By Destiny Rhoades

In this article, I will be discussing the effects of the pandemic on businesses (specifically I will focus on a bar, a liquor store, and a fast food chain restaurant) within the US. As the world continues to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are trying to help by doing their part in social distancing and making sure their customers are safe. How have the new rules and regulations created to keep people safe affected the flexibility of bodily interactions between customers and employees?

Within my observations, I’ve noticed that through these regulations customers have begun to get frustrated and angry due to everything changing within the businesses they have grown accustomed to. In one of the case studies from our group, I included my personal experience as a Subway employee dealing with a customer who didn’t understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected our business. In this case study, I was about to help the next customer when I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a mask and that he wasn’t keeping six feet away from other customers. I asked him what he would like, and he asked for a spinach wrap. However, due to the pandemic my store had stopped stocking up on spinach wraps and other expensive items due to slow business and them going to waste. I explained this to him, and he began to get angry and frustrated learning about this new change. He told me that he couldn’t believe that I didn’t have something he wanted just because of the current pandemic. Through this interaction, I noticed that in some cases, customers are able to understand the current situation that the pandemic has put us in. The customer-employee relationships could be able to develop in an efficient manner only when customers are able respect and follow the new temporary regulations. However, within the case study above, there are instances where the customer and employee relationship are strained due to these emotionally trying times. Another aspect is that in some cases customers, or employees, may not fully understand how detrimental this pandemic has been economically for businesses and customers alike.

Further in my observations, I’ve noticed how the physical distancing within businesses has also affected customer and employee relationships. In my next case study, I will focus on how employees and customers interacted at a liquor store. I went with my father to a liquor store. When we got there, there was a line outside of the store because they could only allow two customers in at a time. When it was our turn, the employee greeted us as we came in, and we returned the gesture. Once we got to the cashier, I noticed that the employee was wearing a mask and had a plastic guard around the counter protecting his body, and it only allowed his hand to stick out. While we paid, many customers seemed light-hearted and attempted to hold conversations with the employee while outside the store. This interaction allowed me to see that customers and employees still attempted to have a stable relationship while respecting the social distancing rules. Through the use of the line of customers outside of the store, and the plastic guard covering the employee, there is this sense of inflexibility in the bodily interactions between the customers and the employees. I draw the term “inflexibility” from Anusha Kedhar’s article Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits: Transnational South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism. She explains how through her experience in dancing in different forms and being restricted from staying within a country for a long time it has made her body inflexible in terms of interactions within her own body and with others around her. Through reading Kedhar’s instances of inflexibility, it allowed me to connect it to this current situation happening at the liquor store. Since the employee and the customers were being restricted from physical interactions, it has made their bodies inflexible based on being deprived of the normal interactions they had before the pandemic(such as handshakes,  exchanging money without gloves, etc). Through the loss of these physical interactions, they have to find a different way to interact in order to continue social distancing.

Even though businesses have incorporated new rules and regulations in terms of physical space, some customers are able to fight this inflexibility by coming up with a different solution to social distancing. In my final case study, I observed how customers and employees interacted with each other at a bar after bars were closed to the public. I went with my father to this bar and there were people parked in the back of the bar being served by employees. This was surprising because bars and other nonessential businesses were forced to close to fight this pandemic; however, this bar stayed open in terms of being able to serve people alcohol and food by moving to the back of the bar where they can’t be seen. The customers had masks on but they were being worn around their necks and they joked about staying six feet away from each other but continued to be in close proximity, while the employees had no masks at all. In terms of Kedhar’s examples of inflexibility, this case study illuminates just how differently employees and customers reacted to this inflexibility from how people dealt with it in the case study about the liquor store.  In this case study, once the customers and the employees interacted with this inflexibility, they came up with a different solution in order to bring that flexibility back into their physical interactions and keep this customer and employee relationship strong in these unsettling times.

There are instances where the employee-customer relationship is strained, stable, or strong based on the emotional and physical affect this pandemic has had on communities. For the case study about Subway, there are instances where customers or employees may show frustration or anger based on the current economic situation the business is in and not understand the effect of the pandemic on business. For the case studies about the liquor store and the bar, that is where the relationship is affected by the inflexibility of the people not being able to have physical contact; however, while some come to terms with the inflexibility others try to get around it and make themselves feel again in order to have physical contact.

References Cited

Kedhar, Anusha. 2014. “Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits. Transnational South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neo liberalism.”Cambridge University Press. Accessed May 1, 2020.