Written by Alex Bobbyn, Fox 22 Bangor
Nowadays, a barrier of plexiglass is what stands between cashier and customer. An effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19. A company in Milo is making those barriers, and demand continues to climb.
“Over the past four weeks, we’ve installed about 11,000 hygiene barriers,” said JSI Store Fixtures President Mark Awalt.
The company works mostly with grocery and convenient stores manufacturing displays for things like fresh produce. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country they’ve stepped in to help in a different way.
“If you think about one hygiene barrier protecting two people, and if that happens every three minutes even, you’re getting 20 protections for two people, so 40 protections in an hour,” said Awalt. “If you’re open 12 hours, that’s almost 500 protections, and now you multiply it by 11,000 shields. That could be as many as five-plus million protections every single day.”
The barriers are being provided to more than just grocery stores, but anywhere there’s a face-to-face interaction. And they’re being made in all different shapes and sizes.
“We now have designs that we could ship out to almost anyone and they could install it themselves,” said Awalt. “Some of them you just pick up and put it in place. It’s got an automatic stand for the plexiglass built in.”
And the plant workers have adapted to making something new.
“They take a lot of pride in what they do for all of our customers,” said Milo Plant General Manager Steven Dunham. “But in this particular case in what we’re doing, they know tvhat they’re impacting more and more people.”
And more and more orders are coming in, some quite large. Both Awalt and Dunham said they have the capacity to take care of those orders, which they plan on doing for a long time.
“I think these hygiene barriers and social distancing rules are here to stay for quite a long time and I guess we’ll all just have to see how it all plays out,” said Awalt.
To learn more about JSI’s sneeze guard and hygiene barrier solutions, check out the digital catalog.