今年2月，当美国**仍在犹豫不决，淡化新型冠状病毒和COVID-19可能带来的潜在影响时，总部位于圣安东尼奥的食品杂货连锁店HEB已经开始进行大流行模拟，并调整计划，帮助其应对2009年的H1N1疫情。

是的，这是正确的：一个地区性的杂货连锁店可以说比我们的**做了更好的提前规划，而且现在有更好的设备来应对冠状病毒大流行，到目前为止已经有超过80000美国人感染了这种病毒。《德克萨斯月刊》报道了HEB管理层如何利用其在自然灾害方面的经验提前应对疫情的故事。应急准备主任Justen Noakes解释说：

“So when did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue. We’ve got interests in the global sourcing world, and we started getting reports on how it was impacting things in China, so we started watching it closely at that point. We decided to take a harder look at how to implement the plan we developed in 2009 into a tabletop exercise. On February 2, we dusted it off and compared the plan we had versus what we were seeing in China, and started working on step one pretty heavily.”

是的，2月2日，甚至在特朗普总统宣布病毒将“像奇迹一样消失”之前。它预见到了即将到来的情况，所以在恐慌性购物在大多数地区全面展开之前，HEB就开始限制购买：

The company began limiting the amounts of certain products customers were able to purchase in early March; extended its sick leave policy and implemented social distancing measures quickly; limited its hours to keep up with the needs of its stockers; added a coronavirus hotline for employees in need of assistance or information; and gave employees a $2 an hour raise on March 16, as those workers, many of whom are interacting with the public daily during this pandemic, began agitating for hazard pay.

据《得克萨斯月刊》报道，除了十年前对甲型H1N1流感的预先规划外，HEB还借鉴了2017年应对飓风哈维（Harvey）余波的经验。诺克斯说，一个重要的教训是，关注客户的需求，并对其所做的事情保持透明：

“The most important lesson for us is to listen to what’s going on in our stores. When we started seeing the N95 masks and the sanitizers, we took that as a good sign that our customers were concerned about what was going on, and that’s what really spurred us to activate our program. That’s the biggest one—to make sure that we’re really paying attention to what our customer does, and to actually respond to it. As we continue to maneuver our supply chain and support our stores during COVID-19, we’ll bring some less*** learned and tools out of that into hurricane season.”

这个故事真的是一个有趣的潜水到一个经营良好的企业（咳嗽）可以准备一个前所未有的情况，并从过去的工作经验教训。奖励：一支马里亚奇乐队随机出现在一家HEB商店演奏（毕竟是德克萨斯州）。