We wash/scrub literally everything that enters the house other than air currents. Cash included.
I also prefer paying by card than having to go out to get cash when I can avoid it. (Both corona and robber danger)
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The things you buy can be disinfected and thoroughly washed. But very few will think about disinfecting cash or their coupons. And touchscreen and phones surface are also quite dangerous for virus to stay alive. In general, I still think it’s better to be safe than sorry. avoid chances of touching common surfaces at the same time in very close proximity next to each other. And wash my hands regularly and rigorously.
And the transition to cashless retail were already on its way around East Asia, so not much of a cost if the infrastructure and people already gotten used to it. For places that haven’t, then I am not so sure about the transition cost would be and how long.
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Actually just scrolling through them once was tough - I was way behind the thread at the start, like a thousand posts - never-mind properly reading all of them 
(then again I read quite slowly compared to a lot of people)
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Exactly.
After you shop in the market, you finally reach the cashier. You were wearing gloves and what-not and now the cashier has to touch ALL the things you bought and while doing so they touch the counter, the machine and sometimes their uniforms. Also, you left your items on the small conveyor belt on the counter, where everyone else put their products, which they had touched with their hands. Also the cashiers probably were the people that placed the items in the isles anyway, and they touch the produce bought by everyone, so what is the point of the gloves? 
Then you reach into your pocket/bag to get your wallet. Assuming that there is anything on your hands, now it is on your pocket/bag and wallet too. Then you try to pay and after aaaaall that someone says “cards only” … really now? Really? 
So, you put out your card and you have to insert your PIN code and press the dials that the previous 23943029 clients pressed. Before you can clean your hands, you have to take your card back and put it back in your wallet and pocket/bag, thus getting anything the dials had on you and your stuff. Huzzah for contact-less protections. 
Now you just have to put in the bags the products you touched, the cashier touched and were standing in a conveyor belt or counter where everyone else had left their own stuff previously. Everyone that touched any product eventually passes through the counter, so really the whole thing about “oooh, cash is dangerous” is meaningless. Cash is actually cleaner than the counter because it changes hands once or twice per day.
I think that in some cases if you sit and ponder about some of the measures taken, it is just a refined form of totemism to make us feel like “we did all we could” and generally feel better/protected, like wearing a cross or having a lucky charm/talisman.
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if you correctly put gloves on and correctly take gloves off, there is no need to wash your hands. But dirty gloves are as dangerous to your face as dirty hands.
Its impossible to hope that anything is not dirty outside your home. So its more easy to just wash your hands when you got home and never touch your face until that.
Mask and vaccine are the main protection. You can also wear googles and disinfect what you buy if you wish. But gloves are the smallest way to decrease probability of infection - coronavirus can’t infect thorough the skin.
Yeah, I think it can be too much, especially considering there’re a lot of dangers we don’t care much about. Like a random squirrel can be sick and bite your nose off, not unheard of for squirrels to bite. But you still play with that squirrel because it’s fun. Makes me wanna go play with squirrels. Aren’t they cute?
Russia is not the country where people are paranoid about coronavirus though. Maybe closer to autumn-winter most people finally learned to wear masks. The next step is to learn to wear them correctly, maybe an unreachable step.
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However, you don’t have to store product wrappings in your house but you do have to store cash. Also, supposedly, you don’t go straight to the living room after you come back from shopping, therefore your purse and clothes can’t transfer the virus to, say, the kitchen.
True, but skin can very often be broken, with smaller or bigger wounds. Even a paper cut is an open wound. Better wash our hands anyway. (People should be doing that before corona as well, but relatively few did.)
They do indeed, but I am sort of satisfied about it. There were many shop owners and many service businesses who had started to feel very comfortable. They disrespected their customers and belittled their staff, thinking that nothing can touch them. Well, corona did and since their customers started looking for other options, many of those unprofessional businesses started to suffer.
I hope after this situation has ended, the worthy businesses will be recognised and favoured by customers.
Very As long as they don’t steal my chestnuts!
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Two things strike me. Surely contactless is a simplification rather than a complication. I just bring my phone (which I will have anyway) and beep to pay. Transaction recorded for me no need for anything else. With cash you have to go to a machine to get some out, carry it around, hand it over, get a load of change, can’t keep track of where it goes particularly. All a massive hassle!
The other is cashiers. I’ve hardly seen one in a year. I take my disinfected handset (there is also an app so could just use my phone directly but I’ve not started that yet). Scan everything as I go round, put it directly in my bag. Pay at the machine at the end (using contactless of course) and go home.
So in the last year I’ve only had to use cash 2 or 3 times for specific things and I’ve been to a cashier in a supermarket not many more times than that.
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It can depend on how one manages their finances. One might have a current account which is quite low on funds regularly (imagine bills come out or money gets moved to savings etc). Or even an account that isn’t really a bank account (lots of those apps now for sending money) where people use it to send each other money quickly (eg instead of splitting a bill at a restaurant, or buying drinks etc).
In those cases one has to keep an eye on how much is in the account at any time to make a transaction. One might need to move money on the fly using apps and mobile data etc. I think with cash, I just buy whatever I need and can afford with the money on me. Or if I need to I take out the cash in advance, just to have 20€ or 40€ on me say.
There’s also the idea that everything needs to verified now with some kind of 2FA, usually sending something to a phone or email for verification. I had a situation before where my phone imploded and my bank wouldn’t let me access my account online because they needed to send me a text message. It causes some amount of stress.
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coronavirus can’t infect through blood too
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I think that a fair routine that can be considered mostly standard post-supermarket shopping is this:
- Take the bags out of the car trunk (not the most clean of places, but most people store them there) or the delivery person takes it out of the supermarket car.
- You put the bags on the floor or a couple of chairs right inside your front door.
- Wash your hands - yet whatever else was on the bags and the wrappings and the things you bought is still there.
- Some people might wash/disinfect the bags and the wrappings and the groceries, but they still haven’t disinfected their clothes, their pockets and their wallet (cash or card, you still have to touch it to pay for stuff), so while you do that, you still touch possibly non-disinfected areas
- Then you put the things than need refrigeration in the fridge and the other stuff in their places
- Then you empty your pockets (touching your clothes and wallet again) and put your stuff away, after you disinfect your wallet and debit card and wash your hands again.
- If you really want to be consistent with all that, you now have to wash your clothes too, as well as your shoes and every wall/floor/furniture/surface you might have accidentally touched during this process…
Now, if you do that once a week, maybe people do not skip any of those steps, but let’s say you hop for 5 minutes to go buy a loaf of bread or something else that is standalone in some other store. Doing all that stuff can be tedius and I am willing to bet that very few people have done them consistently through all those months.
Now, considering that even if you miss even ONE step in all that process, then every previous or later precaution is rendered useless, it really is quite a stretch for people to “deny cash” because it somehow makes ALL the above safer. It just simply does not.
Imaginary depiction of how a supermarket without a cashier would look at my town (1):
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DimpledSingleBlackfish-size_restricted.gif
I remember seeing that system in Sweden in 2017 iirc. Ain’t nobody sane installing that system here, I’ll guarantee you that.
On a more serious note, I’ve never put my wallet on my head, but I sure do put my phone over there a couple of times per day. A lot of people inherently thought that cash is dirty (especially coins) even before the pandemic and were wary of touching food or their mouths, after handling cash, so it strikes me that the casual familiarity of the phone is practically quite more dangerous than cash itself.
(1)
Edit and true story, just to keep things light.
My neighbour bought a chainsaw to cut wood for his fireplace, from a major brand super-market that usually brings such power tools around. The supermarket has a 30 day return policy, if something is defective.
This fellow now, buys the SAME new chainsaw every six months that the product is in the supermarket rotation, takes it home, dismantles it, takes the spare parts, replaces them with the parts from his old chainsaw and then goes back to the supermarket and returns the chainsaw (which now contains the old parts) as “defective” and gets refunded for his money.
Yeah, let’s give this dude a supermarket without a cashier
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Good news, for a change Although I’ll keep washing hands!
My preferred way, since many years now.
- raises hand *
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Here, there are only very few supermarkets (and none of them near us) that are in a testing phase for self-service checkouts.
So, whenever we go shopping (usually only my husband and only once a week) there’s an interaction with a cashier.
Masks are mandatory in all shops that are still allowed to open (however, there are still people who don’t wear them correctly…). But cashiers don’t have to wear masks here 
, instead, there are perspex shields installed to protect the cashiers… But we all know they don’t work that well and the aerosol-filled air just goes around them.
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Mobile payment has come a long way since pin codes from last century.
And here we all use basket that are disinfected, and bag products ourselves on the way out with our own bags. The cashier only handle the scanning of barcode, or key in the price without touching them (customers can hold the products for the scanning, don’t have to be handled by the clerks). And there are also automatic checkout kiosks, where no clerks are needed except just giving instructions.
From Japanese supermarket
From Taiwan supermarket
Still more important to wash hands and use disinfectant on surface in the doorway when I come home before touching anything inside.
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Am I the only one who removes outdoors clothes when I get home?
Even before covid, most of outdoors stayed at the door.
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No you are not the only one. I even change to comfy pajama and leave all the outdoor cloths in the doorway with dedicate closet to separate them (and use bleaching laundry detergent to wash them).
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Personally, I don’t worry too much about infection through touch.
If touch was a major source of infection, then buying groceries in a shop would be risky for the reasons mentioned above and wearing gloves would be similarly enforced as social distancing, wearing masks and limiting contacts.
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Well in some Chinese provinces, it’s a problem to remove your outside clothes when you use to go outside with your inside clothes…
No joke, for the Olympics in 2008, the local authorities issued laws to not do that anymore.
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Dr. Fauci suddenly looks so much better:
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How are other places getting on with the various new variants?
The UK one certainly seems to be causing a lot of trouble so far…
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