Dollar General is offering its workers four hours of pay to get the COVID-19 vaccine, in a novel move aimed at incentivizing essential workers that interact for hours every day with members of the public, many of whom resist basic prevention measures such as masks or reject vaccines, to get inoculated.
The discount chain has been one of retail’s big winners during the pandemic, helped by its low prices and the small size of its stores selling essentials that make for easy in-and-out trip than say a Walmart. But that success depends on its essential workers staying healthy at a time more than 200,000 new cases a day and 4,000 deaths, are being reported in the United States.
Dollar General, which has about 157,000 employees, said on Wednesday that because its stores don’t provide the vaccines—unlike retailers including CVS pharmacy, Walgreens, and Kroger—it is offering staff four hours of pay to offset expenses incurred from having to travel to a store or clinic to get the shots or things like childcare while a worker runs that errand.
“We do not want our employees to have to choose between receiving a vaccine or coming to work,” Dollar General said in a press release.
Nationally, the rollout of the vaccines has been frustratingly slow: as of Tuesday, about 27.7 million doses had been distributed, according to CDC data, but roughly only one-third of those—9.3 million—had actually been administered.
So far no other major retailer is offering an incentive to get vaccinated. But many, particularly grocers, are trying to make a case to state authorities that their employees should have priority for the vaccines as essential workers. So far the standard practice among big employers has been to recommend but not require getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Several unions have been pushing grocers and retailers to increase worker protections and make them a priority for getting the vaccine.
In the first three quarter of the current fiscal year, Dollar General’s same-store sales have risen 17.5% and operating profit has grown to $2.7 billion even as the retailer has spent $173 million on bonuses to workers to get them to show during the pandemic.