HEB cares more about profit than human lives

The reason for this is precisely because companies like HEB - the free market as a whole - lobby to gut all public services and replace them with private services. You can see this in the charter school bait-and-switch: private for-profit companies insist that public schools are "failing," lobby to impose testing and arbitrary restrictions, and then have their funds transferred to private entities. So of course HEB "does a better job" at this or that than the state of Texas, because companies like HEB designed it that way.

But regarding this mask mandate: HEB is obviously dancing around whether they can or should require customers to wear masks. They want to be seen as caring for their workers' and customers' safety while not incurring right-wing nonsense.

HEB has had no problem hiring security to protect against shoplifting (a "crime" caused by poverty), but they choose not to use these same security forces to enforce a mask mandate that would literally save lives.

So yeah, at the end of the day, HEB, like all companies, cares more about profit than human life.