Store chains at odds over book ‘quarantining’
QUARANTINING books would not work because it would require an assistant to follow shoppers around a store and confiscate every book they touched, the owner of HMV says.
Doug Putman argued that it was far better to provide ample hand sanitiser and encourage its use to prevent the spread of the virus in-store.
The HMV owner was responding to plans by Waterstones to quarantine books customers touch for 72 hours before putting them back on the shelves.
Both high street chains will welcome customers for the first time in three months today as lockdown measures in England are eased, allowing all nonessential retailers who can guarantee they are “Covid-secure” to reopen.
Waterstones management plan to install book deposit trolleys, where customers can set down books they looked at but decided not to buy. They will then be stored away for three days “until any threat from coronavirus transmission has been eliminated”.
But Mr Putman, whose entertainment stores in the US and Canada have already reopened, said while HMV had initially considered isolating the music, films and games it sells, management had concluded it was not possible.
He said: “You can’t watch every person in the store, unless you have a personal shopper with each person.
“We’ve gone through this in Canada and the US, and we’ve had similar retailers make similar claims. And I went in … and watched, and picked up books and put them down. ”
HMV customers will be invited instead to sanitise their hands when they enter any of its 93 stores in England, and it will be “mandatory” to sanitise when flicking through books.
Kate Skipper, Waterstones chief operating officer, said quarantining measures for books had worked “quite well” in Europe and the US. “Everyone seems to be adjusting and it seems to be a relatively simple procedure,” she said.
Customers would not be made to sanitise their hands, she said, but added that she thought it would become “default” behaviour to do so when entering a store and seeing a sanitiser station.