“UR-goodbye!”: a wave of hate covered the St. Petersburg retail chain

A large St. Petersburg drogery network Rainbow Smile faced mass protests from anti-vaxxers who do not have QR codes. Some of the dissatisfied customers launched a social media campaign against the chain of stores, offering to boycott it. The company itself told RBC Petersburg that they “act in full accordance with the regulations” and are forced to adapt to the new restrictive requirements of the city authorities.

hate wave

The Smile of the Rainbow chain (sells cosmetics, household chemicals and household goods) has 1,000 stores in RUSSIA, of which 213 are in St. Petersburg. From January 2, 2022, in city stores, customers began to require a QR code before buying. Such rules for non-food stores were introduced by the latest version of St. Petersburg government decree No. 121. This caused conflicts in retail outlets and a wave of hate on social networks.

Dozens of negative comments appear daily under the Rainbow Smile posts. "UR-goodbye! Buy toilet paper - upon presentation of a passport, yes, you would go into bankruptcy !!! Neither I nor my relatives will try to convey as much as possible, and to my friends, not a foot to you! Break the codes on your forehead, and at the same time your passport data, and forward to the concentration camp! I wish you a speedy closure! ”, The user writes on the official page of the Raduga Smile network on the VKontakte social network (the spelling and punctuation of the authors in the quotes are preserved - ed.). Other users post photos with cut discount cards of this network and screenshots with the removal of the Rainbow Smile mobile application. People write about how they threw full baskets with unpaid purchases at the checkout when they were required to present a QR code.

“Choice is when a person can choose for himself in which store he should buy what. And not on a residual principle, to choose from those stores that do not slam the doors in front of him. No one has yet canceled freedom of movement within the territory of the Russian Federation and the freedom to choose a store. Everything beyond this framework is arbitrariness and lawlessness, ”writes one of the buyers. He compared the requirement to provide a QR with “dividing people into “worthy” and “untermensch”.

Checkout at checkout

Also, customers of the trading network complain about how the verification of QR codes is organized. “It is not so much the introduction of QR in Smile that is surprising, but the fact that it is not required at the entrance. Those. there may be sick people in the store (asymptomatic, for example), who, in turn, can infect healthy people. While individual stores go to different tricks to serve everyone (in stores selling shoes, I saw shelves with toilet paper - you see, to help those who cannot stand the prices), Smiling somehow limits itself, - the client of this network is perplexed.