"We’re doing a lot of social distancing,” U.S. President Trump claimed during his press conference on Coronavirus on March 23, 2020. The day before, he had said he is proud of the American people for voluntarily taking precautions. March 21st, I had been in a Target store to buy some necessary items. No one was "social distancing," including employees. A more accurate, and better understood term would be physical distancing, as it is more broadly applicable than socializing and the latter can be done at a distance, especially via telephone and the internet.[1] A day before, I had been in two grocery stores—two because one—a Safeway [Albertsons]—was missing so many hoarded items. I found no physical distancing at Safeway and Sprouts. The former was not that safe after all, and the latter's healthy-food was not being sold in a healthy way. It was as if the employees, customers, and managements were oblivious to the obvious risks, but the explanation may be more complex. I contend that it applies to corporate social responsibility too, for I also found that none of the store managers was making announcements or had signage to remind people to keep a distance from other people in the respective stores. On March 26, 2020, I again saw no physical distancing by employees and customers at a Safeway store; the store manager told me he would have a store meeting on the issue. In the meantime, not even periodic announcements would be made. This is known as erroneously applying status-quo management procedures in a state of emergency. Also, Safeway's store management had not acted proactively to ration products such as toilet paper and cleaning products that had been voraciously grabbed off the shelves by herd-exuberant customers in a panic mode. In short, I submit that the unique business conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic can be used to assess whether corporate social responsibility is real or merely a marketing tool.
I begin with the matters of relinquishing old habits and starting new ones, for both are important to being proactive both at the individual and store levels during a pandemic. Plato’s dictum, to know the good is to do the good, relies on the human proclivity to create and maintain habits. In other words, habitually doing the good, which presupposes knowing what the good is, plays a vital role in doing the good. It gets easier once a good habit has been established and practiced. We are indeed very habitual animals. We tend to take the same route to work, sit in the same seat where seating is open, and even eat the same foods at breakfast as if in a rut. So Plato’s emphasis on habit is wise. If staying at home and keeping at a physical distance from other people are good habits during a pandemic, then the emphasis should be on establishing these habits and attending to them until the new habits become easy, even automatic. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.
Furthermore, that the other person was stunned even though he knew the reason was reasonable stunned me. Why the apparent affront in the face of a pandemic already present locally? I suspect that the man’s reasoning was not controlling his passions (emotions). In The Republic, Plato writes that such a psyche is unjust. So too, by the way, is the polis (i.e., a political geographical area) that has passions unrestrained or checked by reason via individuals or a government. A government has a responsibility, for example, to see that the passions that would otherwise thwart reason’s conclusions do not. So, many governments were urging or ordering people to stay at home (i.e., self-quarantine) and maintain physical distance in public during the Coronavirus pandemic. That government, acting justly, had to contend with preexisting habits such as shaking hands and walking or standing at a close distance to other people. From the standpoint of those habits, the government’s position may have seemed unjust, perhaps as invasive or overreactions. In short, ongoing habits die hard.
Corporate social responsibility could have bridged the gap, such as by a store manager making regular announcements that everyone in the store should maintain a certain physical distance from everyone else. I suggested this to the store manager on duty at Sprouts grocery store as I was leaving, but he demurred even though the chain was touting its social responsibility in providing healthy produce to customers. He looked at me as though I were from France. C'est drole, n-est-pas?
Perhaps that manager feared that some customers in the store would overreact out of fear and immediately leave the store, beginning an unprofitable stampede. The bad education system locally may also have been a factor, for he presumably could have made the announcement in a calming, friendly way. "Hey, thanks for shopping with us today. Just a reminder that the government recommends that we all keep a distance of at least ... from each other. Nothing to worry about; just a precaution." The informal, friendly tone, the use of "government" rather than "public health agencies," the use of "recommends" rather than "orders," the "nothing to worry about," and the sense that the manager and employees were included would likely have been sufficient to stifle any herd-animal stampede, even in Arizona. However, at the end of March, 2020, while I was in a Target store, a simple, "Please keep a distance of six feet between you and others" announcement played every half-hour and did not trigger any stampedes. Even then, neither Sprouts nor Safeway were making announcements in their respective stores even though from my visits I could see a lot of non-distancing, even by employees.
(This is not the Safeway store where I found the deliquencies.)
I begin with the matters of relinquishing old habits and starting new ones, for both are important to being proactive both at the individual and store levels during a pandemic. Plato’s dictum, to know the good is to do the good, relies on the human proclivity to create and maintain habits. In other words, habitually doing the good, which presupposes knowing what the good is, plays a vital role in doing the good. It gets easier once a good habit has been established and practiced. We are indeed very habitual animals. We tend to take the same route to work, sit in the same seat where seating is open, and even eat the same foods at breakfast as if in a rut. So Plato’s emphasis on habit is wise. If staying at home and keeping at a physical distance from other people are good habits during a pandemic, then the emphasis should be on establishing these habits and attending to them until the new habits become easy, even automatic. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.
A good habit faces two hurdles. Firstly, contravening habits must be resisted. When the Coronavirus just getting started in the U.S., I literally had to pull back my arm so I would not shake someone’s hand. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to shake hands now,” I told the other person, who was stunned. My habit of shaking hands had become so ingrained in my mind that it sent my left arm out even though I had decided not to shake hands. Pulling my arm back felt so unnatural that actually doing it felt difficult, as if I were fighting against horizontal gravity; it was as if I had to drag my arm back.
Furthermore, that the other person was stunned even though he knew the reason was reasonable stunned me. Why the apparent affront in the face of a pandemic already present locally? I suspect that the man’s reasoning was not controlling his passions (emotions). In The Republic, Plato writes that such a psyche is unjust. So too, by the way, is the polis (i.e., a political geographical area) that has passions unrestrained or checked by reason via individuals or a government. A government has a responsibility, for example, to see that the passions that would otherwise thwart reason’s conclusions do not. So, many governments were urging or ordering people to stay at home (i.e., self-quarantine) and maintain physical distance in public during the Coronavirus pandemic. That government, acting justly, had to contend with preexisting habits such as shaking hands and walking or standing at a close distance to other people. From the standpoint of those habits, the government’s position may have seemed unjust, perhaps as invasive or overreactions. In short, ongoing habits die hard.
The second hurdle that a good habit must overcome to be sustained is the person going beyond the decisions and actually engage the new behaviors enough such that they stick. It is one thing to decide to do something different, and quite another thing to change behavior. This goes beyond stopping previous habits, such as shaking hands and standing close to other people; new behaviors must be done enough to gain traction. Simply having made the decision to change is not enough. Yet implementing a new choice is difficult because the conduct is not aided by the force of habit until the conduct is done enough times to become habitual. Hence Plato’s dictum that doing something good enough for it to become a habit is important. This applies to corporate social responsibility at the managerial level (especially at the store level).
In the grocery stores (and the Target store) that I went to when it was reasonable to assume that most Arizonans would be aware of the need to keep a certain distance from others, I found that few if any people were engaged in the practice. Even if they had made the decisions to engage in the practice, which was in line with the core human motive of self-preservation, they had not resisted old, antithetical practices and put the new behaviors into practice enough for them to become habitual, and thus easier.
Rationally, a human being would tend to be motivated based on self-preservation to form new conducive habits. In other words, a law should not be necessary. Perhaps the force of old habits is powerful enough to eclipse even the motive for self-preservation, or maybe the problem lies in too many people not making even rather obvious connections between, say, staying at a distance and not catching the virus. Arizona was at the time 49th out of the 50 American States in primary and secondary education (i.e., before college).
Corporate social responsibility could have bridged the gap, such as by a store manager making regular announcements that everyone in the store should maintain a certain physical distance from everyone else. I suggested this to the store manager on duty at Sprouts grocery store as I was leaving, but he demurred even though the chain was touting its social responsibility in providing healthy produce to customers. He looked at me as though I were from France. C'est drole, n-est-pas?
Perhaps that manager feared that some customers in the store would overreact out of fear and immediately leave the store, beginning an unprofitable stampede. The bad education system locally may also have been a factor, for he presumably could have made the announcement in a calming, friendly way. "Hey, thanks for shopping with us today. Just a reminder that the government recommends that we all keep a distance of at least ... from each other. Nothing to worry about; just a precaution." The informal, friendly tone, the use of "government" rather than "public health agencies," the use of "recommends" rather than "orders," the "nothing to worry about," and the sense that the manager and employees were included would likely have been sufficient to stifle any herd-animal stampede, even in Arizona. However, at the end of March, 2020, while I was in a Target store, a simple, "Please keep a distance of six feet between you and others" announcement played every half-hour and did not trigger any stampedes. Even then, neither Sprouts nor Safeway were making announcements in their respective stores even though from my visits I could see a lot of non-distancing, even by employees.
Perhaps the manager at the Sprouts store was so ingrained in old thinking habits that my suggestion did not even register such that he did not even make a decision. Both hurdles to beginning a new habit (i.e., making the announcement periodically) may have been too high for the man, yet it is curious that the company did not have a policy of making announcements as of the end of March.
Similarly, the manager of the Safeway store was in a meeting-rut when on March 26th he told me he would have to have a store meeting in the future rather than make announcement to employees and customers alike to please keep a distance of 6 feet/1.8 meters in keeping with the government's recommendation of distancing. Ironically, when his employee charged with sanatizing the shelves had walked very close to me and I reminded him of the distancing, his response was essentially to blame me. "Just relax," he said twice (he was obviously not). Interestingly, although the cashiers had a new protective clear-plastic sheet separating them from customers, at least one young cashier couldn't hear the customers because of the screen so she would lean sideways to speak at close range without any barrier face to face at close range. More than one office meeting would be needed at that store.
On a positive note, Sprouts's shelves were well stocked, whereas Safeway's were not. Safeway's managers may have been in too much of a mental and behavioral rut to catch the drasically increasing sales figures on items like toilet paper and ration them. Of course, the resistance to rationing may have been from the profit-motive, in which case we could conclude that the company's CSR programs paled in comparison to authentic corporate social responsibility within the business (i.e., closer to the core business functioning, or operative business model). Safeway managers may have discounted the point that rationing may even have an overall good financial effect as fewer customers face empty shelves and thus a bad experience.
I do contend that the store
managements had a social responsibility to see that their employees and
customers were as safe as possible from catching the illness while in the stores. It cannot be said that the managements were pro-active; even their reactivity was laggard or incomplete. Besides making simple announcements on distancing especially at the cashier area, responsibility extended to picking up on, and acting upon, abrupt trends in product sales in enough time to ration items even if rationing is not in the short-term financial
interest of the companies. The companies' respective charters undoubtedly give those companies the right to make food available to paying customers. With that right comes a responsibility that becomes particularly active not only when too many customers and employees are not keeping a distance, but also when some customers are hoarding a product to such an extent that the stores cannot provide that product to other customers in a reasonable period of time. Rather than pointing here to CSR programs whereby a company sponsors a baseball team or food bank, I am referring to authentic social responsibility, which lies in managers and employees taking responsibility in the conduct of business, directly with people rather than through an institutional program. In other words, the authentic sort tends to a bottom-up phenomenon, at least at first, though proactive companies can issue companywide policies that are consistent with the measures taken in some stores in a timely manner. I contend this sort of responsibility is most likely to be enacted in strong companies, whereas
the weak are too focused on entrails—too easily held back by preexisting
choices and habits to venture new choices and implement new policies. Perhaps this case study comes down to this: Why in the world would a store manager NOT make a store announcement after a customer recommends doing so because people, including employees, are not keeping a distance to each other? It is reasonable to expect that the manager would not only make an announcement, but also call his superior other store managers can do likewise. Perhaps the rare situation of a pandemic reveals that the typical mentality in retail management is excessively rigid, even if being so is not really being cautious after all, but impedes caution being actualized at the store level.
1. "It is important for us all to realize that when they recommend 'social distancing' . . . what health experts are really promoting are practices that temporarily increase our physical distance from one another in order to slow the spread of the virus." Cecilia Menjivar, Jacob Foster, and Jennie Brand, "Don't call it 'social distancing'," CNN.com, March 21, 2020 (accessed April 4, 2020).
