Ever since the governor published his stay-home order, we’ve been using Walmart’s “Pickup” service to get most of our groceries. As few Americans now need to be told, you do this by filling and paying for a virtual cart of groceries using the Walmart app on your phone. Then, at the appointed time, you drive to a row of lettered parking spaces along one side of the store, enter your parking space’s letter into the app, and wait for a Walmart worker to emerge from the building’s side door, pulling a little flatbed cart stacked with plastic bins containing your groceries.

Not wanting the worker to touch your car, you will have already opened the trunk or the hatch back, and you will close it again when the worker is done. Instead of having to touch the worker's germ-laden tablet to sign for your groceries, it will be okay with you if the worker signs for you, naturally, and no, you won’t want to review any substituted or out-of-stock items. You’ll just for God’s sake want to get this over with, please.

At my first Pickup, our groceries were brought out by Sydnee, an elfin teenager with elaborately pierced ears and wearing a jeweled septum ring. Although this was still early in the course of the emergency, I already understood that Sydnee and I were looking at each other across some kind of divide. My wife and I had started working from home that week, and signs suggested that we might ride out this storm out in relative safety and with incomes intact. Young Sydnee and her coworkers, however, would daily face a grim choice between maybe/probably becoming infected if they went to work and definitely starving if they didn’t.

What was the emotion I felt toward Sydnee as I watched her swing the gray plastic bags into the back of my car? At the end of our interaction, it emerged as gratitude. “Thanks for being here,” I told her. “I know you’d probably rather not be.” She seemed gratifyingly touched by my words. “Someone’s got to do it,” she said, with a pleased little smile that warmed my heart all the way home.

What exactly was I thanking her for, though? Leaving aside that the practice of thanking soldiers for their service has always struck me as performative and self-congratulatory (as opposed to, say, actually supporting the troops by calling one’s senator to demand better-armored Humvees, voting out politicians who spend soldiers’ lives too casually, or even just anonymously sending a round of drinks over to the party of four in camo at an airport bar), any Walmart worker still willing to punch in these days seems at least as deserving of such tributes. At the margins, I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced a direct benefit from each new dozen of dead Iraqis or Afghans or seen how exactly my family would be imperiled by a shortage in the number of young Americans willing to do that work. But let Sydnee and her coworkers start staying home en masse right now and life in a lot of American households would get difficult, fast.

On the face of it, then, I was thanking Sydnee for her bravery in coming to work, just as—on the face of it—people thank soldiers for a similar reason. There is a key difference, however. No one enlists in the military without understanding—even if to varying degrees of remoteness and abstraction—that they are shouldering some degree of risk that they will be required to fight and possibly die in wars. It seems permissible to assume, of anyone we see wearing the uniform of any branch of America’s currently “all volunteer” military, that some weighing of this risk occurred before enlistment papers were signed and that the decision to sign was informed by a conscious acceptance of that risk.

We cannot assume any of these same things about Sydnee and all of the many others wearing Walmart uniforms in the year 2020, trundling our groceries out to our cars, stocking the shelves inside, or working the cash registers to serve those death-cheaters still willing to push their own shopping carts around the store. Certainly we can describe the service they are providing in some of the same terms we use for military service. Each morning, when Walmart workers put on their polyester vests, they do not know if they will come home again—healthy, that is—and so also do not know if they will infect family members when they do. And during each shift, by keeping open a channel through which a huge number of Americans now obtain their daily bread, they provide a service that it is no exaggeration to describe as being of life and death importance.

And yet something is missing, in the comparison between Sydnee and a soldier: any sense in which the former ever decided to take all of this on.

Reasonable people may dispute the degree to which people who join the military are fully cognizant of the risks they are incurring, and even the degree to which it is accurate to call our military “all volunteer,” since there are systemic factors that push many people into the military almost as forcefully as a draft. Nonetheless, whatever degree of autonomy and conscious risk acceptance we can agree to assign to military members, surely it would have to be much more than we can assign to Walmart workers.

In fact, given that both the military and Walmart draw disproportionately heavily from the same demographics, it might even be safe to guess that someone wearing a Walmart vest has chosen what she believed to be the safer of the two main job paths available to people like her (not to mention also being the path that, in Sydnee’s case, would allow more leeway in terms of visible body piercings).

* * * * *

By the time of my third Pickup, the emergency had intensified. For one thing, there was by then an actual declared state of emergency, both statewide, countywide, and in the city of Waldhurst, although these various declarations had not included much in the way of firm direction for the populace at large. The state had detected about 500 cases, there were 4 in our county, and the danger felt clearer and presenter even if not as pronounced as in so many other places.

The weather was cold and wintry, so perhaps that was why the heavy young man who brought out my groceries was wearing a navy blue balaclava. Even by this point it was not common to see masks and gloves in public, but it was no longer a surprise when one did. On the other hand, according to social media, hardly anyone was wearing these inside the Walmart, where whole families were still being observed grazing the aisles and reuniting with other branches of their clans for catch-up conversations, just like always.

At some point, as the young man was loading my groceries and breathing heavily through the cloth of his mask, it occurred to me that I was downwind of him, and I casually shifted position around him along the arc of a circle with him at its center and a six-foot radius. In addition to Sydnee, I had now tried out my gratitude line on two additional Walmart workers, with similarly gratifying results. It had become my ritual, my sacrament, and as I maneuvered further out of the zone of possible infection around this young man, I was eager to try it again. Perhaps an expression of empathy would distract him from the probably obvious way I was thinking of him as a biohazard risk to me and my loved ones.

“How are things going in there?” I asked.

“Pretty crappy,” he answered, without looking up from his work.

His tone did not exactly leave the door open for continued chit chat, and suddenly what I’d been about to say struck me as fake and worthless. When I’d asked a similar question of the other Walmart workers, I’d gotten downright cheery answers—“there’s some people that are trouble but most people are pretty patient,” that sort of thing—but of course those answers had been influenced at least as much by the cultural resistance in these parts to being seen as a complainer as by any real conditions on the ground.

But “crappy,” of course, was the first truthful answer I'd heard. I had asked one of the other workers if managers were letting people stay home if they felt sick. They were, she said—but basically on the same terms as usual, i.e., if they had sufficient sick or vacation time saved, with the exception being if they had a positive test, in which case they would be paid for the mandated two-week quarantine time.

I said that didn’t quite seem to be in the spirit of what public health experts were calling for, even if you left aside the fact that it was and remains nearly impossible to actually get a test. She replied that one store had tried a more liberal policy of granting paid time off to anyone who felt sick, even without a diagnosis. The next day, so many people hadn’t shown up to work that they’d had to close the store. I felt a bit of ice in my spine.

It shouldn't but of course does need to be said: no one working at Walmart wants to be there, a fact that infuses no little awkwardness into the paeans we keep hearing to how “brave” they’re being. The simple fact is that, for those of us lucky enough to get to stay home during the current emergency, there is a conflict between keeping everyone as safe as possible and our demographic's continued ability to buy groceries for our families.

As a thought experiment, imagine we had a draft. Now, imagine walking up to a quartet of drafted soldiers in uniform in an airport, on their way to a war zone. What would you think about thanking them for their service? I’m not saying gratitude would be unwarranted, but I suspect the range of possible reactions to that gratitude might be quite a bit wider—and the interaction considerably less predictable—than with soldiers who think of themselves as having volunteered. It would probably depend a good bit on the current body count.

When I’d thanked Sydnee and the others, and they’d thanked me for thanking them, we’d just been agreeing to pretend that there had been some sort of real choice involved and that, therefore, the concept of “bravery” was somehow a pertinent lens through which to view their actions.

Brave they may be—brave they are, no doubt about it.

But what they also are, more importantly, is fucked.

And it requires a high degree of obliviousness to believe there won’t have to be some kind of reckoning for that. “Thank you for your service” isn’t going to cut it.