Southern grocer Winn-Dixie will require masks after all

“Stronger Together. Winning Together. Let’s help each other stay safe,” says the coronavirus web page of Southeastern Grocers, parent company of Winn-Dixie, which operates hundreds of stores across the South.

And yet, Winn-Dixie waited until late Monday to announce that it will be joining the stampede of large grocery retailers requiring customers to wear masks in their stores. The company said it will require masks as of next Monday.

Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, Kroger and Publix announced last week that they will mandate mask

wearing at stores nationwide. The National Retail Federation has encouraged retailers to set nationwide mask policies to protect shoppers and employees, and nearly 30 states now require masks worn in public places.

Southeastern announced at the end of last week that Winn-Dixie stores would not be requiring masks for customers because it did not want to cause undue friction between customers and employees.

“Our associates have seen that mask mandates are a highly charged issue with our customers. We do not want to put our associates in a position to navigate interpersonal conflict or prohibit customers from shopping in our stores,” Joe Caldwell, director of corporate communications and government affairs for Southeastern Grocers, wrote in a weekend email.

However, on Monday afternoon, Southeastern reversed its position, with Caldwell attributing the change to customer feedback. The about-face came a few hours after President Donald Trump tweeted a picture of himself in a black mask and called mask-wearing patriotic.

“It had absolutely nothing to do with President Trump’s tweet,” said Caldwell.

Winn-Dixie has about 500 stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, all states that Trump carried in the 2016 election. Trump wore a mask publicly for the first time July 11 during a visit to a military hospital but until Monday had been otherwise dismissive about mask-wearing.

As many grocers did at the outset of the pandemic, Southeastern Grocers adjusted store hours in March to provide additional time for restocking and extra cleaning. On June 25, Winn-Dixie stores resumed normal operating hours, eliminating that extra time for store cleaning, even as coronavirus cases surge across a wide swath of the United States and states begin rolling back reopening schedules.

And although the grocery chain installed floor decals and Plexiglas partitions at registers and checks workers’ temperatures daily, it has “allowed” workers to wear face masks and gloves rather than requiring them. While WinnDixie has had unions at points in its past, none of its stores are currently unionized.

In an editorial last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed the latest science showing that adherence to universal masking policies reduces virus transmission.

Increasingly, retail employees have been pulled into conflicts about mask-wearing. A security guard at a Family Dollar store in Michigan was killed after trying to enforce a mask requirement. At stores like one Trader Joe’s in California, videos of customer conflicts over mask-wearing have gone viral. And mask rage has become a tool in partisan wrangling.

On July 10, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, representing 1.3 million workers — including employees of Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, Vons and other major grocery chains — joined with a coalition of health experts to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling on governors, members of Congress and the Trump administration to make masks mandatory in all 50 states.

Some Winn-Dixie customers took to social media praising the supermarket chain for “offering adults a place to shop without wearing a mask! This is America! We should have freedom!” Others tweeted their disapprobation: “We will not be shopping at your store. Enjoy your Grim Reaper special.”

Within hours of a report on TMZ that Winn-Dixie was considering changing its 100-year-old name, Caldwell, the Southeastern Grocers spokesman, said in a statement the company had no immediate plans to do that, although it affirmed support for the Black Lives Matter movement.