A SMALL and geographically disparate social media movement that aims to align protective face masks with fear and conformity targeted a local health food shop in Savannah on Wednesday.
When Brighter Day Natural Foods Market posted to Facebook that they would require all customers who enter the small and often-crowded store to wear face masks, they were adhering to national and global pandemic health recommendations and responding to the preferences of many of their customers.
They offer curbside pick-up to accommodate those who don’t feel comfortable in a mask, and they have committed to making masks available, for free or by donation, to those who want to enter but who don’t have the proper attire.
Customers posted comments of gratitude for the “socially responsible,” “common sense” mask measures that they felt would “prioritize health and wellness” and help to “protect the vulnerable.”
But the initial reaction was, at a glance, not so good. In fact, it seemed at first, in a landslide of critical comments and anti-mask memes, that the small business had made a dire mistake.
“Might want to rethink this and actually give your CUSTOMERS a choice?,” posted Karen Weibel. “We are all adults here and can decide what’s best for our own health.”
“Most people who shop at health food stores are not into masks ,” Bonnie Gembrin said.
The apparent clientele threatened to withhold their business unless Brighter Day changed its policy, but upon closer inspection, something was amiss: Weibel appears to be based in Texas; Gembrin and her family live in the San Francisco Bay Area; another is a professional dog groomer in Ruskin, Fla.; yet another, a medical supply distributor in Chicago.
Indeed, nearly all of the negative posters lived hundreds of miles from Savannah, or had their locations hidden while championing their participation in protests of health safety recommendations nationwide.
Not every bit of negative feedback was from a foreign operative: The owner of a local apothecary peddling “organic plant magic,” and a resident of Pooler who was once tased at the end of a high-speed police chase were among those who clicked “angry face.”
But over the course of Wednesday, of the approximately 60 angry face emojis, dozens originated in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, South Dakota, even the Cayman Islands, according to data available on the posters’ social media platforms.
Some anti-mask posters claimed to be concerned about oxygen restriction. But it turns out their true concern was sucking the oxygen out of the room:
“We boycott every store with a mandatory mask policy,” volunteered Sharon Schlicher, a midwife in Oklahoma.
While there were upwards of 260 comments by Thursday morning, many names from this “we” contingent appeared repeatedly, wielding the platform to inflate the effect of their demonstration.
When asked why they might spend their time criticizing the legally and socially accepted decisions of small, privately owned businesses in a community states away from them, the Ruskin, Fla. dog groomer invoked the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech is deeply important, particularly in a time where there is so much to question. But here the First Amendment is a thin veil over a familiar strategic maneuver to manipulate social media and meddle with optics in a way that damages a targeted business or person in a community.
It happens all the time: a cacophony of commenters posturing, as the dog groomer did, as locals, intentionally creating the false impression that the negative voices are the majority.
While anti-mask protestors are making headlines left and right (this one included), according to a recent survey led by researchers from Harvard Kennedy School, Northeastern University, and Rutgers University, they are in the vast minority across the U.S. David Lazer, a PhD and distinguished professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern who contributed to the research said the data shows that support for social distancing measures and business precautions is “pretty much a bipartisan consensus.”
In the survey, 96% of respondents reported they had trust in hospitals and doctors to do the right thing to best handle the COVID-19 outbreak, 93% said the same about scientists and researchers, and 88% about the CDC.
The overwhelming consensus among each and all of these groups at present is that wearing masks in public areas does not eliminate, but does substantially mitigate, risk when it comes to thwarting the spread of COVID-19, and that, for people over the age of two, wearing a cloth mask for short periods of time does not pose a health risk unless your doctor tells you otherwise.
Some fear that requiring masks is a certain harbinger of an impending police state, evoking images of masked handmaids in Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” Indeed, legally-enforced federal commandments about attire — such as laws that women must wear shirts in public — have been seen as infringements on rights over the decades.
Meanwhile, individual businesses choosing to indiscriminately require shirt, shoes, and — in a global pandemic — a mask, while offering alternatives for those who can’t comply, are working to design a favorable experience for their customers that the public can take or leave.
Time will tell who is right about masks and coronavirus, but a precious few things are certain at present: Firstly, mask aversion is a familiar chapter in the agenda of vaccine skeptics, serving to sew doubt in public health authorities as a coronavirus vaccine looms on the horizon.
When a widespread conspiracy theory video featuring the disputed findings of a known vaccine skeptic went viral last week, I went down a rabbit hole, speaking to rhetoric experts and propaganda researchers about why a piece of media with these vaccine-skeptical undertones had reached so far, so quickly.
Media scholars agree that social media platforms, Facebook at the forefront, have devolved into little more than echo chambers of misinformation. In part, this is because these niche activist groups — be they “coronavirus truthers” or “flat Earthers” or “Holocaust deniers” — are desperately persistent and therefore disproportionately loud:
“There’s no countermovement for the truth,” Dr. Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told me in a recent interview.
“The vast majority of Americans believe the stay at home orders are a good idea, but we still spend a ton of attention on the protestors and the spectacles and these health misinformation stories because they can really harm people.”
Another certainty, the politics of bodily health aside, is that our local businesses need us more than ever, because their supply chains have been disrupted, because their staff may have been furloughed, because their regular customers are sheltering in place, and now, because trolls from other cities and states are leveraging their Facebook pages to promote a niche political agenda.
Brighter Day owner Brad Baugh commented via a text message that the owners’ initial reaction was to take the post down when they saw controversy unfolding in a place meant to convey helpful information to their customers.
“But after seeing the outpouring of positivity,” he said, “we decided not to.”
The big box store business model cannot and will not meet a local community’s needs in a crisis. But small independently owned markets, such as Brighter Day, can.
This was laid bare in the Great Toilet Paper Debacle of 2020: When due to supply chain disruption there was no toilet paper at Savannah’s national chains, the small businesses — the Asian Market on Montgomery and Red and White — were the first to find a way.
As our local businesses need us, we need our independent, small businesses and the sense of community to which they are central.
But as the world seems to spiral, there are constantly new forces against which we need to defend them: by being supportive, by caring about others, and maybe, as social media becomes little more than a swirl of media manipulation, by spending less time reading Facebook comments.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2020.
Grocery store employees are involuntarily risking their lives every day they go to work. They spend hours in an enclosed space, subjected to the germs of countless people. If they want customers, co-workers, managers, and suppliers to wear masks, to protect themselves and their families, their wishes should absolutely be respected.
We follow other health and safety rules in stores without blinking an eye—no smoking, no running, no pushing and shoving, no peeing or spitting on the floor, no wiping your nose on the merchandise, no sticking bare hands in barrels of bulk grains, no opening up and sampling the ice cream.
As an employee and long time customer of Brighter Day before that, I have to say that having to deal with this type of treatment from customers is insulting and disrespectful. We’ve gone from being labeled unskilled workers to “Coveted Essential Heroes” to being a thorn in someone’s side. This year has already been a host of changes for employees with the change in ownership to a Pandemic!
Personally, coming from a tribal nation across the country, experiencing this pandemic brings up the trauma of Ancestors sacrificing their lives to the onslaught of disease ridden colonizers. It has been very triggering watching Indigenous communities lose their loved ones, being overrun by entitled American tourists and threatened when practicing our sovereignty in trying to keep people out of our reservations. All while fighting the every day battles “normal” for tribal nations that so many entitled Americans have no clue or care about! Add to this that I am a struggling single mother living below poverty level with a damaged lung that puts me at risk should I contract Covid.
It has been extremely stressful working shorter shifts but having the same responsibilities of getting the grocery orders submitted and put away and still expected to serve with a smile on my face. Only made possible by responsible employers who worked quickly to get a plan into place so that we had jobs, and most of all, were SAFE. As safe as we could be in a situation where we didn’t/don’t have all the information. All so people could have the comfort of clean food and supplements to keep them healthy while so many, too many others can’t even afford the option, my own nations included.
I don’t require or demand people do anything and I have seen customers in our very small store without masks and they aren’t harassed or threatened, kicked out. I give people the room to decide for themselves what kind of impact they want to make. As for me, I wear a mask because I want to live to work to provide the kind of food to people that is better for our bodies and most of all, better for Mother Earth. And I want to keep other people safe. I refuse to make this yet another divisive issue. Goodness knows we have enough.
Wow! I can’t believe you took the time to “research” the people who reacted or commented on your original article. Digging up and sharing out-of-date tidbits of negative information is just the kind of yellow journalism (If this even qualifies as journalism) that causes people to distrust mainstream media. Incidentally, it’s not very bright on your part, as it will discourage potential readers from reading and/or interacting with future articles and posts.
Furthermore, I am a former teacher of the “resident of Pooler” who was tased. That’s ancient history. I’m sure we all have moments in our past of which we are not so proud. The beauty of life and growth is the opportunity to turn ourselves around, which is just what this young lady has done. She’s a gainfully employed, contributing member of society. She’s an AMAZING mother, and she has a heart of gold. I could not be more proud of her.
Finally, I’m a faithful customer of the “local apothecary owner.” My family has benefitted from the use of a wide a variety of her gut health and immunity-boosting products, salves, and balms. Incidentally, I’m just the kind of middle-aged grandmother, with a shopping addiction and money to burn, who Brighter Day would LOVE to have as a customer.
I’m not sure of the intention of your article, but here is the result…I won’t be reading anything else you publish, and I won’t be shopping at Brighter Day.
Now, let’s see what you can dig up about me. Be sure you spell my name correctly when you “Google.” That’s Kelli (with an “i”) Lariscy.
I’m not even sure why this is on Connect Savannah…I guess I get what you were going for based on the title…but this post, op-ed, whatever you’d like to call it, is so rambling, poorly written, bitter and full of tangents that it comes across like some drunken Karen hit the keyboard after one too many visits from the wine fairy. Why the weird, overly detailed, extremely negative and nasty focus on the locals commenting…when your point is to accuse the non-local critics? Didn’t you kind of blow holes in your whole point there? Eesh. Not your best work. 🙁
What a poorly written article. Par for the course with the media. Connect Savannah has lost the respect of many. Also, that organic plant magic peddler has amazing, natural products and last I checked has rights to angry face whatever she damn well pleases. Shes doing more of a service to our community than this crap ass article ever will. As far as the person who was tased,what, a decade ago? Omg lol thats the best you can do? Ive met that person once and they say first impressions are everything. Let me tell you about her, she is hilarrrrrious and such a sweet person. She is the proud mama of her baby girl and a kind, active member in our community. This article and people like you ARE THE PROBLEM. If youre gonna call someone out, name names and dont hide behind your laptop screen. SHAME ON YOU ALEXANDRA MARVAR.
PS. THIS ARTICLE SUCKS and quite frankly so does Brighter Day They have lost a long time customer allowing such trash to be written on their behalf. Good day.
The fact of the matter is people who do not wear masks are actively acting in a way that puts others in danger. They have decided that their comfort is more important than others health. This culture needs to change NOW. Thank you to Brighter Day for protecting your workers and protecting your own customers. I hope others follow suit.
This article is embarrassing to the writer. BD just lost another long time customer. I hope the previous owners realize they made a mistake selling the store to these clowns.