CathInfo.com

I keep saying, we need to RESIST this nonsense every step of the way, with every fiber of our being.

But when it comes to commerce, the power mostly rests with the enforcers.  Regarding walking around masked or unmasked, outside, yes.  But in my local stores, there are signs from the owners that the unmasked will not be served.  So, there's no forcing of wearing a mask, but making a purchase is contingent upon it.  That's the coercion involved.

Thus, as I said earlier on a different thread, it has to start with the merchants.  Merchants have to either publicly disavow this, on their own or in concert, or not mount such a sign in their place of business, not wear masks themselves, and not demand it as a contingency. The sellers have the power.  

Government agencies and other institutions are subject to different processes, but merchants hold a tremendous amount of power in this regard.  Just say No:  there are too many of you for law enforcement to succeed in stopping all the commerce in just about any city that is not a village.  When the merchants do this, it will separate the sheep from the goats.  The artificially terrified or control-freaks will at first refuse to patronize unmasked businesses, but if the most popular businesses join in, the public will eventually have nowhere to go.  Lots of things can be ordered online, but gas for your car and hand-chosen produce are another matter. At that point, all the patrons will be left with as an option, is their own mask, which is always what should have been an option, and not a mandate. No one's preventing them from wearing a mask or even a hazmat suit, and there's no law preventing anyone from making a fool out of himself.

Of course, wearing one's own mask would expose the lie that claims that wearing masks prevents your own transmission to others, not their transmission to you.  ("Oh, look at my virtue signals!  What a heroine I am to wear a mask to prevent the Covid that I don't have, or had a year ago, from affecting every customer at Walmart.") 

I believe that technically, a business "has the right to refuse service to anyone," and that includes "for any reason."  However, in U.S. law, certain groups do have more rights than others ("protected classes"), and that includes the disabled. (ADA) A customer could present proof of being disabled and thus compromised by mask-wearing, but most cashiers are the ultimate sheeple and will parrot whatever their ignorant bosses have told them to say.  So probably that means first being refused service, and then returning with docuмents.  Even the fact that a customer would be denied the first time is an infringement and would open the business-owner up for a tort lawsuit; however, again, this puts the onus on the customer to protest rather than on the owner to comply with federal law.

The way civil law works, with regard to torts, is that the tort or "wrong" first has to be committed before the complainant can seek redress. It's obnoxious, but we have a functionally illiterate population running most businesses.

The better way would be to ask/urge customers to wear masks (if the unnecessary request is made at all), not to insist.  The way the owners would be protected from lawsuits by those wanting mask enforcement is to (a) suggest that individual customers mask themselves as an option; (b) remind the customers, with signs, that they can always choose instead to patronize other businesses who may illegally "require" masks, if it makes them more comfortable or if they believe their individual health is compromised by a less than 100%-masked environment. 

And as a business owner, I would state it literally as I wrote it in (b).

The U.S. Constitution does not grant universal rights to access and purchase from every retail business in the country, under uniform conditions.  That would only be true if the federal government owned every business.