At CVS, Whole Foods, and Target, most fully vaccinated customers and employees can go without masks.

People who work at the TJX family of stores, which includes the lower-price retailers HomeGoods, Marshalls, and TJ Maxx, must wear masks for the entirety of their shifts, vaccinated or not.

Wegmans announced on May 19 that fully vaccinated customers were no longer required to wear masks in the store, while fully vaccinated employees must continue to wear them until July 4.

It would be much easier for employers to verify a worker’s vaccination status than a customer’s—and most of the companies I’ve mentioned offer employees paid time off for vaccination and potential side effects—so it would make more sense to allow verified vaccinated retail workers to go unmasked while requiring all customers to mask up.

Chipotle allows fully vaccinated customers, but not employees, to go maskless, and Starbucks workers must “wear multi-ply facial coverings (or double mask)” while patrons do not.

(Immunocompromised workers should already be granted the types of accommodations that must be made for any employee with a disability.) While United Food and Commercial Workers, a union that represents 1.3 million grocery and retail employees, has registered concern about the rollback of store mask mandates, a statement from the union president focused on the risk of customers with unknown vaccination histories going unmasked and workers “being asked to be the vaccination police.” But instead of reinstating customer mask mandates in response to worker concerns, the companies who’ve eliminated them have simply made masks optional for all customers, using an honor system to free employees from enforcement duty?

(The burden of policing anti-masker customers was so great that some Starbucks workers told Business Insider that they were glad to see customer mask mandates gone.).

The burden of their protection should not be foisted solely upon workers, especially when stores are already creating uncontrolled risk by allowing customers to choose whether to wear masks at all.

Forcing low-paid workers to wear masks in a place where unvaccinated, unmasked customers roam does more to falsely inflate a company’s image as COVID-conscious than it does to reduce the actual risk of in-store COVID transmission.

You might argue that retail and food service workers, by virtue of their public-facing duties, are at a greater risk of contracting the coronavirus, and then spreading it, than many of their customers, so they should be wearing masks for everyone’s sake.

You could also argue that any transmission-prevention measure is a good one: The more masks, the better, and managers have a lot more power over what their workers wear than they do their customers.