Felt sick over customers wearing disposable gloves when shopping

Don't touch your face.
They are obv trying to protect their hands, I think.

But you're missing the point. If you're touching everything with them and keeping them on all the time, they're the same as your hands.

In a medical setting, yes.

You can wash them by keeping them on and washing gloved hands with soap and water then drying with a towel, remove and re-use as needed until they tear.
I wear them and clean them this way at home.

Kids with shoes on is the least of your worries with trollies. Birds/foxes, other wildlife all over them overnight. Teenagers/adults climbing all over them, riding in them, pissing on them. Staff using them for storage if non good items...

kids shoes...meh.

Wearing the same gloves isn’t any worse than using are bare hands without washing them for the same period. Provided you’re changing or sanitising the gloves regularly, wearing them for a prolonged period isn’t a big problem.

The reason exam-type gloves are sometimes called “disposable” is simply to illustrate that they are thin and not designed the last for a long period without developing rips or holes. It’s a comparison against reusable gloves such as marigolds.

The main benefit of gloves over hand washing is (i) gloves also protect the wearer if you have any small cuts or grazes (eg from gardening) and (ii) if you need clean hands but aren’t near washing facilities, you can simply remove or change the gloves.

So sorry to hear you cannot access treatment- it might be worth contacting the charity OCDuk who can advocate for you to get/ get more NHS treatment l. I'm mostly restricted to my house with OCD now - it is such a horrible illness.

Are you sure they don’t just have yellow hands?

Germs can survive (and spread from) unwashed hands for a long time too though.

Yuck.

I think it's reasonable to be concerned about viruses at the moment but they're called 'disposable gloves' for a reason.

I have severe OCD and have worn them to shop in the past but they came off the second I was finished in a single shop. I liked using them for the trolley and the self-service check out (which must be pretty covered in faecal bacteria from the 'I-don't-wash-my-hands-after-using-the loo-when-it's-just-a-pee-but-I-do-touch-the-public-toilet-flush etc' brigade). I immediately used sanitizer before getting into the car afterwards and I was extremely careful not to touch my face or anything germy.

But they're not protecting themselves. Disposable gloves are for doing one task, not for wearing all the time touching multiple things.

I thought it was because (a) you can/should wash your hands regularly, but you don't wash gloves, and (b) germs survive for ages on plastic surfaces but only a few minutes on your hands.

They may have auto immune issues and are immuno suppressed, which means even a common cold could be more serious - and Covid hasn’t gone away. They are entirely reasonable in wanting to protect themselves.

I have severe OCD and wear gloves when I go on public transport and to shops because I can't stand the idea of touching the same surface that every person in the city has touched and some of them will be ill and won't have washed their hands after going to the toilet. I am plagued by anxiety but have no access to treatment so suffer in silence. Nobody would ever know this though because I just wear normal gloves with the finger tips that work on screens and tills. I wear the same pair all day and when I get home they go in a 60 degree wash. I'd be too embarrassed to wear rubber gloves because I don't like drawing attention to the fact that I have this condition. There are plenty others like me out there but you would never know because we're good at hiding it.

I only started to wear gloves because my hands were getting red and sore with the repeated use of hand gel. Initially we were each going through a box of gloves every shift and it got very expensive. Our employers offered us the cheap latex gloves but they made our hands sweaty, so we bought nitrile gloves and reused each pair until they tore, but used hand gel over the gloves after every customer. The gel and copper coins stained them but when this was explained to a certain type of customer she (always she) pretended not to understand; clearly they wanted us to destroy our hands.

We didn't wear gloves, we just used gallons of hand sanitiser and washed our hands frequently. The only advantage that I could see of wearing gloves was that it served as a visual reminder to us not to touch our faces. I managed to get right through Covid without catching it (even before they brought in all the PPE stuff) and only caught it right at the tail end (when everyone else had had it and therefore had no sympathy!).

Washing your hands frequently is just as good as wearing gloves. But having the gloves on reminds you not to rub your eyes or lick your fingers - although anyone who regularly works on a till knows not to do this anyway.

When i worked in retail, numerous women would take notes out of their sweaty bras 🤢

Thanks @EleanorReally and @ShinyAppleDreamingOfTheSea
That needed calling out.
I hate posts that turn nasty.

I worked in retail during Covid and most of us bought our own disposable gloves. The cost of replacing them after every customer was too much so we used hand sanitiser over the gloves. If we were handling copper coins the copper residue reacted with the hand sanitiser to turn the gloves green. Some customers complained. One woman berated me for my "filthy" (just sanitised) gloves while her little boy picked his nose.

I just don't think this is an actual problem.

Ohhh so you are actually bashing elderly specifically now?
Sorry, can't get on board with you.
You sound very unpleasant.

You probably shower every day too. Who knows how many shopping trips those gloves have had…

Perhaps she has the germs and doesn't want to pass them on, like how facemasks were supposed to work during Covid - they were never meant to stop you catching, more to stop you passing on.

lets hope they are not care workers popping in for supplies on their way home from work !

@user1470226590

I think you’ve mis-posted ?