I wear cotton gloves but with latex over the top and change them frequently like when handling a different species hence no cross contamination. Reasons for wearing them are many, store policy or state regulation not among them. Gloves slip off easy to wait on a customer, take an order, answer the phone, wrap, etc. Gloves also protect from bone cuts and scratches, the cold, repeated hand washing and more. I'll never forget how miserable I was when I first started this biz mostly from infections from handling pork and knife cuts. There are enough pains after many years doing this work but my hands don't feel so bad these days. I kinda like that.

jimhenry2000 wrote:

---

I often wore Wizard Kevlar gloves to protect aganst cuts and sometimes rubber gloves but I don't see how cloth gloves would not send an inspector ballistic due to cross contamination  potential. Seems like a bacteria farm to me. 

---

 oh Yeah.  I remember how nasty those cotton cloth gloves got.  I would only wear them to keep my hands warm if i had to be in the freezer for a long time.  I worked in one store where the meat dept would get so cold I had to wear those cotton gloves while cutting .  I started slipping large latex gloves over them to keep them clean and dry.  that worked really well.

You can use heavy duty rubber gloves that have a cotton lining.  They are warm, comfortable and sanitary, and do a great job preventing those nasty bone cuts you get cutting pork that seem to get infected instantly.

We would just take them off the shelf and charge them to the store.

wyatt wrote:

---

In my shop we can't have anything to drink

---

 How do you feel about that?

When I first started at Pathmark and before I was a meat manager, as low man I had to work every Saturday 8 AM to Midnight. This was a brutal shift (especially when I had to be back at 5 or 6 AM Sunday) but if I worked through my lunch and dinner I could get out at 10 PM. I would buy a sandwich on breaK, shove it in between my apron and smock and eat it while I worked. No one had a problem with that but that was in the very ealry 1980s.