From the first Piggly Wiggly to automated self-checkout machines, the supermarket is a microcosm of modern food systems, labor, and the idea of convenience. On today’s pledge drive edition of A Public Affair, host Bert Zipperer speaks with Ann Larson about her book, Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register.

Larson got a job at a supermarket at the outset of the COVID pandemic after spending a few years on the margins of the professional class in New York City. She worked for over a year at a grocery store before leaving and writing her book. Her main takeaway from that experience is that there is no such thing as unskilled labor. Supermarket cashiers, like herself, need patience, technical and communication skills, product knowledge, and more. They’re also likely to develop repetitive stress and muscular-skeletal disorders, workplace injuries that increasingly go un-investigated due to cuts to OSHA.

The second lesson of Larson’s book is that all laborers have dignity. When workers–like cashiers–are underpaid, they become devalued. In our culture, status is tied to pay, but Larson wants to bust the myth that so-called “low-skilled” workers deserve low pay. She says that unfortunately we seemed to have quickly forgotten the lessons about essential work that the pandemic taught us.

From her time cashiering, Larson saw the supermarket function as a community space where people could escape from the heat or cold, for example. But it’s also a place of precarious labor. On top of that, the shift to self-checkout machines in the name of “convenience” shifted labor from their employees to their customers. They also discuss the issue of Piggly Wiggly, the lack of unionization among retail workers, and the need to enforce anti-trust laws.

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

Ann Larson’s writing on education, debt, and low-wage work has appeared in The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, and The Nation, among other publications. She is coauthor of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition and is a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She lives in Salt Lake City, UT.

Featured image of the cover of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register.

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