New Retail Guidelines Enacted As Stay at Home Order Extended through May 30

As Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s revised Stay at Home order goes into effect today, retailers are highlighting new safety requirements designed to protect the health and safety of customers, workers and their communities.

Many retailers, including grocery stores, hardware stores and pharmacies were deemed essential and have remained open since the governor first put in place the Stay at Home order in March. These retailers continue to provide critical goods and services and have quickly adjusted their operations to adhere to social distancing guidelines. Under the revised order, additional retailers such as clothing stores, sporting goods stores and others can re-open for curbside and delivery fulfillment of telephone and online orders.

The updated Stay at Home order also requires retailers to implement the following safety guidelines:

Shoppers and employees will be required to wear facial coverings while in stores. This rule applies to anyone over the age of two who can medically tolerate a mask, and requires both the mouth and nose to be covered;
Stores must impose occupancy limits, restricting the number of people allowed into a store at one time to either 50% of store capacity or limiting customers to five people per 1,000 square feet;
Where practicable, stores will establish one-way aisles, which will be designated by signage and/or floor markings;
Stores must discontinue the use of reusable bags;
Social distancing requirements will be communicated through in-store signage, public service announcements and advertisements.

“As retailers work to provide necessary goods and services throughout these challenging times, we ask everyone to please abide by these new requirements, which are designed to protect one another and ensure stores can remain open to meet a surge in need,” said Rob Karr, president & CEO, Illinois Retailer Merchants Association. “While this new order will give many businesses that were initially forced to shutter a narrow opportunity to avoid permanent closure, the future of our state depends on all of us adapting to a new reality sooner rather than later and the retail industry is proud to have pioneered many of the new social distancing requirements that are now going into effect. We look forward to continued collaboration with the Governor and the legislature on a comprehensive strategy to re-start the entire retail sector in the very near future. This strategy must include the long-term changes necessary to provide goods and services to Illinoisans in a world changed by COVID-19.”

To learn more about safety initiatives retailers large and small have implemented across Illinois, please visit https://irma.org/.