By JODY BENSON
Los Alamos

Thank you, Smith’s workers for your heroic efforts, day by day, and especially now during the COVID-19 panic.

Every day you’re at the store, cleaning it, organizing it, stocking it, leading us lost shoppers to whatever weird item we’re looking for, checking us out (hopefully as we customers use our own reusable shopping bags), and taking our stuff to our cars in the parking lot from which you gather all the corralled as well as stray carts. 

But now we have COVID-19. Schools closed. For some reason, people started to panic. On Thursday, Los Alamos workers heading home from all over northern New Mexico, decided to strip Smith’s shelves to begin their COVID-19 hoarding.

With the long lines like those at Disney World’s Space Mountain snaking through the aisles, with people’s carts piled with all kinds of stuff, with only a normal Thursday staff at the checkouts, the staff ran nonstop to serve their customers.

Thank you Smith’s staff. Thank you for your exhausting work. Thanks for—as much as possible— keeping the store clean and shelves stocked with whatever you have. Thanks for being at the checkouts. Thanks for keeping up your customer service, and even responding to frustrated shoppers with more courtesy than the customer shows you.

Let’s not let COVID-19 infect our brains with a crazy panic that only exemplifies our distrust of the capitalist system. This is the time to help one another, take what we need and leave the rest. And the virus invasion shows how we can all take an example from the service sector: work hard, be kind, and do as much as we can to get through this.