Staffers at Iconic Boulder Book Store Relieved Mask Order Is History – for Now

During a visit to Boulder on February 20, two days after city officials lifted a public-health order requiring face coverings at public indoor spaces, we noticed that the Boulder Book Store still had a sign near its entrance that read “Masks Required.” Inside, however, around half the customers were unmasked.

Businesses still have the option of requiring face coverings, but in this case the sign was simply out of date. “Masks are not required in the store,” confirms Arsen Kashkashian, the store’s general manager. “The sign was left over from when the mask mandate was in place.”

The store’s “staff is relieved the mask mandate has been lifted,” he adds, noting that while employees did not get too much pushback from customers about the policy, “it did get tedious asking people to mask up every day.”

That dovetails with comments we’d heard over the last few months, after mask mandates were reissued last fall. People working in a variety of retail establishments around metro Denver said that enforcing mask rules was generally more of a pain in the neck than an invitation for a threatening response from an angry recruit in the “My Freedom Is More Important Than Your Health” brigade.

The worst behavior we witnessed was during an early January flight from Nashville to Denver, when a long-suffering flight attendant had to stand and glare at a passenger who didn’t want to cover up for a tense thirty seconds or so before he finally gave in.

Boulder’s mask mandate lasted longer than anywhere else in the metro area. A previous order was dropped in June 2021, but just over two months later, on September 2, Boulder County Public Health put a new mask edict in place amid a surge of cases related to COVID’s Delta variant. At that time, Boulder was virtually alone in making such a move. Denver didn’t impose similar masking rules until November 24, just before the arrival of the Omicron wave, and allowed it to expire on February 4, two weeks before Boulder followed suit.

According to Kashkashian, the Boulder Book store staff “is free to mask up or not based on their preferences,” and during our visit, the workers in view overwhelmingly opted for face coverings; we only saw one mask-free employee. He stresses that “staff members are being courteous to the people they are working with, and if someone wants the people they are working near to mask up, they will. Most staff members are masking up while on the sales floor with customers but taking their masks off when back in the offices.”

A mask order could return in Boulder and beyond should a new COVID-19 variant emerge and cause cases, hospitalizations and deaths to spike again. But for now, Boulder Book Store employees are happy that they can concentrate on the job they’re paid to perform – which doesn’t include being an officer with the mask police.