The business of mask wearing

If you’ve visited a Walmart, or similar store recently you may have noticed that all of the store employees are wearing masks, but fewer and fewer shoppers are.

Why?

It’s simple… we live in the United States, land of lawsuits.

Obviously the stores don’t want to be sued for giving customers’ coronavirus, so they insist that the employees wear masks. And although customer wearing of masks was initially enforced, the stores realized that it could cost them revenue. Since customers are anonymous they couldn’t be successfully sued if one customer gave another the virus, as it couldn’t be proved. So I think that the strict enforcement was quietly dropped.

What the public doesn’t understand is that when a person wears a mask it protects other people, not themselves. So when you see a person in a store without a mask, they can more easily infect you while your mask reduces the risk of you infecting them.

That’s why coronavirus hasn’t gone away, as wearing masks outside the home is a good way to reduce infections, but I suspect many transmissions are inside homes where people do not wear masks.

When one family member gets it, they all do. And spreads it around.

Not so on airlines, where everybody has a name and a seat, so it was easy to find who sat where. That’s why you wear a mask on an airplane, or else you don’t fly.

It’s just business. The stores don’t really care if you catch coronavirus; they just don’t want to be successfully sued. The lost revenue won’t be much, but losing customers who refuse to wear masks can be a significant loss of business. And that’s why.

Sad.