Juno News - May 03, 2021


The frustrations of navigating confusing pandemic rules


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

244.57808

Word count

827

Sentence count

57


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).
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?