What's Unseen at the Grocery Store

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. You know, unless you work at one, the supermarket might be like the most ordinary place in American life that you take the most for granted.
You go a couple of times a week, maybe you barely think about it, and part of the comfort is not having to think about how any of it works. But if you ever worked in a grocery store, you'd know that a supermarket is really an ecosystem, and the people keeping it alive are working harder for less than many of us pushing a cart with guests. My next guest spent a year on the other side of the register and wrote a book based on notes she took after each shift. In the fall of 2020, writer Ann Larson took a job as a cashier at a grocery store in Utah.
What she found is a job that's physically brutal, badly paid, and far more skilled, than you probably give it credit for. With me now is Ann Larson, fellow of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author now of Clean Up on Isle 5, Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. Thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

**Ann Larson** (1:22)
Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:24)
Listeners, we're going to invite your first-person stories here. Do you currently or have you ever worked at a supermarket?
212-433-WNYC. What would be the headline from you? What's the job actually like from Behind the Register, deli counter, stock room, wherever you are or wherever you work? 212-433-WNYC. Whatever you think the rest of the general public should know that they don't see as ordinary shoppers. 212-433-9692. On things that were not great working conditions or great pay, have you ever found a way to push back or make it better? Call or text us with your supermarket employment stories.
212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Ann Larson. Why, Ann, out of all the things you could have undertaken as a, should we call it a undercover act of journalism, why this?

**Ann Larson** (2:28)
Well, like a lot of people, I found myself unemployed during the pandemic. So while I eventually wrote a book about my experience on the job, and after a few months there, I realized that I needed to write about what I was experiencing and observing. At first, I just got the job because that was what was available in my community.
I had been living in New York City for about 20 years. I moved there to attend the City University of New York, actually, and to go to graduate school. But after a while, my professional class jobs dried up, and I was facing unemployment. So I moved back to my home region. I'm from the Mountain States, and I moved back to Utah.
My timing was really poor because I moved back right as the pandemic was getting underway.
My city was shutting down, people weren't hiring. I sent out a lot of resumes to white collar jobs and didn't hear much back. And so at the time, I was living near a supermarket that I started shopping in. It was a very, very large store. I would go there to shop and I would see all of these employees. And here they were. They were showing up to work every day, punching a clock. They were still smiling and offering great customer service. And while many other businesses were closed and schools were closed, here were these people here to make sure that the rest of us could buy groceries. And I was super impressed by that. And I also think I felt a little bit guilty that I wasn't there with them. And so I thought, why not? I can get a job in the store. I will earn some money. I can get health insurance because I didn't have that at the time. And I'll sort of wait this pandemic out, see how long this lasts. And it ended up being about 13 months. And by the end, I definitely knew, you know, what I had seen was so troubling and enlightening that I wanted to write a book about it.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:12)
So you didn't go in with the intent of writing a book or doing journalism necessarily about your experience, mostly just fill that weird time during the pandemic with some employment?

**Ann Larson** (4:24)
Exactly, exactly.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:27)
You've said that in supermarkets, there are two versions of community happening at once. What are they?

**Ann Larson** (4:35)
So the supermarket I described in my book is kind of a split screen. On the one side, the supermarket is a really wonderful place. If you think about your neighborhood grocery store, it's hard to imagine living without it. It's a pillar of the community. It's almost always open. You can go in anytime and find thousands of products on sale day or night. My store was certainly that way.