Walmart limits in-store customers to help curb coronavirus spread

Walmart is limiting the number of in-store customers, in order to prevent further coronavirus spread. Yahoo Finance’s Heidi Chung joins Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Meantime, we're also seeing corporations on the retail side stepping up to try and implement some new rules to prevent the spread of more coronavirus cases in their stores and across the country. And the latest giant retailer to step up would be Walmart, announcing some new plans to make sure that they're doing their part to help slow the spread of cases as well.

And I want to bring on Heidi Chung with more details into their latest moves. And Heidi, it looks like they're going to be instituting some things that we've seen out of Costco and some other stores in the form of limiting how many people can come through their store at once.

HEIDI CHUNG: Yeah, Zack. So retail giant Walmart certainly joining a lot of other retailers, as well as just other corporations in general, in terms of ramping up their precautionary measures, not to just protect their employees, but also the customers that shop at their stores.

Now keep in mind, Walmart, along with a lot of these other retailers, are considered an essential business, so their stores have remained open, even as other restaurants and nonessential retailers have had to close their doors to their customers.

Now most recently, Walmart is implementing a new initiative that doesn't allow too many customers into their stores at any given time. So that makes sure that they are complying with the social distance guidelines. So specifically, no more than five customers will be allowed per 1,000 square feet in Walmart stores at any given time. And when that capacity is reached, a customer will have to wait until somebody comes out of the store before they are allowed into Walmart to shop.

Of course, this all comes after a very, very long list has already been created in terms of steps that Walmart is taking to combat the coronavirus. Most recently, the company wrote in a blog post that as a protective measure for Walmart employees, they will be implementing one direction aisles that will be marked with markers. So no one is allowed to go in the opposite direction of those marked aisles.

The company is also making sure that there are specific marked stores for entry and exits for customers. Now a couple of other initiatives that Walmart has implemented over the past couple of weeks include expanded sick leave policies. They have closed stores overnight to make sure that they are restocking and cleaning and disinfecting those stores.

They have allowed employees to be temperature checked before entering the stores for their shift. And also, they have started to make gloves and masks available for their employees as a precautionary measure as well, Zack.

But even as companies taking these massive steps in the right direction, it has not been able to prevent employees from getting the coronavirus. We just learned over the weekend that two Walmart employees in the Chicago area store died after contracting the coronavirus. But we actually have very limited information in terms of when this virus was contracted and how long they were working in the stores before they were asked to stay home.

What we do know, though, is in that blog post on Facebook, the company said that the two employees had not been in a store for more than a week. So that's all we have in terms of information. But yeah, we will be keeping an eye to see if Walmart releases any additional information on that front.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, Heidi Chung bringing us important updates, and important magnified by the fact that you're thinking about one of the largest retailers in the country here. I mean, we've seen some small stores doing the same in terms of making sure that people stand apart and wearing gloves as they come into stores. But you think about the scale of Walmart, how important that will be for stopping the spread of this as well. But Heidi Chung, thank you so much for bringing us that.