Walmart Issues Limits on Toilet Paper and is Counting Customers Again

With coronavirus cases surging and the fear of another lockdown, customers at Walmart are probably not thrilled learning that toilet paper once again has a limit.

The retailer has resumed counting customers at its stores this past weekend as well as reinstating limits on toilet paper.

It was in April that Walmart had been restricting the number of people in its big-box stores to not exceed five customers per every roughly 1,000 square feet, or about 20% of a store’s capacity.

For awhile however the biggest retailer in the United States had stopped physically counting people.

“We know from months of metering data in our stores that the vast majority of the time our stores didn’t reach our self-imposed 20% metering capacity,” a Walmart spokesman said in an email to CNBC. “Out of an abundance of caution, we have resumed counting the number of people entering and leaving our stores.”

Walmart isn’t alone with its move as Kroger, Wegmans, and Publix have also reinstated buying limits for items like toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the U.S., has imposed purchase limits on essential goods like bath tissue, paper towels, disinfecting wipes and hand soap, according to Fox Business.

“To ensure all customers have access to what they need, we’ve proactively and temporarily set purchase limits to two per customer on certain products,” a spokesperson told Fox Business.

Currently over 68,500 are hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, more than at any other point during the pandemic, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.

The nation saw 181,100 new cases on Friday, according to the New York Times.

Walmart has said it will still have in-store Black Friday sales, but the company is breaking them up into three different sales events instead.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.