Love Me my Local HyVee, but...

they're maybe not the brightest bulbs in the box.

After enduring pandemic shopping times with mandatory masks, and a good percentage of customers inside and most schoolchildren masked while shopping still today (likely to keep consistent with wait-until-the-end-of-schoolyear local policies they face outside the store), HyVee employees have started going bare faced, some of them, and more and more of us customers...

What does HyVee do? In the non-self-checkout lanes, they installed over the registers and lanes, overlapping( huge colorful beach umbrellas, designed to shield a group of four or more from the sun.  (hm. Is this a Pride thing?)

Big Umbrellas -- makes you feel like you are in an open-ended tent in there, nice and intimate with the cashier, and the previous customer still picking up his bags and jug of milk and boxes of pop from the end of the chute and putting them into his cart, AND the woman next in line a few feet back putting her items on the belt...

I'll just use the self check-out, no biggie, but can you picture that one without me pulling out the camera in public and taking a snap?  We went from sanitizing the conveyor belt of grocery items between each customer; mandatory masking and plexiglass barriers; even dots on the floor to stand on and one-way* lanes to direct us, even in the produce section to prevent transmission of an airborne virus... to creating artificial indoor ceiling barrier like a longhouse running over the checkouts, that keep air from circulating freely at points of heaviest traffic congestion, all to push non-grocery summer product... Nothing learned. Oh, Iowa.**

* One way lanes in produce did not last long -- no way are people going to go through the apple aisle to get from the bananas to the berries if they can cut down the side on lettuce lane more efficiently because it's a more direct path -- you can see them, "it's right there"...  And especially when nobody is there, the one-way markings were ignored.  It's like with driving:  you can't cut the corners when nobody is around if you expect the traffice discipline to hold because one day, another vehicle indeed will be coming 'round that corner you are in the routine of cutting. Stay safe; don't cut corners. Not in running, not in sewing, not in driving. Learn this at least, fellow Americans?

**I say that because  I don't think this was anything decided by local HyVee. I would guess those 'uge umbrellas were hung under corporate schematic directions, meaning: in all the stores. Like most retail today, I don't think the HyVee's sneeze locally  (or set sales prices***, design endcaps, or make many interior design plans) without input from corporate.

***Except for produce, when they are trying to move perishable items, get new shipments in, and are continually restocking. That's at the front of our store, which I'm most familiar with...

Make it a great humpday, friends. Remember not to sneeze unmasked under the beach umbrella as we start to move into air-conditioner indoor-air-transmission season up here! Remember there's no vaccination against the common cold, so common-sense prevention measures still apply, like before...  (Don't crawl into an enclosed or even open-ended tent with sneezy stangers, and don't let any corporate practices force you into such a chute either!  Take that packed cart to the self-checkout line, if need be.  

Your health is your wealth still, and defensive measures taken under your own instincts are often more self-protective than all the groupthink decision-making the msters-in-charge make on your behalf today. Take care how and where you are being steered...