Four days a week, Al Kasper parks his car as close to the employee entrance of a Happy Valley, Oregon, Fred Meyer as he can, steps inside, and slips behind the relative safety of the unprotected deli counter. “If I parked farther out in the lot at night, there would be a higher chance of something happening,” Kasper says. He’s had customers threaten to fight his fellow coworkers over minor cashiering errors and requests to follow store policies, and he doesn’t want to take any chances if someone comes to the store looking to cause harm. Kasper says customers have come behind the deli counter and refused to leave, asked him to take his mask off so they could hear him better, and removed their own masks to eat food in the store. The collective weight of frequent incidents and disrespect has left Kasper “legitimately frightened” in his own workplace, he says. “I don’t want to get my ass kicked in the parking lot.”