RELATED: Walmart Shoppers Are Outraged the Store Is Getting Rid of This. When you’re out for a shopping trip at a big-box retailer, your biggest potential for exposure is through the highest-touch surfaces in the store. Typically, that includes shopping carts—but amid stringent cleaning protocols in the era of COVID, stores often sanitize these. Therefore, your biggest exposure to an unclean high-touch surface is likely going to be the credit card keypad at the checkout line, Russo says. “If you’re using a credit card, you have to swipe the card and you have to sometimes hit the keys or enter your phone number for the store’s bonus plan,” Russo says. “So that’s one of the greatest high-touch surfaces in the store.” RELATED: Never Buy This One Food at Walmart, Customers Say in New Survey.
Walmart shoppers should be aware of the keypad at the checkout line, but shouldn’t fear it. Instead, they should focus on practicing good hand hygiene during and after shopping. “You can touch a contaminated surface and it’s all fine as long as you don’t touch your eyes, nose, and mouth before [practicing] hand hygiene,” he says. “You don’t have to freak out. We know that we’ve been erring on the extraordinarily conservative side in the age of COVID. But even the age of COVID, as long as you take care of business with hand hygiene and be cognizant [to] not touch your eyes, nose, and mouth before you do that, you’re OK.” If you know you’re going to be tempted to touch your face before you get a chance to wash your hands, carry sanitizer with you when you shop. Most big-box retailers like Walmart and Target make it available in stores, too.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb “If you know you always rub your eyes because you have allergies or something, have your little bottle of hand sanitizer handy and just take care of your hand hygiene,” he says. “Or most stores have the alcohol-based hand sanitizer on the way in and the way out—grab a splash of that.” RELATED: Walmart, Target, and More Major Stores Are Pulling This One Food From Shelves. “We have learned from COVID and the public is acutely aware of modes of transmission of infectious agents,” he says. “The public also became aware of the increasing importance of hand hygiene, and I would like to think that moving forward that people practice good hand hygiene as the order of the day. Hopefully, people will start to make that part of their fabric of daily living.”
