Here’s a nifty trick some of my middle school students taught me years ago. Take your dry fingertip and rotate it in circles on the top of the stack of papers, even if the stack is only two and the papers are currency. Odd thing is that it really works! At least in my experience it does.
In 50 some years of handling currency I have never in my life licked my fingers to separate fresh money. Nor any other kind of paper. New bills (or any papers) separate just fine if you just squeeze a little & slide your fingers in different directions.
Licking fingers is simply a habit. It was a harmless habit; not anymore.
Speaking of habits. …
Some years ago I went to an underground coal mining museum. The docent explained that in a mine the miners never face directly at whoever they’re talking to. If you do that your helmet light shines blindingly in their face. Instead you point your head and face 30-45 degrees away from the person you’re talking to. She said you can always recognize miners at the grocery store or wherever because they do that unconsciously; two people conversing while facing half-away from each other.
It’s common now in restaurants to take off masks once your’re seated and have drinks. So when it’s time to order or for any other waitstaff interaction later in the meal you’re typically unmasked.
Taking a leaf from the miners’ code of underground politeness …
I’ve now decided the polite thing to do when they approach is smile & make eye contact to establish that I’m paying attention to them, then point my face away from them towards the middle of my table or the sidewall while I’m actually talking to them. If they seem miffed, I explain I’m aiming my breath away for their safety. I’ve gotten a lot of thank you’s in recent weeks about this new habit.
Give it a try.
That is something that I used to do, it does make it much easier to separate bills, especially new $20s.
Now, I use a little squirt of hand sanitizer. Works just as well, and not only isn’t spreading infection, is actually working to reduce it.
If you are in the cash room, definitely be a bit careful. I handle and count all our cash, and I’ve become rather paranoid about it. I don’t usually wear gloves, but I make sure to thoroughly wash my hands before and after.
I just went shopping for the first time in over a month. That’s not unusual for me since mistermage does most of the shopping on his way home from work. The difference this time was I actively kept my hands to myself. No more reaching out to touch stuff unless I was buying it. I raised my kids to not touch stuff because 1) we didn’t have the money to buy a lot of extras and 2) not touching= not breaking. But as an adult I was used to grabbing stuff to read the ingredients or weigh stuff in my hands. When this pandemic really started blowing up I read an article where the author talked about changing her habits when shopping. Not touching stuff stood out to me.“Look with your eyes and not your hands.”
We were at Trader Joe’s (first time) and I was pleasantly pleased to see all the masks being worn. I was also shocked at check-out that the “organic good for us” stuff was so cheap. I always thought walking into one of “those” stores was akin to $2 or $3 more on everything.
TJ’s whole schtick is “Fancy, quirky, and off-brand cheap”.
It’s Whole Foods and their ilk which are the extra $2-3 per item stores.
I’ve been doing that as much as I can. But the problem is, sometimes I really do need to see something on the label, and I can’t see it without touching the product, because: the necessary part of the label is turned away; the necessary part of the label is too high for me to read it (I’m a bit shy of 5’2"); the necessary part of the label is too low for me to read it unless I lie down flat on the floor; the print is too damn small, despite multifocal glasses, for me to read it without getting my face up to the label and the label not only facing right but also in good light.
Sometimes I’ll pick up one can to read the label and take it even if it isn’t what I want, and take another half dozen if it was. (Labels change all the time.) But if the item’s expensive, I really can’t afford to do it that way.
I assume in any case that whatever I’m buying may have been touched by somebody, and handle it accordingly when I get it home.
– you can, however, add me to the list of people who’ve been handling cash all their lives and never had to lick their fingers to get any of it apart, new bills or old bills. And I have washed and/or sanitized my hands, and will be wearing a mask if there’s any chance I’ll get within ten feet of anyone else.
As already mentioned, dampening your fingers with hand sanitizer can work. As can manipulating the bills, rubbing fingers above and below the bills in opposite directions or, if you’re really desperate, as the cashier for help because we get a LOT of experience in separating new bills.
Just hope your cashier is not a finger-licker, too.
The cash office I work in has always had hand cleaning supplies in it and all three of us who work in there are pretty fanatical about cleaning up both our hands and the machinery/surfaces in there. Cash has always been filthy. That whole “lick your fingers” thing was never a good idea because of what you could pick up from your paper currency, and not just what you could pass on with it.
Unfortunately, as someone with food allergies I don’t have a choice - I HAVE TO read the ingredients on packages, even stuff I routinely by in case ingredients change.
(I mostly cook from scratch, so not that much handling of packages goes on, but I do have to do some.)
I do try to keep my hands fanatically clean - not that would necessarily know that just by looking.
Anything you purchase in a grocery store has been touched by (at least!) a dozen hands already. Now, some of that touching was sufficiently far back in the past so as to not be a covid risk, some of those hands had gloves on (but… when were those gloves last cleaned?), but anything you buy has been touched before.
Which doesn’t mean it’s got cooties on it, but cleaning things once you get home or, where you can, setting them aside for a day or two (like canned goods) would help to mitigate any remaining risk.
Me neither. It would never occur to me to do so.
Now, opening those plastic bags that you put produce in, however…
Yup, basically that’s what I’m doing – unload things out of the way somewhere, or into a previously-cleared corner of refrigerator or freezer, and wait for a while to use them; anything that won’t survive that (ripe avocadoes, say) gets washed.
aggh, there are multiple reasons why I hate those, and that’s one of them. (I give customers paper bags when I can.) But I put a hand on each side and rub, I don’t stick my fingers in my mouth.
Whole Foods is knotting those plastic bags for delivery service, which means they all become plastic garbage (can’t be opened without tearing, can’t be reused, can’t use my own bag instead).
If I had a smart phone I’d be using that to look stuff up. I don’t have one, though. Then again who knows what site is up to date at any given time. Thankfully, there are no food allergies in the house. The lactose intolerant child lives on his own so we get to use butter a little more often (frying mushrooms and corn on the cob need real butter 
)
Even without COVID, cash is FILTHY. I have worked as a cashier and my hands always felt vile after a shift.
As far as licking one’s fingers: again, even without COVID: cash is FILTHY. Even if you don’t put your fingers back in your mouth after separating those bills, you’re adding grunge to the bills and making them dirtier for the next person to handle. Not only whatever germs you had in your mouth, but that faint bit of moisture will help other crud stick to the bills.
BLECH!!!
I’ve used my phone to look up labels rather than handling items, but it was extremely time consuming. I abandoned it pretty quickly.
thorny, I have bad news for you. Neither refrigerating nor freezing kill the virus. Clean things before you put them in. This article quotes a microbiologist:
There are other articles/papers that say the same thing.
I know. Time on an inhospitable surface kills it, though – probably more slowly in a freezer than in a warm place, but eventually. But anyway I’m washing up after I get the food out of the package.
I wasn’t putting things in the freezer or refrigerator because I thought the cold would kill covid; I was putting them in there because they needed to stay cold or frozen.
…and we had another coworker test positive. They had already been at home for a week when they got the test results. So far it’s a mild case - the person is sick, but at home.
The store paid to have a professional cleaning service come in and clean the entire store top to bottom. I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. I question a bit how much good it does a week after the infected person was last in the store, but maybe it will interrupt the transmission. So all you folks noting that we’re getting more business and making more money, remember we’ve also got more expenses to pay for.
Same here. Well, your first paragraph. You can stop at the “professional cleaning” part; our owners haven’t sprung for that (that I am aware). Several more are out pending their results, and a few more have returned with negative results and a lost week or more of pay.
Fun stuff all around.
Same here. Professional cleaning crews come through afterwards.
And grocery store workers are not heroes anymore. Folks are tired of the pandemic for the most part, and the good will from the first couple of months is mostly gone, replaced by anger about out-of-stocks, prices, and safety policies of which we have no control at store level.