CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE

Don’t take supermarket employees for granted.

This insider account persuasively argues that cashiers, stockers, baggers, and other grocery store workers deserve more money, rights, and respect for their “skilled and socially necessary” labors. At the Utah supermarket where she worked for a year, Larson’s fellow staffers suffered repetitive-stress injuries and struggled to pay bills. An 80-year-old employee collapsed on the job and later died in the hospital. As documented in frightening passages, staffers regularly dealt with unreasonable customers. One shopper tried to headbutt Larson; another announced he’d been drinking and was carrying a gun. Larson, a supervisor, earned more than some others, but rent consumed half of her modest paycheck. A debt-forgiveness activist, she tried to foster team spirit, streamlining new employee training sessions and giving staffers opportunities to impress executives. But her attempt “to be a one-woman solidarity machine” faltered amid “exhaustion and pain” caused by the job. Her amiable, first-person voice seamlessly integrates capsule histories of labor unions in the retail industry, the rise of chain stores, and employee-displacing technology. This compassionate book will make some shoppers think twice about using self-checkout machines, which reduce “social connection” between shoppers and workers. A few of the quotes attributed to workers feel overly tidy, perhaps because “in certain instances,” she uses composite characters. Few people, in any profession, are as reliably pithy and perceptive as some of her colleagues. In a forward-thinking conclusion, Larson offers ideas for addressing “economic precarity” among grocery workers. These fixes range from familiar—a higher minimum wage—to industry-specific. Improved medical insurance and retirement benefits would boost workers “health and dignity.” Shoppers can help, too, by pushing lawmakers to ax anti-union laws and enforce those meant to reduce retail monopolies.

In a thoughtful memoir, a former grocery store worker calls for industry reform.