Whole Foods Employee Reveals COVID Horror Story On Reddit

The perks of working at Whole Foods: 20 percent employee discount, better-than-average grocery store pay, and paid time off (via Whole Foods). The downsides: according to Reddit, entitled customers, management problems, Amazon culture clashes, and now, some employees say, COVID safety concerns (via United Food and Commercial Workers International Union). Perhaps the most alarming of these has to do with customers themselves — in this case, one who an employee says purposefully coughed on them.

We've heard complaints from essential workers all over the nation, from customers refusing to wear masks, verbal abuse over COVID rules, and even that lady who was arrested for coughing and spitting on food (via NPR, Bloomberg Law, Fast Company and Action News Jax). But no worker can anticipate — nor should they expect — going to work during a pandemic and be physically coughed on. A Reddit user who posted in r/wholefoods said they work at Whole Foods (though we can't confirm this) and had a terrifying exchange with a woman buying beer.

The Reddit user wrote that they were working the register in their store, noticed a customer's mask wasn't on, and assumed that it had fallen down without her noticing. They asked the customer to pull up her mask before approaching the counter, and she refused. The employee said they told her they'd ask their supervisor to ring her up, "because there's the policy at my whole foods, not sure if it's at every one, where if you don't feel comfortable checking people out without masks on then you can get a supervisor to do it instead. i was really respectful about it tbh."

Eventually, the woman started to leave, and when the employee pointed her out to the supervisor, that's when she came back, "and i guess she didn't like that and that's when she proceeded to walk up behind me and cough on me and then left. my supervisor witnessed the whole thing and they caught her on camera." Luckily, it seems the supervisor handled the situation well, but that employee can't go back in time. They might want to get tested, too. It seems there's really no line customers won't cross during COVID-19.