Juno News - May 03, 2021


The frustrations of navigating confusing pandemic rules

Mentioned
Anthony
Will society ever return to normal？ Regulating, Censoring and Namecalling

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

244.58

Word count

827

Sentence count

61


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Retail stores in Ontario are shut down to all non-essential retail except for delivery and curbside pick-up. It can be a frustrating experience when you have to learn the ropes each time you go in and out of the store.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey there, I just had a bit of a frustrating kind of silly retail shopping experience that
00:00:10.260 I want to tell you about because maybe it'll resonate with you depending on where you live
00:00:13.980 in Canada, what province you're in, and what sort of restrictions your province currently has in
00:00:18.800 place. I'm here in Ontario, of course, and we have all non-essential retail shut down
00:00:23.960 to anything except for delivery and curbside pickup. But I've noticed different places
00:00:29.340 interpret curbside pickup in different ways. Some of them, it's just like, don't even touch the
00:00:34.780 door, don't come anywhere near us and so forth. Others, you can open the door, you go in and you
00:00:38.980 kind of set a foot in the store and they have a little table set up in front where you pick up
00:00:43.180 your bag or so forth, or you can even, I guess, put in a request and then you tap your credit card
00:00:47.560 right there, right at the front. Maybe the door is always kind of propped up by your back foot the
00:00:51.140 whole time. So always airflow and you're not really in the store and that kind of thing. So everything's
00:00:55.980 slightly different at different stores. And when you go to a store for the first time, at least in
00:00:59.980 this sort of new era, you don't know what you're getting into. So you have to sort of learn the
00:01:04.240 ropes each time you go to a store. So I went to this place, we'd already ordered, we'd ordered online
00:01:08.700 in advance, and then they send you an email to confirm, okay, it's ready. So I show up and I get
00:01:13.040 to this place. I'm standing out front and I kid you not, there were eight different signs saying,
00:01:17.820 if you're picking up for this or that, if you're here from this delivery service or this, if it was an
00:01:23.360 online with a gift certificate or I'm looking at these eight signs, I'm like, what? And then I
00:01:27.500 look in, I don't see any employee to wave to, to be like, you know, come here, I'm a paying customer.
00:01:31.600 Can we, you know, do a little, can I tell you, I'm here to pick up, this is my name and so forth.
00:01:35.660 So instead I opened the door and I look and I say, hello. I'm like, I don't know what's going on.
00:01:39.760 What are, maybe they're doing it differently here. I don't know. So I step foot in the store and I say,
00:01:44.840 hello. So I'm one, one foot in the store and then someone comes around, they've been hiding in back or
00:01:50.420 doing some workout back or whatever. And the person comes up front and they're like,
00:01:52.900 you're not supposed to be here. Get out of the store. And right away, cause whatever, I'm happy
00:01:59.380 to follow the rules. I was like, sorry. So I get out of the store and I step back and then, you know,
00:02:03.880 I get back there and so forth. And once, once I'm outside, once I'm there, then they say, well, you
00:02:09.140 know, what, what would you like? And I say, my name's Anthony. I got the thing to pick up and they
00:02:12.160 say, okay, fine. And then they give it to me and you know, I leave and so forth and whatever. I got it
00:02:16.700 and so forth. They didn't write the rules. These are just the employees. I don't think it was the
00:02:20.080 owners. It was a chain store and so forth. But I'm just kind of like guys, just a couple of weeks
00:02:24.740 ago, the store was open for people to go in reduced capacity, but you could have, you know,
00:02:29.460 whatever, 10 people milling about in the store. And probably in a couple of weeks time, the stores
00:02:34.460 are going to be reopened again, kind of thing. So it's like, you know, the, the heavy enforcement
00:02:39.460 of the rules where they're like, what are you doing? Get out of the store. I'm like,
00:02:42.960 it's incredibly frustrating. We're all just trying to navigate all of this. And here's,
00:02:47.580 here's kind of the joke at the end here, right beside it is an LCBO, a liquor store. That's it.
00:02:53.540 You can see in the background, I'm in the parking lot right now. And what do I do?
00:02:56.640 I go in the store, I browse around, I pick out some different beers. I go up to the till. I have a
00:03:02.660 nice exchange with the person. I say, thank you. I hope you have a nice day. And so forth.
00:03:05.660 I pay for the beer. I leave pleasant experience. So one store, one building right there. I can't do
00:03:12.380 that. You get yelled at, you have to leave and so forth. Just one foot in the door. I wasn't trying
00:03:15.900 to break the rules. I swear. Laker store and I go perfectly pleasant shopping experience.
00:03:21.760 What on earth is going on?