Plus the dread of contracting the coronavirus and yet another season of skirmishes with customers who refuse to wear masks.
"We had got to a point here where we were comfortable, it wasn't too bad, and then all of a sudden this new variant came and everybody got sick," said Ms Artavia Milliam, who works at H&M in Hudson Yards in Manhattan, which is popular with tourists."It's been overwhelming, just having to deal with not having enough staff and then twice as many people in the store."
At a Macy's in Lynnwood, Washington, Ms Liisa Luick, a longtime sales associate in the men's department, said:"Every day, we have call-outs, and we have a lot of them." At a Stop & Shop in Oyster Bay, New York, Mr Wally Waugh, a front-end manager, said that queues at the cash registers were growing longer and that grocery shelves were not being restocked in a timely manner because so many people were calling in sick with their own positive tests or those of family members.
Shifting guidelines around isolation are also causing confusion at many stores. While H&M has instructed employees like Ms Milliam to isolate for 14 days after testing positive for Covid-19, Macy's said in a memo to employees last week that it would adopt new guidance from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention that recommended shortening isolation for infected people to five days from 10 if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving.
Like many retailers, Kroger has not provided hazard pay nationally since the early stages of the pandemic, though the union is negotiating for it to be reinstated. The chain has also discontinued measures such as controlling how many customers are allowed in stores at a time. The union has been asking for armed guards at all of its stores in the Denver area as incidents of violence increase.
While the retail industry initially cited the holiday season rush for its resistance to such rules, it has more recently pointed to the burden of testing unvaccinated workers. After oral arguments in the case last Friday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority expressed scepticism about whether the Biden administration had legal authority to mandate that large employers require workers to be vaccinated.
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