Diary of a (secondline) clinicianThere has been something of an arms race lately amongst businesses in instituting social distancing measures. For a few weeks now the Australian federal government's restrictions have been stable and clear: stay 1.5m apart from others as much as possible and indoor spaces should allow no more than 1 individual per 4 square metres of floor space. This offers a lot of room for variation in implementation. From supermarkets putting stickers on the ground to indicate where to stand while waiting and using clickers to keep track of how many people are in the store, to stores having compulsory hand hygiene stations at the entrances for use on entry and exit. A particularly amusing example is the kebab store I walk past on the way to and from work. Restaurants only being allowed to sell take-away meals at this time, most have roped off, upturned, or simply removed their in-restaurant patron furniture. Not so this kebab store, which has instead used the tables and benches to make a, admittedly rather artistic, barricade around the bain marie and counter. To pay and receive your food you must lean over a table, reach out and tap your card on the EFTPOS machine held through a gap in the almost roof-high table wall, then collect your food as it is meekly proferred through a similar aperture. "most [restaurants] have roped off, upturned, or simply removed their in-restaurant patron furniture" You would think there would be a consequence to increased waiting, people getting fed up and irritated. Curiously, long lines to enter the grocery store may actually increase the mental estimation of the value of waiting. It's no surprise that people are very bad at apportioning value. You can take an item from a budget store, and sell it for double the price in a higher-end retailer with similar purchasing behaviour. In fact, chains such as Aldi in much of the world and Trader Joe's in the US have centred entire businesses around doing exactly the opposite. So it is that certain queues can increase the perceived value/quality of the store/restaurant/ticket that is being lined up for. "You can take an item from a budget store, and sell it for double the price in a higher-end retailer with similar purchasing behaviour" I am interested as to what the weight of driving forces behind many of these corporate decisions were. Was it an effort to scream safety to their customers in order to continue attracting them? Was it staff demanding they be kept safe and the human resources / legal teams working out the best way to avoid WorkCover claims? Or other forces of which I am unaware. Regardless, as with so many things COVID-19, it will be most intriguing to see which new elements of the way do life go once the threat is over and which remain.
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May 2020
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