What Mark Cuban’s ‘secret shoppers’ found about how Dallas is handling COVID reopening
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hired a company to investigate how Dallas-area businesses handled reopening from the pandemic lockdown last week.
He posted the results on his blog.
“I wanted to get an understanding of what opening meant to businesses around Dallas. Were they opening? What precautions were they taking? Were employees in safe environments? And bigger picture, I wanted to know if these are places that I would feel safe taking my family to,” Cuban wrote on his blog.
Cuban hired Shift Smart, which specializes in business workforce analytics to study how Dallas businesses were responding to the governor’s open order in Texas. The study was conducted May 1-3. Cuban says the company will conduct a couple more studies “so we can learn what the trends are and try to learn from it.”
Shift Smart called 1,000 restaurants and retail locations based on popularity and visited 300 to “assess compliance” with the state reopening protocols.
They found that 36% of businesses chose to open over the first three days of the opening and 96% of those businesses weren’t compliant with all mandatory protocols.
“The extent of non-compliance is dramatic with a 1/3 of all locations being [less than] 50% compliant across mandatory protocols as established by the Governor’s office,” Cuban said.
Among the most ignored compliance orders, the study found, were tables being disinfected, safe waiting areas, employees wearing masks, seating separation, groups of more than six people, and no items left on empty tables.
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 4:17 PM.
