The sanitary pass, a headache for the biggest shopping centers
Shopping centers where you have to show your credentials are no longer the exception. The government on Wednesday extended the list of those who will be subject to the health pass. This will now be payable in the largest of them – their surface must exceed 20,000 m² – if they are located in a department where the incidence rate exceeds 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. A hundred shopping centers spread over 38 departments, mainly located in the South of France, are currently concerned. Until Wednesday, only the prefects of Loire-Atlantique, eastern Pyrenees and Vaucluse had imposed this rule on shopping centers of more than 20,000 m² in their department.
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Of 840 French shopping centers, 350 are large enough to have the pass imposed on them, in the event of a degraded health situation. Some departments, such as Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Yvelines, Val d'Oise, Isère or Ain, have an incidence rate which is close to 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Shopping centers are afraid of struggling to find the security guards needed to carry out this check. The National Center for Shopping Centers estimates that the recruitment of 5,000 agents is necessary to verify the pass in 350 centers. Given the wide opening hours of a shopping centre, this represents an additional cost of 30,000 euros per month and per entry.
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For the largest of them, the control will necessarily generate queues. If the flows are weaker in August, they will pick up strongly in September. Some centers welcome 15 to 20 million visitors per year, underlines the national center of shopping centers. The businesses located in these centers fear that these constraints are dissuasive, and that customers prefer to do their shopping in a place where the health pass will not be required.
A final difficulty concerns the staff of businesses located in shopping centers subject to the pass. These employees must be vaccinated by August 30. The brands hope not to run out of staff once vaccination is compulsory, especially in small shops that only employ one or two people. The impossibility, for the employer, of knowing the vaccination status of its employees will not make it easy to finalize the staff schedule at the start of the school year. At the end of July, employees of major clothing brands were vaccinated in the same proportions as the French population, estimates Procos, a federation of major brands.
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