What You Should Know About Our Mask Policy

We don't like masks either. Masks suck. They're uncomfortable. Masks discourage customers from shopping in our store. They turn people away from in store play and have a detrimental psychological effect on our community. Masks cost us money. 

If you are rabidly anti mask, you probably have reasons. Your reasons are in your head. You have principles and ideas and theories. Our reasons are in our bodies. We don't have ideological reasons, we have health reasons and yes, economic reasons. Our reasons are solid and real and unquestionable, because we live them. They are informed by science and enforced by the government from agencies you've probably never heard of. If it's not entirely clear by now, I don't respect your reasons, not when you insist they be taken seriously at the expense of other peoples lives and livelihoods. 

You may safely play the odds as an individual. What is the percentage chance you'll get COVID with your limited circle of contacts? What is the percentage chance you'll get seriously ill from COVID? As a business, we see hundreds of people a day and we have nine people on staff. Unmasked, someone will get COVID. How do I know? It has happened already a couple of times with a mask policy. We have been forced to cancel shifts and close the business early. 

Anyone on staff working with an infected person is assumed sick unless proven otherwise. At one point, there was a good chance we could be closed entirely for days. I was the backup plan, working from home, and I was in the middle of a COVID quarantine. I also have skin in this game in the form of a backstop loan from the government. I pay 3.75% interest on a large loan because I frankly don't trust you, anti masker, not to screw up this country further. I could pay it back, I have the money sitting in a zero point nothing percent account, but I don't trust you. My lack of confidence in you can be measured to the penny, paid as interest to the federal government. You are literally a drain on my finances by your very existence. We should call you the 3.75 percenters. 

You may see the odds of getting COVID as small and the symptoms inconsequential. For me, COVID is a reality that will 100% infect staff, harm their health, and potentially cost thousands of dollars as we close. My personal feeling is everyone will eventually get COVID, it's just a matter of delaying it until the variant is inconsequential and the vaccines super effective. I think we're almost there, unless you screw it up by spreading a new variant. 

I think masks will disappear by the end of the year and you'll go back to chemtrails or crop circles or whatever it was you obsessed over before masks. Or maybe we'll get a new variant. Maybe it will kill someone you love and we can watch you cry and admit you were wrong. I hope that doesn't happen. It will bring me no joy. We will remember your reticence though. We will remember that your twisted ideology was more important to you than our lives. Your freedom without responsibility can die in a hole with the nearly one million people who have perished from this disease, almost all unnecessarily.