Enforcing mask rules often falls on retail workers

The exchange was tense between the customer and Jesse, a Trader Joe’s employee sporting a white face mask and a flowery Hawaiian shirt.

“Why aren’t you wearing the mask?” Jesse asked the customer on a recent day at a store in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “I am not here to question what you believe in. These are the rules. I am just asking you kindly to wear the mask.”

The customer, Genevieve Powers, who was recording the entire exchange, refused. “We are in America here,” she said, “land of the free.” Then she turned her camera on other shoppers, who were less than amused: “Look at all of these sheep that are here, all wearing this mask that is actually dangerous for them.”

Jesse, identified only by his first name in the video, telephoned police, who did not arrive. Finally, when Powers left the store, others customers burst into applause.

As more parts of the country reopen businesses, many retail workers have reluctantly turned into de facto enforcers of public health guidelines, confronting customers who refuse to wear masks or to maintain a wide distance from others. The risk of a violent reaction now hangs over jobs already fraught with health perils.

A Target employee in Van Nuys, California, ended up with a broken left arm after helping to remove two customers who refused to wear masks.

A cashier told a man refusing to wear a mask that he could not buy a pack of cigars at a convenience store in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. He punched her three times in the face.

In San Antonio, a man who was told he could not board a public bus without a mask shot a passenger, police said. The victim was hospitalized, and the gunman was arrested.

And in a confrontation that turned deadly, the security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot and killed after insisting that a customer put on a mask.

Meegan Holland, spokeswoman for the Michigan Retailers Association, said stores were caught in the middle. “People can get belligerent when being asked to do something that they do not want to do,” she said.

Masks have been recommended by public health officials as a key way to diminish the spread of the coronavirus, with at least a dozen states requiring them and many others issuing a hodgepodge of county or municipal orders.

They have also turned into a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars, with some defending their right to not wear one.

“We have individual rights; we don’t have community rights,” said Powers, 56, the customer at the Trader Joe’s store, in an interview this week.

Public health experts said this argument was misguided.

“I never had a right to do something that could injure the health of my neighbors,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University.

Mask opponents generally overlook the fact such regulations are meant to protect other people, not the person wearing the mask, she added.

Americans are navigating a patchwork of conflicting national and local guidance on masks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, initially downplayed the efficacy of masks but now recommends them.

And they have become a ready symbol for those dubious about giving government officials wide powers for an extended period.

Retailers find the confrontations over masks a minefield.

“It is a very hot-button issue,” said Kenya Friend-Daniel, a spokeswoman for Trader Joe’s. The company declined to allow Jesse, the employee involved in the confrontation, to be interviewed.

“We do not want to put our crew members in the position to have to enforce something like that,” she said, noting that customers “overwhelmingly” wear masks.

In all its 505 stores, Trader Joe’s has put up signs recommending that customers wear masks, not least to protect its employees, Friend-Daniel said.

Refusing is not grounds alone for being ejected from a store, she said, even where wearing masks in public is the law, but creating a disturbance that bothers other customers is.

Target, in places where masks are the law, has stationed security employees outside its stores to remind customers to wear them, said Jake Anderson, a spokesman.

Stores are not the only businesses involved. Uber announced that starting Monday, drivers and riders must wear masks, and those who refuse can be kicked off the platform.

Smaller retailers feel especially vulnerable to balancing the need for safety and the need to revive their bottom line.