Wearing a mask when you aren't around other people is stupid and detrimental to health, not helpful. If you are stocking where there are no customers and you know there won't be, then you shouldn't have to wear a mask.
You also could get a mask with a exhalation . It will ease half your breathing, and actually the part where your lungs aren't as strong. Those don't protect others as well though but your boss won't realize that.
Thin paper masks are less effort to breath through than the thicker polypropylene ones. They are a little less durable though.
Also you can work slower. Your boss required you to wear a mask so he should deal with the consequences. He should and probably has calculated to some extent that less work will get done because of it. If not it should be demonstrated. Work no faster than you are able to work while wearing it. That's just basic safety advise.
Appreciate the tip about exhalation vented masks. To clarify, this store does stocking and receiving during business hours, on the sales floor so avoidance is slim to impossible. As in they dump anywhere from 3 to 6 pallets in the produce section and attempt to break them down and stock while people shop.
Despite my tenure they reject most of my ideas on how to run things. For example dumping pallets on the sales floor instead of the receiving dock.
These fools used to pile cardboard onto flat top carts and attempt to make it across the store to the bailer. I taught them to use shopping carts instead, as it contained the mess and the carts were needed for other things besides garbage. That process took years, and now they are hardcore stuck on it.
I've known shopping carts are more dirty on average than toilet seats for some time however, so I devised a better method: Use the largest boxes of the day to hold all the broken cardboard. These self righteous nonces still painstakingly pick each broken down box out of the shopping carts to throw them away, even as I walk up next to them, dump my box in 2 seconds and away. Meanwhile they are grabbing filthy warehouse boxes by hand from a bloody filthy shopping cart!
The indignity of being ruled by idiots, normally a forgettable burden, has become dangerous to my well being.
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