows if they will even reopen once everything is given the all clear to open again.
In the other Madison, in Wisconsin, the stores are doing quite a lot to keep people safe. Nearly everyone is wearing masks, except some of the stocking crew. They’ve put up plexiglass dividers between the patrons and cashiers. Distancing cues are marked on the floors. Carts are sanitized after patrons use them. Shoppers are following distancing guidelines and 90 percent are wearing masks. I take advantage of the senior hours between 6:00-8:00 am. There aren’t many shoppers then.
I haven’t heard of any people at the grocery stores getting sick here. I hope that continues.
o – Make that focus on treatment FOR PROFIT. The more and the worse, the better. I.E., the sicker the population – the more profit there is in it.
Yep, John wins the Interweb Tubes today!
“the density of the population, and
the density of the population.’
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
We have a problem with how we do our finances. In Europe, transactions are done electronically more so than here. An example is a village that I am familiar with. That small village is close to a hub type of city that has grocery stores. So you can order your groceries and have them delivered to your home. In this case, about 10 miles more or less. If the order is over 50 Euros, delivery is free. Under, you pay 5 Euros. The goods are covered and delivered from the store by an employee dressed in protective gear, including face mask. The hand held device is covered with plastic and you put your card in and put your code in. The card is then sanitized and given back. All is done and you and your family are taken care of, without contact.
Why not use the postal system for those deliveries?
Is there some value reason Noem can’t mandate these workers–vectors that they are however necessary that they be—wear a mask? She needs be asked the question.
Need groceries? Visit people who make a million a year and wealthy real estate holders like drumpf and SIL…..from WAPO today..
By
Dana Milbank
Columnist
April 14, 2020 at 5:00 p.m. CDT
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have insisted that Congress spend another $250 billion on small businesses devastated by the pandemic, but they refuse to “renegotiate unrelated programs” from last month’s emergency coronavirus bill.
What are they afraid of?
Well, maybe it’s this: As the dust settles on the $2.2 trillion legislation, it has become clear that one of its largest provisions, a $170 billion tax giveaway, appears to be tailor-made for the benefit of wealthy real estate investors such as President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is running one of Trump’s coronavirus task forces.
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
The giveaway, primarily to real estate investors and hedge funds, is larger than the total amount in the legislation for hospitals ($100 billion) and for relief for all state and local governments ($150 billion). Worse, the bonanza for these millionaires and billionaires has little to do with the coronavirus: It lets them offset losses not just from 2020 but from 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic.
AD
This is repugnant. Cash-strapped states don’t have the funds to care for the sick, much less to do the testing, contact tracing and isolation needed to reopen workplaces and schools. As The Post’s Tony Romm reported Tuesday, more than 2,100 U.S. cities expect major budget shortfalls — and therefore possible cuts to vital public services.
But this provision gives tax filers who earn more than $1 million a year an average windfall of $1.6 million this year alone. (Compare that with the $1,200 break the average wage earner gets.) As The Post’s Jeff Stein reported Tuesday, the Joint Committee on Taxation found that 82 percent of the benefit of this and another tax giveaway in the coronavirus relief bill will go to the 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million — and just 3 percent to those who earn less than $100,000.