(I want this for later.) (I’m not sure I’ll remember to write down all the steps the first time, and may need to come back and add some things.)
Some of this stuff is probably overkill! Some is probably underkill! Who knows! The United States government wasted two months going “La la la, this won’t happen HERE!,” so we know very little about what we should be doing to protect ourselves and others! (Here’s an NPR article I found useful: No, You Don’t Need To Disinfect Your Groceries, But Here’s How To Shop Safely.)
So! On a grocery shopping day, I get up and I skip my shower and I get dressed. I wear lighter clothing than I normally would for whatever the weather is. (Between the mask and the stress, I am generally sweating in the store.) I put my hair in a bun. (A ponytail gets tangled in the lower mask tie.) I take everything I don’t need (nail clippers, tweezers, lip balm) out of my pockets and leave those things on the bureau. I take my credit card out of its usual location in my phone case; I put my credit card and keys in one pocket (the soon-to-be-contaminated pocket) and my phone in another pocket (I try not to touch it at all during the trip; it’s just in case of emergency, and also it has my driver’s license in it).
I have breakfast and coffee and I check email and mess around for awhile. In my very limited experience, my grocery store is busiest early in the day: first there is the designated seniors/high-risk time, and then right after that there is another huge rush.
I gather up: my mask; one facial tissue; the shopping list. (I have hand sanitizer in the car.) I always feel like I’m forgetting something important, because normally I have to remember to bring the reusable bags, but those are banned right now. The shopping list goes into the “contaminated stuff” pocket with the keys and the credit card. I wear old shoes I don’t mind not wearing for anything except these errands. If I am wearing one of my pairs of jeans with a too-long inseam, I roll them up a little so they won’t touch the floor. I drive to the store.
Still in my car in the store parking lot, I tuck the folded tissue against the inner upper edge of the mask (this seems to reduce glasses-fogging), and I put the mask on. They’re limiting the number of customers inside, so I go stand in line outside the grocery store, staying at least six feet behind the person in front of me. When it’s my turn to go in, I take a cart; I used to sanitize the cart, but they’re sanitizing the carts at the store now. (Though if hand sanitizer and sanitizing wipes weren’t so scarce, I would still go ahead and use one or the other.) I don’t touch my face or my mask AT ALL, and I am getting pretty good at that, I think, especially compared to the early days when I thought it might be impossible.
Our list is already sorted by aisle, which is very helpful: it’s hard enough to keep track of things while feeling stressed and trying to avoid other customers. I get what I need of anything that appears to be well-stocked; I adjust and take less if something appears to be in short supply (or of course if there is a sign limiting it). I am not at all good at thinking on the fly, so this part is hard for me, but if they don’t have something I need, I am working on making a FAST decision about what to do instead: getting another brand if possible, getting something remotely/adjacently similar if not, or deciding to skip it. If I can’t think fast enough and there is another customer waiting, I loop back around and try the aisle again. I remind myself that part of my panicky feeling is because I am breathing through a mask.
I may get better at this with time (I notice I am a little calmer with each trip), but right now I find I don’t have any mental space for anything more complicated than finding substitutions for something out of stock. For example, Paul mentioned the idea of having a pudding pie for Easter. And in the safety and comfort of home, I thought, “Oh, what a great idea! We could do a chocolate one—or I’ll see what other flavors of pudding they have, and maybe we’ll try something new! Do I maybe remember seeing LEMON pudding? That would be nice and springlike for Easter!” But in the actual store, it put me at MAXIMUM CAPACITY just to pick a graham cracker crust (TWO EXTRA SERVINGS OR REGULAR? EXTRA OR REGULAR???) and find two boxes of chocolate pudding. There was no additional processing available for looking at different flavors. Plus, there were other customers waiting to get at that section.
Anyway. I pay for the groceries. I thank the clerk and bagger for being there (I choke up each time, which is embarrassing but at least adds to the earnestness/sincerity). I put the groceries into the car. I get into the car, take off my mask and drop it on the floor of the passenger side, and use hand sanitizer on my hands and on my keys. I drive home, feeling gross but also appreciating being able to breathe normally again.
I bring all the groceries to the floor of the mud/laundry room, except the ones I bring into the garage to put into the stand-alone freezer. I drop the mask into the washing machine and the tissue into the trash. I wash my hands. I take a sanitizing wipe, and I wipe everything I touched on my way in/out: doorknobs, door edges, car door handles inside and out, the edge of the back door where I touched it to close it, the car door lock, the steering wheel, the radio buttons and volume control, the freezer door handle, the garage-door remote button. My guess is that by the time I drove again, all those things in the car would be safe anyway, but I still do it.
I go back inside, take off my shoes and leave them with the winter boots no one is wearing right now, and wash my hands again. (It’s handy that there’s a sink in the mud/laundry room.) I take a couple of bags at a time from the mudroom to the kitchen, and I load everything into cabinets/refrigerator; I don’t put any bags down on countertops. I put all the empty bags inside one bag, and put those with my errand shoes; I will eventually use those bags for litter box scoopage and so forth, but I give them a cooling off period.
I wash my hands again. I use a sanitizing wipe to wipe down the fridge/freezer door handles, the cupboard handles, the edge of the cupboard I used to close it (next time I plan to use the wipe to do the closing, but I forgot this time), the sink handles. I try not to lose my mind on this. I wipe down my credit card, and the outside of my phone even though I didn’t touch it while I was at the store. I wash my keys with soap and water. I wash my glasses with soap and water, while giving my hands another washing.
I go upstairs and put all of my clothes into the laundry basket. I don’t know if it’s necessary to shower after shopping, but I feel Contaminated if I don’t, and Happier if I do, so that’s why I postpone my morning shower and take it after shopping. I then put my towels into the laundry (this is more a way to make sure I’m remembering to change my towels, rather than an actual decontamination thing). I put on all clean clothes and put my stuff back into my pockets. I take the rest of the day to recover, and to imagine that my throat Already Feels Weird.
I haven’t been to the grocery store in a couple of weeks – since before masks were recommended. This is helpful, especially the tissue trick.
Also: <3
I was going with gloves and antibacterial gel in my car but since they came out and said that obese people are at a greater risk I didn’t go to the supermarket this week and just did a pickup order for during the week that my husband will pick up, hopefully we will have most of the things that we ordered. This means that I won’t be leaving the house at all anymore :(
I also don’t know “What We Should Be Doing,” but I can at least offer you the solidarity that your routine is almost identical to mine except we can only use reusable shopping bags where I live (a wonderful thing in non-pandemic times!), so all my bags go directly into the washer with my clothes when I’m done.
we can no longer use reusable bags here because they don’t know that they’ve been washed and it’s putting the baggers at risk.
They won’t let us use reusable bags here at the moment! Between that and the throwing of *plastic* gloves on the ground instead of the proper receptacle my hopes that this would be good for the environment are slowly circling the drain. We are actually making much of our environmental problems worse! FFS.
Like you I have a contaminated pocket in my jacket where I keep my keys and important cards. I keep my phone in a different pocket, although at stores like Sams and Target I need to use it, so I go to those stores last. When I get to the car I use hand sanitizer all over my hands, the keys, and my phone. My phone is in a case, so I’m hoping the hand sanitzer won’t damage anything and is hopefully doing it’s job. When I get home I use a lense cleaner all over the phone.
I am trying to do the thing where you don’t panic-buy, but it is hard. They were out of toilet paper everywhere, literally every store I went to and I went to five trying to find some. They were out of the regular necessities that I usually buy at the store and I had to either get a different brand or go to another store to find it. I live 30 minutes from the nearest store, so going has always been an undertaking, and now that I’m trying to go every 10 days it is even more of a job. I have to go to a lot of stores and it has been interesting to see how the different stores have been handling things. Aldi has completely changed their practices. Target is out of almost everything (milk, TP, flour,etc), although it doesn’t help that they are switching their flour and other necessities to good and gather from the market pantry, Sams is stocked, so is the Walmart neighborhood market (and they are sanitizing all carts and metering people in the store like Aldi and Target). My local food lion has been the store that never has cart sanitizer or someone to sanitize the carts, I think I went there for the last time yesterday until this whole debacle is over.
I went to Trader Joe’s and Kroger last night on the way home from work. My Trader Joe’s will now not allow you to bring in reusable bags at all. Kroger will let you bring them in, but will not bag your groceries for you in them. I don’t like to use the self-checkout when I have a cart brimming with two weeks worth of groceries, so I let them bag my stuff in swathes of totally unnecessary plastic bags. So now instead of being able to wash the bags from yesterday’s trip, I have a pile of plastic bags in semi-quarantine under the sink. Grr.
yesterday I asked the bagger to use paper because I always reuse them. Most of the baggers at this store are mentally challenged and he laughed and said, “you’re going to have so many bags!” I had a cart full of groceries that he packed into 16 bags. In one there was just the bottle of pine sol “because it can’t be mixed with other things:”. I’m actually thrilled to have so many bags!
I just went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in weeks. It’s…icky. And I took it a step further and sanitised all the groceries that were perishable. Wiped down the milk jugs before they went into the fridge. Wiped down the strawberry containers. Wiped down frozen corn. Anything else that could sit out in boxes is in “grocery jail” in the garage. Cardboard (cereal, crackers) sits 24 hours. Plastic packing materials 4-5 days, because apparently that’s how long it can last on different surfaces? I’m worried about who was touching the groceries in the store before I picked them up and put them in my cart. Is this overkill? Yes. But, it’s something I can control and makes me feel better.
Yes, that has been on my mind too! I watched that video with the doctor who says you should sanitize the groceries, so now it is on my mind. I started off doing all of it, but lately I have been putting everything on the table and spraying a cloud of Lysol over it and hoping for the best.
It sounds like you are taking great precautions. I haven’t been back to the store in a few weeks because I have been doing online pickup/delivery, but I am sure I will need to go on a TP/cleaning supply run soon, as I can’t seem to get those items through pickup. I will probably do exactly what you are doing.
One thing that has been helpful to me that I probably read here, as this is where I get most of my helpful life tips, is to hide some junk food for later in the week. At the beginning of the quarantine, I did like I normally do, which is to add all of the junk food to the pantry. The kids did what they always do, which is devour the junk food in two or three days. Then they started asking me when I was going to the store. I tried to explain that I just went, that we have plenty of food, and that I am definitely not going back to the store just to get you more ice cream when you just inhaled a whole container of it in two days. So now I have been hiding a few bags of cookies and chips in another cabinet, and I bring it out when things feel slim.
So whichever commenter suggested that recently, thank you!
I hear you. My husband doesn’t understand why going to the grocery store is so stressful now, but you really captured it.
Here is a tip that we use in my research lab. Put your phone in a ziplock bag. You can still work the touch screen through the plastic, and the phone itself is protected. We use this to keep chemicals off the phone when I work in lab, but it works for a pandemic too.
This is a great idea! Thank you!
I didn’t know that it would work through a baggie. Thank you so much for this information!
My pandemic grocery routine now feels woefully inadequate. :(
But I HAD been doing the “hide the snacks and ration them out” thing for a while and that is working well! For my kids AND for me!
I have to hide/ration snacks too.
Our routines are very similar except that I disinfect my groceries or let them wait if possible, and I don’t take a shower and wash my clothes after the grocery run but I do if I’ve been in a medical environment.
Today it took me literally hours to get rid of the panicky feeling after the grocery run. The adrenaline and shakes. I know it’s not rational but my coping skills aren’t helping. Part of the problem was that despite getting there at 7am, it was really busy. Ugh.
We don’t have a garage, only a carport. BUT…I worked on a livestock farm for years, where we were considered the germ carriers and had to follow procedures not to bring any diseases in. We would come in, undress and shower. Then we would put on the clothes provided by the farm-you couldn’t bring any personal items through that shower stall. The only thing from outside that was allowed in was our lunch boxes, and that was passed through a sliding glass window to the break room.
I’m thinking-if you do have a garage, you could keep a change of clothes by the door to the house. If you have water in the garage, do a thorough scrub, change clothes putting yours a plastic tub to be washed later. Leave whatever groceries you can in the garage till they are deemed safe to enter the house. I’m thinking the garage would be a great line of defense against contamination. Let that be your “staging area”, and filter things through there. It would help if you had a fridge or freezer in the garage-I grew up in the Midwest and that was pretty much the beer fridge, but I’m sure not everyone has that.
Third time I’m trying to type this, keep getting disconnected, so short on details. Large family pro-tip: once near front of line, get a second cart. Will clear conveyor faster. Take two trips to car. Worth it.
Your routine is almost identical to my husband’s routine, except he puts everything he wearing directly into the washing machine and runs the wash after he puts the towel into it.
I live in a country that is in the middle of a strict 5 week lock down. We may not leave the house except for essential groceries (non-essential simply are not sold) and medical emergencies – that is it. No going for walks, exercising outside or even walking your dog. From what you describe in your post, what you are doing for a trip to the grocery store is not at all overkill – it is pretty much spot on and similar to my routine. The only thing that I really do differently is instead of placing cards and drivers license in my pockets, they go into ziploc bags. If there is a loyalty card to be used, I swipe it instead of handing it to the teller. Our tellers sanitize their hands between customers and clean the surface where items are put down to be rung up. When I get home, I follow similar steps to you as well. No one in the house may come near me until I have showered and changed, which happens as soon as I am home. When the bags reach the kitchen, I wipe each item down as I take it out of the bags before I place it on counters. When I am done packing away, I sanitize my kitchen counters again, just to be safe.
The other thing that is different for us – though this is not something you would have control over – is that our local shopping center has created separate pathways for people entering and exiting. There is also someone (usually a security guard) standing at the entrance to the center with a bottle of disinfectant and everyone who enters and leaves has to have their hands sprayed. Ditto for the entrance and exit at every shop within the center.
The thing with this virus is that you simply can’t be too careful. Even if you think what you are doing is overkill, I assure you that it is not. There really is no such thing as taking too many precautions at the moment. Keep doing what you are doing, and what you need to do to feel safe.
Just out of curiosity, are you (Swistle and / or commenters) using plastic gloves when grocery shopping? I have no informed opinion on whether we “should” do it or not, but in my country it seems to have become very common. The government has made face masks obligatory when out in public, and most people seem to combine that with gloves, though interestingly the gloves have not been part of official recommendations or rules.
I have not been.
I just… cannot manage to do all of this, even though I know it’s right and smart and the best info we have. I do a small portion of it to try and be safe. But for whatever reason I just cannot make myself take all the steps I read about and my brain agrees are a good idea. I think there’s some part of me that is acting out against this being our reality.
Me too. We live in a country where the outbreak has been very small and containment measures seem to be working. We have maybe 30 cases in our county, 1 in the town where I do groceries, and 1 in the town where I live. Obviously there are more cases, just not confirmed. But grocery shopping is already anxiety-inducing due to all the changes, and it’s like my brain just cannot deal with doing anything more than what I am already doing. Which is washing hands, sanitizing when possible, keeping my phone in my pocket (using a paper list), not touching my face or anything unnecessarily, social distancing, etc.
Not sure if you’ll agree but I found this article comforting/ reassuring.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr