2020 seemed to hold no surprises at this point. Your country on the brink of fascism? Ugh yes. Murder hornets? Sure. Pandemic? Well yeah of course. You’ve rolled with it, and you consider yourself fortunate: your art is taking off, you still have a job you love, and your family and friends are taking the virus as seriously as you could have hoped, and they’re safe and healthy. So no one can really blame you that you enter the holiday season with a sense of optimism. The bad news? You work in retail during a global pandemic.

Back in 2012, you quit your retail management job to make space for a sudden urge to be creative, so you took a year off and started your artistic sabbatical. You did everything creative you could during that time to fill out your artistic resume including set design, writing a novel, and even begrudgingly getting onto Instagram. You didn’t miss retail management and the time off creating felt like a permanent vacation. You slowly realized that Los Angeles was a great place for established artists, but not great for someone just starting out, and also was a poor fit for the type of person you became while living there.

You visited Portland in 2013 and fell in love with the city: from the proximity to nature, to the eagerness for collaboration, to the moody seasons , you felt a loyalty to the city before you even moved there. You started a long interview process to get back into retail, but this time on your own terms: you made it clear in the interview that your artistic career was a priority, but you would give 100% while at work. Being promoted wasn’t what you wanted, work/life balance was. You got the job: you were going to be an Operations Lead at a rapidly growing luxury handbag store in downtown Portland, Oregon.

To be fair, your position was another way that your work life balance manifested, too. For the first time in your retail career, you weren’t client-facing. You now worked in inventory and supply management for the store, which meant you were mostly backstage and behind the scenes. As an introvert, this meant you didn’t go home exhausted from interactions with customers anymore, and since your job mostly dealt in absolutes, it didn’t necessarily tap your creative reserves. You put your nose to the grindstone and seven years at your job passes in the blink of an eye.

Things start sliding sideways in your world the second week of March, 2020. You just had gotten back from a trip to Los Angeles, and little do you know at the time that this will be your last trip of the year. One morning, you’re locking up your bike after your commute into work. You pass the massive flagship Apple store every day, except something’s different this morning: their front doors are closed, and the employees are gathered around with concerned looks on their faces above their branded t-shirts. The few customers there are are confused, wandering around outside the glass fishbowl of a store, a couple on phones trying to figure out what’s happening.

Your store hardly gets customers that day, or the next. You know what’s coming on Monday, once everyone is back in the office in corporate. You get the call at home on your day off, it’s your boss: “Can you come in and help me shut the store down?” You hop on your bike and you’re there in 20 minutes. You and she send everyone home and work on the closing checklist that the company sent; it’s surprisingly cohesive and comprehensive considering how quickly it must have been composed. “See you in a couple weeks!” you call to her as the two of you walk away from the shut-down store.

The spring into summer is unlike anything you’ve experienced. It’s…challenging to find ways to do your job from home, when so much of what you do at work is hands-on and physical. You wrestle with an odd kind of guilt: “I should be more productive.” “I need to find more ways I can work.” “I’ll volunteer to go into the store to work even though I acknowledge that leaving my house may endanger my health.” And to be fair, this is all pressure I’ve generated myself. At no point did my boss or my workplace ever make me feel like I wasn’t productive enough. They didn’t need to; capitalism did that for me.

All around you, friends and acquaintances were getting laid off. Your freelance, creative, and actor friends in Los Angeles had zero idea where their next paychecks would come from, and in Portland, your friends who styled hair, served at restaurants, and made their living serving the public become unemployed, either quickly or slowly, depending on how much their employer can stave off unemployment. You feel incredibly lucky to even be employed.

Then the announcement comes: you’re going back into the store! The employees will be split into two teams that don’t overlap schedules, in order to isolate the teams. If someone on one team falls ill with the virus, the entire team will quarantine for two weeks and the other, healthy team will split again to cover the store. No one says it, but you intuit that your store has to make money, there has to be a revenue stream in order to prevent layoffs and keep people employed.

And there’s that guilt again, even more powerful and complicated than the moral guilt from your Catholic upbringing. You feel incredibly loyal to your company, but at the same time realize the loyalty to a company is function of capitalism. Your company is taking such good care of you: they’ve shipped gloves, so much hand sanitizer and wipes (hey why does that hand sanitizer smell like tequila?) and masks, you muse that they made some kind of backdoor deal to secure all that PPE (hi don’t fire me, this is a joke). But are they taking care of you because they truly care about their employees, or is it just much much harder to train new employees than executing widespread layoffs? Is their constant monitoring through cameras to ensure social distancing to protect you, or is it to protect themselves from future litigation should an employee fall ill through exposure to a customer?

The answer? It doesn’t matter. You and your coworkers are safer for their efforts. Your optimistic nature almost always wins against cynical thoughts like this. Any company, by nature, is driven by profit but also by people, and every person you’ve ever come into contact with all the way up the corporate chain has been invariably warm, empathetic, and genuine. And you remind yourself that you are so fortunate, so lucky, so privileged to even be wrestling with these questions, and there are millions of people who would love to have your job, would love to have any job.

In the end, it boils down to the massive failure by the Trump administration to provide any kind of relief or income for the suffering masses and also small businesses. It’s literally the government’s job to respond to situations like this, with our own money that we’ve paid into the tax system.

Eventually the two teams in your store can merge back again (with the help of contact tracing technology); it’s an emotional experience working with your coworkers who you hadn’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s with this swirl of feelings that all of you brace yourselves for the great unknown: retail pandemic holiday season. You all have no idea what to expect out of Black Friday, but it starts shortly after you get to work: someone in the mall shouting that they refuse to wear a mask, in front of your store. Unknown to you at the time, this will set the tone for the rest of the season.

The good news, is that your company has empowered you to give no quarter, tolerate no bad behavior. This is something retail employees fantasize about. Kicking people out for bad behavior? Don’t mind if I do! Although the scale is different. Kicking a customer out for insulting an employee, or using profanity, or disturbing other customers requires a more nuanced skill set and decision making process than, say, kicking someone out for wearing one of those pointless “beauty masks” that are so sheer I think they actually accelerate respiratory particles to supersonic speeds.

In June when we reopened, maybe in July, sure I could understand people still being shaky about things like, uh, science. In the opening months of the pandemic there was so much information and rapidly evolving guidelines that some people were confused about what were good practices, and what were unnecessary ones, to prevent the spread of the virus. As an occasional gatekeeper at my store’s door, I was charged to ensure that people were complying with guidelines. Most of the time it was a joy to be able to set the tone for the customer’s experience in what could be an unsettling environment. Sometimes it was our job to be teachers, fair but firm: Yes, you have to wear your mask above your nose. No, your family of twenty can’t come in because then we can’t distance around you. No, let me get you a cloth mask. Why? Because your current mask has a valve and while that protects you, it doesn’t protect us.

And let me be clear (and to my company, I can’t stress this enough: please don’t fire me), this is by no means the majority of our customers, it’s a minuscule percentage. For the most part, they’re not malicious or petty (oh except the one Karen who ran over my foot with her stroller after scoffing at our precautions? Ma’am, I’m sorry to inform you that your baby is ugly). It’s this weird mix of working a job, something that a million, or say 12 million unemployed Americans in the US right now would love to have, and being grateful for it, and being frustrated that the government doesn’t have a mechanism to just let us stay home. This isn’t to bitch about a job that (not in a pandemic) is one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had. Also, I have to give credit where it’s due and acknowledge that the vast majority of my coworkers are client facing on a much larger scale than I am.

So what’s the point? To ask you to be nicer to your server, your salesperson, your grocery store worker, and especially your friend and acquaintance in the medical field right now. To paraphrase Ian Maclaren (or Brad Meltzer?), “be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle you know nothing about.” And if you can’t understand why people would choose to be in retail or serving or any other kind of service job during a pandemic, then maybe you’ve never been poor.