Five Questions with "Cleanup on Aisle Five" Author Ann Larson

Great question. As I mention in the book, I got only occasional glimpses of employees’ lives outside the store. But over time I learned enough to know that most of the parents at my store had teenagers or adult children. Two reasons explain the lack of parents of young kids. The first is that pay was so low that hiring a babysitter would cost as much or more than a day’s wages. The second was scheduling. At my store, as in the industry more generally, a worker could be scheduled mornings one week and evenings the next, or a combination. Most people had little to no voice in when they worked. And once a schedule was posted, it was difficult to change. Workers had to convince a colleague to cover or trade a shift. To get a specific day off, we had to ask for it two weeks in advance (and the request might not be granted). This kind of uncertainty would be difficult for anyone who needs a flexible schedule or who might have to take a day off at the last minute.

I went back to the notes that I took on the job to see what I had written about the family lives of my colleagues. I discovered that I had written about a woman in her 20s who was the single parent of 3-year old. Here’s what I wrote about her at the time, using a pseudonym. “Caroline’s sister and her sister’s boyfriend (with whom she lives) watch her son when she is at work. I do not know if her sister is employed or how the two of them work out their schedules. But I know that Caroline has been called away from work several times because her son is sick or because her sister is not available to babysit.”

I’ll start by reiterating what you hint at in your question. Customer service work is not inherently demeaning. I was often proud to work in the store. I had many affirming interactions with shoppers, and many colleagues took pride in their jobs and in treating customers well. Employees who wanted to take classes or take up hobbies or any of the other things that make up “the good life” had to do it while holding down jobs that left them with little energy. The fatigue was partly a product of the repetition. One reason I wrote Cleanup on Aisle Five was to draw attention to how doing the same thing over and over with no sense that anything will change is a recipe for exhaustion that is beyond normal fatigue. One colleague loved gardening. During a shift, she made plans about what she was going to do in her garden later. But by the time she got home, she was too tired. Another told me that she once fell asleep after a shift and woke up covered in urine. Some staffers were trying to lead rich lives outside of work. I met cashiers who were writing novels and screenplays. One of the guys who worked in the meat department was an actor who had performed in a locally produced film. But these were the exceptions. It was more common to hear employees lamenting their lack of energy to do anything after work.

What do you think would need to happen to resolve that tension for retail employees nationwide? Pro-human labor policies like a shorter work week, a predictable schedule, and paid sick and vacations days are a start. (It would require unions to win all of that. Since only about 5 percent of retail workers are unionized, we have a long way to go.) But we also need to reform the nature of retail work. At my store, a worker hired to slice meat did that job all day, while a cashier worked the registers for eight hours. Such “specialization” is cheaper for employers. But retail workers, like everyone else, want to do interesting work and to learn and apply new skills. I think the real answer to the tension is democratization of workplaces. What if workers had a hand in running stores? A cashier might spend a couple of hours scanning groceries before going to a meeting with her peers to discuss big picture questions about inventory, customer service, and more? This kind of system would combine the skilled physical labor that workers already do with mental work that took advantage of their intelligence and experience in a different way.

3. One of the things that I didn’t realize about grocery store employees (my own ignorance, so thank you for correcting it!) was the amount of injuries retail work can cause. At one point you write that, “I looked around the Front End and saw that no one was physically capable of getting carts. Gordon’s bad back made him a poor candidate, and there was no question of sending Travis. Another cashier was wearing an orthopedic boot after suffering a broken foot. Her doctor had told her that standing for long periods had likely put pressure on her foot until a bone had snapped like a twig ... Like the self-checkout stations, my coworkers glitched and broke down.” I know you also experienced chronic pain yourself. Can you talk more about what people should understand about the physical toll this work takes, and why that matters?

This was one of the most alarming things that I learned on the job. As you mentioned, one of the challenges of managing the store was finding people who were able bodied enough to do the heavy labor including sweeping and collecting carts from the parking lot. I developed a painful case of plantar fasciitis. Every step felt like a pin pushing deeper into my heel. After I left the store and started researching the supermarket industry, I found that musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) like carpal tunnel are extremely common. Cashiering may seem like light work, but it’s actually one of the most dangerous jobs in a supermarket because of the likelihood of developing an MSD. As I recently reported for the Nation, employees have virtually no recourse. OSHA is charged by Congress with protecting workers. But the agency has been underfunded for decades. Big companies are taking advantage. They know they can work people to the bone without consequence.

I wrote above about some of the impacts of unpredictable scheduling. I will add here that, as someone who has spent time in the white collar world as well as in working-class jobs, autonomy over time is a main difference between the two. In my professional jobs, I could go to the doctor or do my grocery shopping when I needed to. If I was sick, I could stay in bed for a couple of days without fear of being fired. At the supermarket, it felt like my time was owned by someone else whether I was “on the clock” or not. The lack of control is exacerbated because many employees have calculated how many hours they need to pay for essentials. The phrase “I need the hours” was shorthand for “if I don’t work my full schedule this week, I won’t make rent.” Biometric tracking systems added insult to injury. At my store, we used our fingerprints to clock in and out, connecting our bodies to the store’s timekeeping mechanism. The clock doubled as a surveillance device. Bosses could log into the system to see, down to the second, what time a worker clocked in, took a break, and left. The result was a stifling sense of being watched. Barbara Ehrenreich captured the existential dread in Nickel and Dimed. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour,” she wrote, “is that what you’re actually selling is your life.”

5. I’ll close with the question I always like to ask: What surprised you the most while writing this book?