It doesn’t matter if you’re able-bodied and/or in good general health.
Your age alone puts you at higher risk of severe illness or death if you catch the virus.
You don’t HAVE TO go during senior hours but you are, in fact, among the people this is intended for.
Use your best judgement, but yes, very much, you should take advantage of senior shopping hours without feeling any pangs of guilt.
I think the judgement you make should depend on how well you think your situation fits the intent of the rule. They can’t intuit the ability of each potential customer to handle exposure risk. Age is a proxy, instead. If you think you are very much in the mainstream of humanity regarding your ability to handle exposure risk then you might reasonably shop during regular hours, but if you think you have added risk as is typical of the 60+ crowd then you should take advantage.
As several have said, in some ways, age is just being used as a convenient and socially acceptable way to divide people into groups to pare down how many are in the store at once. We might also have considered instituting hours for everyone with a last name starting with A-L - except that would be rough on those essential workers working at that time. At least seniors are more likely to not be working, and have more flexible hours for shopping.
Having the shelves more fully stocked is a nice perk, but I don’t think it’s why they’re doing it.
But the final thing to consider is cleanliness. At least some of the stores are using the overnight closures to do deep cleaning and disinfecting. So first thing in the morning is when the store is the cleanest it’s going to be all day. Makes sense to have the most vulnerable in at that time.
I agree.
If you look at the statistics for Italy over 6800 have died, but most of them were over 60 and NONE under age 30. So why not encourage under 30’s to work and quarantine (and help) those over 60?
The flip side of this is that everyone in the store will be an old person. If you like getting stuck behind a bunch of elderly people dawdling their way through every aisle, go for it!
I went by Whole Foods (in the Quarry for any locals on the board) intending to come at 7 am to check out the senior shopping time. I didn’t get there until 8 am and there was no line of any sort. I went in and even though many shelves were bare, I was able to get most of what I wanted-- milk, sweet potatoes, bananas, apples, WFM bread, chicken breast tenders. There were about 25-ish customers in the whole store, many of them (like me) wearing blue nitrile gloves. The checkout person bagged all my groceries in brown paper sacks. I was in and out in 15 mins. The checkout clerk said it had been pretty crowded in the 7-8 hour and they had to open another checkout line. YMMV.
@Shoeless, not all of us old folks dawdle. :dubious: