Shropshire Star comment: Credit to the supermarket workers

Throughout this crisis people have just been getting on with their work to make sure, so far as the present circumstances allow, the wheels of society keep on turning.

Those in the supermarkets are not on the NHS front line, but they are on a different sort of front line, interacting with the public in their hundreds and thousands every day.

Barriers and other measures have been put in place to try to help ensure their safety, but the very fact that they are dealing with so many people rather than staying at home must surely increase the risk factor.

Today we shine an appreciative spotlight on some of their number. Tuffins Supermarket at Craven Arms has been doing its bit, adapting its methods to ensure safety for all, rising to the challenges, and going the extra mile for the vulnerable by offering a home delivery service designed to help those who are self-isolating.

Tuffins is just one example. Everywhere you look stores, whether they are the big supermarkets or the little corner shops, are doing praiseworthy work. And let us not forget that working on the till or stacking shelves are not the highest paid of jobs.

Their work has not had the high profile of that of NHS workers who are regarded as modern heroes. There is a danger that we could come to take what they are doing for granted. After all, going shopping is a normal activity, in normal times of course, while going into hospital with coronavirus is not.

However there are many signs that their efforts are not being overlooked, and that customers really appreciate what shop workers are doing and will continue to remember how they rose to the occasion after we have finally come through the crisis.

May they continue to show their appreciation in a manner which really counts for shopkeepers, but keeping up their custom.

Napoleon is famously alleged to have sneered that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers.

Well, if that is so, they, and their workers, have done us all proud.