Saturday, May 15, 2021

An Important Victory for Anti-Maskers


In the wake of the CDC's new guidelines that those who have been vaccinated do not need to wear masks indoors in most cases, the first major company to allow customers in stores without masks was Trader Joe's.

Hours after the Trader Joe's announcement Walmart and Costco announced the same.

All three retailers further announced that they would not be checking for proof of vaccination.

It is noteworthy that Trader Joe's was the first. Anti-mask activists took notice:

TJ is very woke. From their website:

To Our Valued Customers:

We are dedicated to doing the work, every single day, to make sure Trader Joe’s is an environment that is safe, welcoming, inclusive, and respectful for all Crew Members and customers. Focusing in particular on our support for our Black Crew Members and customers, we have taken a closer look over the past several months at our diversity and inclusion efforts and identified areas where we could improve...

We appointed a product development team dedicated to expanding the number of products in our stores that are produced by Black-owned suppliers. We established a goal of having 15% or more of the items presented at our Tasting Panels sourced from Black-owned businesses. We are pleased to report that we have been exceeding this goal: an average of more than 25% of products evaluated at our panels since June have been from Black-owned suppliers. 

The allowance of mask-free shopping, which is associated with Trumpists,  is not something that you would think TJ would be taking a leadership role in.

Could the Allan Stevo letter-writing campaign have pushed the company (See: Let's Make This Rock: Trader Joe’s Activism Opportunity!!)?

I note this comment at the letter-writing campaign post:

You're not going to receive a response. Letters to companies are worthless, just about as much as calling your congressman or complaining thinking you'll talk to the president or CEO.

An individual letter to a corporation may not have any impact but a letter-writing campaign is a completely different story.

The Left has been extremely effective in using such campaigns to push corporations in the direction of woke. A company that is not used to getting a sustained number of letters against a policy will have a difficult time judging how big the upset customers overall are and will very often attempt to appease the complainers. This is especially so with a letter like Stevo's which suggested that this was only the start of the campaign.

The relaxing of the "must wear mask" policy at TJ so quickly after the CDC announcement could very well have been a rapid response in an attempt to nip the Stevo campaign in its early stage.

Letter writing campaigns can be very effective tools of agitation, with the emphasis on campaign, a single individual letter is not going to do it, a flood of letters might. 

 -RW

7 comments:

  1. All hail Allen Stevo!

    Resistance is NOT futile.

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  2. Nicely done, though I will stay away just the same. A year changes habits.

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  3. I did not even have a chance to write an email in from the time I read Stevo’s post to now reading the news.
    I would bet that corporate is very different than the individual stores on the ground. TJ attracts a certain kind of day to day employee. RW refers to them as Mini Maos. same goes for Food Hole. I mean , really, does one actually think a guy like John Mackey gives shit about any of this? It does not really align with his overall ideology but he does at times get swamped by others in the mix sort of like with the “we don’t sell lobster” nonsense. Maybe I give Mackey to much credit but...
    Positive news anyway ones sees it.
    For the record here in the North of Austin sticks all the big corps still talk a good game about “requiring” this or that including Old Navy playing recordings over the PA in the stores but I walked in, did my shopping, tried on a pair of pants, stood in line, and paid cash and no one said a word. Sorry, I have no info on whether or not anyone was looking at me funny because I just do not care. Same goes for a regional big grocery chain called HEB. Theses places are still forcing employers to wear mask as far as I can tell. That is next step. These folks need our help as well. They are in a potentially unhealthy situation and need their paychecks and lack the numbers to make a stand. The dearth of employees available to replace them has not really sunk in around here. Employers are still functioning like they have the upper hand from what I can tell and in some ways they do regardless of stats. I have been in the position of not being able to miss a paycheck. It is a stresser there is no two ways about it.
    Anyone who was planning on sending a letter, I suggest just adding in the employees in some way and see what can be achieved. They gave an inch. Take a yard.

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    1. agree, especially about the health of the masked employees. their health has been under attack for over a year.

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  4. One pro-leftist narrative compliant letter gets action. It's like companies wait for an excuse to do these things. It takes flood of letters, to the point of creating a fear of significant revenue loss on the order of go-woke-go-broke to get action in the direction of individual liberty and free markets.

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  5. OK, boomer. Keep writing your letters and making up stories about complaining your way to personal conversations with this executive or this manager. This had zero to do with letter writing campaigns. They do nothing, repeat, do nothing, in the same way that calls to congressmen do nothing. Congressmen listen to lobbyists, not constituents. These companies want you to submit to the regime via vaccination. They're dangling the carrot to the last of the hold-out normies.

    If these kinds of things worked the way you fantasize they do, all the people who made very public shows about cancelling their Costco memberships because of mask mandates in March and April of 2020 would have prevented the company from doing so. But they didn't. Hell, all the people who cancelled memberships and complained when Costco several years ago stopped accepting American Express for payments and sponsoring a partnered credit card would have reversed the company's decision. But it didn't.

    And at the end of the day, it's the individual state, county, and municipal mandates that are ruling the actions of individual locations.

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