Please note: Accuracy and availability of IPR transcripts may vary. 00;00;01;22 - 00;00;22;19 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I'm J.R. Jamison, and you're listening to The Facing Project. For many of us, a trip to the grocery store is just another errand. We fill our carts, stand in line, and maybe exchange a few words with a cashier. Then we head home and move on with our lives. But what if we slow down long enough to see the people on the other side of the register? 00;00;22;22 - 00;00;56;21 J.R. Jamison What stories would we discover, and what assumptions might we leave behind? Today on the Facing Project, I'm joined by writer Ann Larson, author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. Based on her own experiences of working in a grocery store, Ann opens the box and lets us see inside through storytelling, where she invites us into the world of essential workers, people whose labor keeps our communities running but whose lives are too often invisible and sadly dispensable. 00;00;56;22 - 00;01;13;21 J.R. Jamison Ann and I will explore work, dignity, wage disparity, and what it means to really see one another. When consumerism itself is a veil that often divides workers from shoppers. Stay with us. 00;01;13;23 - 00;01;28;25 J.R. Jamison You're listening to The Facing Project, and I'm J.R. Jamison. My guest today is Ann Larson author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and The View from Behind the Supermarket. Register. Ann thank you for joining me on the Facing project. 00;01;28;26 - 00;01;31;08 Ann Larson Larson: Thanks, J.R.. It's a thrill to be here. 00;01;31;11 - 00;02;01;27 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yes. I'm so excited to be in conversation with you. I really enjoyed your book, and you focus most of your time in the narrative on your life behind the register, essentially, but also on the front end of the grocery store that you call TGS. But your journey there? I think some would consider an unconventional route. Take us back to those early days of finding your way to TGS and ultimately becoming one of its essential workers. 00;02;02;04 - 00;02;35;22 Ann Larson Larson: Yeah, so clean up and five tells the story of my year working in a supermarket in Utah, where I was hired during the pandemic to supervise an area of the store called the Front End. And that's where the cashiers work. I had never been a cashier before. I had bagged groceries in high school, but this was many years later, and so I found myself during the pandemic all of a sudden with this new job, managing this part of the store in the industry that I really had no experience in, this book tells that story. 00;02;35;23 - 00;03;01;04 Ann Larson My journey to TGS, as you mentioned, is a little bit unconventional. I, I grew up in a small town in Idaho, and then I moved to Utah to attend college. So I'm from the Mountain West States, but I sort of, as a young 20 something, was pretty ambitious. After college, I moved to New York City. I wanted to be part of, you know, the big city, be professional. 00;03;01;04 - 00;03;36;01 Ann Larson I had visions of getting a PhD, of going to law school, something like this, of being a writer. And so I spent about 20 years in New York City. And while I was there, I did manage to get that PhD at the City University of New York in English. I taught part time college students as an adjunct and as a graduate student, and I also joined some activism, left wing activism I was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011, and I a few years after that, I co-founded an organization called The Debt Collective. 00;03;36;01 - 00;03;57;16 Ann Larson And what the Debt Collective did and does is organize with student debtors and people with other kinds of debt to win debt relief. And so for a few years, I worked with students who had attended scam for profit colleges, and they were promised a bill of goods, and then they took out a bunch of loans and couldn't pay them back. 00;03;57;16 - 00;04;20;12 Ann Larson Long story short. So I worked for several years to win debt relief from the federal government for those borrowers. And we did win billions of dollars in debt relief. But after a while. So this is maybe 2019, 2020. The the funding for that work became harder to come by. And I found myself unemployed in middle age. And I didn't know what didn't know what to do. 00;04;20;12 - 00;04;45;28 Ann Larson I ended up moving back to my home region of Utah to sort of make a new start, figure out what was next. And I was I figured, you know, I've got a lot of experience. I'm educated, I can make this work. And but then the pandemic hit. And so one of the themes of the book is like my incredibly poor timing that I ended up I ended up getting my PhD right as the financial crisis was hitting in 2008. 00;04;46;01 - 00;05;13;06 Ann Larson So that harmed my ability to find work. And then I ended up unemployed right as the pandemic hit, which put me in a in a disadvantageous situation, you might say. So anyway, I was in the I was looking for work. I don't I'm not a person who has a lot of ability to live without an income. And so I was shopping at a supermarket close to my apartment that I called TGS in the book, and I was pretty impressed by the workers that were showing up there. 00;05;13;07 - 00;05;30;10 Ann Larson You know, this was right at the outset of the pandemic. We didn't know how bad this was going to get. There were lockdowns, the schools were closing, but here were these employees showing up every day and punching a clock. And they were smiling and they gave great customer service. And I felt like I felt was really impressed by them. 00;05;30;10 - 00;05;50;17 Ann Larson But I think I also felt a little guilty that they were showing up to work. And I was I was home and so I thought, I can do this, I can work here until, you know, the pandemic ends or I find something better, whichever comes first. So I applied to work at the store, and surprisingly, I was hired just a few days later to supervise the cashiers. 00;05;50;17 - 00;05;58;24 Ann Larson I think, you know, I was a bit older. I had I had an education and I had some management experience, so that's how I ended up at TGS. 00;05;58;26 - 00;06;23;04 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Wow. And so you go on this journey where you're back in your home area and you see this shiny supermarket and you end up as a behind the register, but also as a supervisor. And you write in the book about how once you were on that other side, you started to see a bit of a different story. And we'll talk more in depth about that here in a moment. 00;06;23;04 - 00;06;31;15 J.R. Jamison But I want just to know your immediate reaction of what surprised you the most when you stepped behind that counter as a worker and not a shopper? 00;06;31;20 - 00;06;49;05 Ann Larson Larson: What surprised me the most was how hard it was and how much skill it took. You know, I did not expect working in a grocery store to be easy. I did not walk in thinking this is going to be a breeze. Not at all. But I was still surprised by how much skillet took, how long it took me to learn the job. 00;06;49;05 - 00;07;10;20 Ann Larson Just, you know, we have this myth that retail workers are unskilled, right? This this is the term and this is just absolutely false. When I got the job, it took me a really long time just simply to learn the upper at the register. I describe in my book the weeks and months of frustration that I went through learning how to use this machine learning. 00;07;10;20 - 00;07;32;18 Ann Larson There are many things a cashier not only has to have these this technical knowledge, learning how to operate this machine, but also a lot of communication skills. Shoppers, you know, think about it, you're a cashier. You're serving hundreds of people a day. They come through your checkout line and they're all different. They have different personalities. Some people want to chat with you, you know, about the weather or sports or the what's on sale that week. 00;07;32;19 - 00;07;48;08 Ann Larson Other people are kind of maybe they're in a bad mood. They just want to hurry up and get out. There are just all sorts of different people have questions they want to know. You know, where something is in the store. You have to have lots of product knowledge to be able to direct people in to find what they're looking for. 00;07;48;10 - 00;08;12;02 Ann Larson There are just many, many skills that there are angry customers, people that have that are they want to complain, right? So you have to develop the ability to to serve people in all sorts of different situations. And so I really was surprised right away how much skill this took, how long it took me to learn the job. And it gave me a great deal of respect for the people that do it. 00;08;12;04 - 00;08;40;11 J.R. Jamison Jamison: So really, you're wearing the hat of being the oracle of knowledge for the entire supermarket. Also playing counselor, also playing just small talk person and also managing the other people in the store as well, and also kind of managing the customers. And you're doing all of this while you're on your feet. I think one of the things I kept thinking about while I was reading your book is that almost all of us has stood. 00;08;40;12 - 00;09;14;04 J.R. Jamison We've stood right in a checkout line. So we've done that standing, but not on the other side. And we've stood there thousands of times. And yet I don't think I ever really considered the life of the person who was checking me out. But as you said, right. You have to be the knowledge person and you have to be the one to make conversation when conversation needs to be had and you have to have the answers when a customer is mad about something or they feel like maybe what was scanned wasn't the right price, and you could have written a book that was entirely about poverty. 00;09;14;06 - 00;09;34;28 J.R. Jamison You could have written a book that was about unfair work hours, or even unlivable wages of the grocery store workers. And there's a bit of that in there, but instead you really chose to tell it from the stories, from the lens of the people who were in the store, including workers, including customers. Why were the stories the right way to explore the subject? 00;09;34;29 - 00;09;37;13 J.R. Jamison Talk more about that decision as a writer? 00;09;37;19 - 00;09;56;13 Ann Larson Larson: That's a really great question. It took me many, many drafts to sort of figure out which approach to take, because the supermarket is such a complicated place. Another thing I learned, there are so much going on there that it was kind of a challenge to figure out, like, what's what's the narrative thread here? Like, what's the most, what are the most important stories to tell? 00;09;56;14 - 00;10;19;07 Ann Larson And and you know, one of the things I just want to touch on something that you said, one of the themes of this book is the sort of split screen of the supermarket, right on the one side, as you mentioned, there are it's very low paid work. A lot of supermarket workers can't afford their own groceries. There's a lot of injury people, repetitive stress injuries and things like that. 00;10;19;15 - 00;10;38;12 Ann Larson On the other side of the split screen, the supermarket is a wonderful place. It's a community center, right? Imagine. And this was especially apparent during the pandemic when a lot of other businesses were closed. But it's true all the time. Our supermarkets are pillars of the neighborhood. They're almost always open. We can go in, there's a friendly person there. 00;10;38;14 - 00;11;01;19 Ann Larson There's all sorts of food and household goods, aisles and aisles of stuff, things that you need to sustain yourself, but also small pleasures. People came into our store to use the bathroom and to get the get coffee and hang out with their friends, and they talk to the pharmacist about their health care needs. People brought their bikes in and left him on the front end, knowing that we would keep an eye out while they were shopping. 00;11;01;25 - 00;11;29;22 Ann Larson So there's this kind of wonderful way that the supermarket is a community center. It's a place where people feel comfortable, where they know how it works. A lot of shoppers even knew our names. They were the regulars. They would come and hey, and how are you doing when they came through the line? And that's sort of the other side of this, of the split screen, where it's pretty dark on the other side with a lot of a lot of low pay and suffering, and that's on the side of customers and workers. 00;11;29;24 - 00;11;51;22 Ann Larson But I think, you know, so I what I wanted to do in this book was really just drill down into those stories of what's happening in the store from the point of view, who actually work and shop there. So what I started to do is I took notes. I would get home from work when I was extremely tired after every shift, so it was really a challenge. 00;11;51;22 - 00;12;14;14 Ann Larson But I would force myself after work to open my laptop and start taking notes. And what I would do is just write down summary of the day, what happened, incidents between workers and shoppers, tensions between workers and other workers, whatever sort of stuck out to me as important or meaningful. And I try to like, really capture the way people spoke sentences. 00;12;14;14 - 00;12;38;11 Ann Larson They said expressions that they used. And to really get get as close as I could to the actual action. When I left the store about a year later, I went back to those notes, you know, and what I found was really, you know, a really rich document of the everyday life of the supermarket. And so I thought, okay, this must be there must be something here. 00;12;38;13 - 00;12;57;04 Ann Larson You know, it was a lot of disjointed, though. Every day is the same. It's also very different from every day that came before. So the trick was figuring out what are the narrative threads, what are the lines that I can actually follow through the whole book? There's also there's a high degree of turnover in a supermarket. Employees come on, they work for a few weeks or months and then they quit. 00;12;57;07 - 00;13;14;03 Ann Larson There was like a hundred people working in my store. I only knew a very few of them, some I knew by face, but not by name. So one of the challenges of the book was really figuring out which stories do I tell, whose stories do I tell, and how can I create a narrative that I can follow through a whole book? 00;13;14;06 - 00;13;33;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: When you write about the customers and your coworkers and managers, even with a great deal of compassion, even when the interactions sometimes were difficult, it wasn't always easy conversations. How did working at TGS reshape the way you see people? 00;13;33;10 - 00;13;54;12 Ann Larson Larson: I think that's a really good question. You know, I think it reshaped the way I see class relations in the country. You mentioned when you were introducing the book about, you know, most of us, all of us have stood on one side of the check stand. We've all gone through the checkout lane, we've all purchased groceries. We kind of know what that's like. 00;13;54;12 - 00;14;14;04 Ann Larson We do it without thinking about it, but we don't often think about the person on the other side of the check stand. And I think that that, you know, if you look up statistically, retail sales person is the second most common job in the country. So this is a lot of people. This is millions of people who do these jobs and supermarkets in other places. 00;14;14;04 - 00;14;38;26 Ann Larson And I think, you know, what I, what I realized is that there's this we tend not to think about them because we think of ourselves as consumers, as people who buy things and, and who want to receive good service. But right now, we have an affordability crisis right? In the country. People can't afford their groceries. There are lots and lots of articles in the paper about the price of milk and the price of eggs and inflation, and how these. 00;14;38;27 - 00;14;56;07 Ann Larson But what I find and what I can't forget after my experience in the store, is that the people that are working in supermarkets who are selling those goods are actually this is not a separate problem, right? The fact that these people make less money than they should, the fact that they don't, they're not respected, that they're treated as unskilled. 00;14;56;07 - 00;15;21;15 Ann Larson In some ways, the supermarket is like the epicenter of a lot of problems in our society, both from an affordability standpoint but from a standpoint of like, what are workers earning? Are they earning enough to survive? And so people in that situation are doing the best they can in really, really difficult circumstances, and they're not being given the sort of consideration that they deserve. 00;15;21;17 - 00;15;42;15 Ann Larson I mean, I think I think about the pandemic when we talk about essential workers, right. For a brief moment. And, you know, healthcare workers were obviously at the top of the list and warehouse workers and others. But for brief moments, grocery workers were sort of seen. Right. We saw them for the first time. These are people that are going to work that that yeah, that are heroes. 00;15;42;15 - 00;16;10;02 Ann Larson Right. And for even a few months in there, some grocery workers received additional pay. They called it Heroes pay. Right. But how quickly? I think also about how quickly that moment passed. And we sort of went back to the old ways of thinking that those people were invisible, even though there is so incredibly essential and important. 00;16;10;04 - 00;16;38;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: And you write about kind of this cycle that essential workers and grocery store workers get caught in, which is long hours, low pay, not enough energy to really look for another job. If you really are trying to actively look for another job, there are kind of these stress points around it that when I was reading, I kept thinking in some ways some people are kind of trapped, maybe in this job. 00;16;38;08 - 00;16;39;22 J.R. Jamison What would you say to that? 00;16;39;24 - 00;16;55;10 Ann Larson Larson: Yeah, a lot of one of the things I was worried that people would say, because I write a lot in the book, about the the bad parts of these jobs, the low pay, the injury, the unpredictable hours. And what I was worried about was that people might say, well, why don't they just go out and get a better job, right? 00;16;55;11 - 00;17;21;00 Ann Larson You just go and you find something better and maybe you, you know, don't don't put up with that. Right. And I really want to caution how, how difficult it is to get out of a bad job. These jobs can feel like quicksand when you're in them. You have very little say over your schedule. You can be scheduled to work, you know, mornings or swing shift or nights, and the schedule can change from week to week. 00;17;21;02 - 00;17;38;02 Ann Larson The job is very tiring physically. I had colleagues, one colleague of mine, she liked work in her garden. She is a real gardener, so she had a she's very proud of the vegetables that she grew out of her garden. But she told me one day she said, you know, every day I'm at work and I think I can't wait to get home and work in my garden. 00;17;38;02 - 00;18;00;23 Ann Larson But when I get home, I'm so tired. All I can do is lay down and sleep. And that's just one example of of the way your entire life can feel like it's owned by your employer. You don't. You don't really have days time off or days off. You have periods of rest where you're recuperating so that then you can go back and do the job again the next day. 00;18;00;29 - 00;18;26;14 Ann Larson And so this is just not a very this is not very suitable. These are not suitable conditions for thinking that you could go out and find a better job. If you want to interview for a different job, you might not know your schedule more than two weeks in advance, so that might be difficult. Taking college classes could become difficult not only because of the fatigue, trying to juggle different obligations, but not knowing exactly what your schedule is going to be. 00;18;26;21 - 00;18;53;21 Ann Larson And so these jobs are really tough to get out of. And they also, you know, for somebody I worked with a security guard who working on your feet for years really is harmful to the body. Something else I learned on the job is the degree to which a lot of people are working in physical pain. He was about 60 years old, and so he couldn't at a certain point, he said his hip was so inflamed and he was in such pain that he couldn't work anymore. 00;18;53;21 - 00;19;06;18 Ann Larson So he was planning to try to retire early. And he said, you know, I need to work. I don't know what I'm going to do. But he said, I've just I've had a stand up job my whole life, and I don't know what other kind of job I could even get at this point where I'm not standing up. 00;19;06;19 - 00;19;27;02 Ann Larson Like, what kind of desk job is a 60 year old person who's worked on their feet their whole life going to find? And so this was it wasn't that people were. I do want to emphasize it wasn't that people were like, didn't know that they had had it bad, right. And didn't know that they deserved better. Many of them did. 00;19;27;02 - 00;19;32;06 Ann Larson But the avenues for actually improving their situation are pretty limited. 00;19;32;09 - 00;19;55;27 J.R. Jamison Jamison: What I found interesting too most of the managers are supervisors had worked their way up from the store from cashier. Let's just use that as one example. But with their changing roles, did it come changing attitudes in the environment of the supermarket itself? And this even kind of happened to you when you were taking on more of a supervisory or management experience? 00;19;55;28 - 00;20;04;05 J.R. Jamison Talk about this dichotomy. And what does it say about environments like a supermarket where no one ever really gets a break? 00;20;04;08 - 00;20;22;18 Ann Larson Larson: What I found on the job was that, you know, I might have thought going into a job like this, that there would be a lot of solidarity between workers, right? That I would go in there and everybody would kind of understand, we're on the same boat here. We're not being treated well. We're not we're not receiving the wages that we deserve. 00;20;22;22 - 00;20;47;15 Ann Larson But there would be a sense of togetherness, like, we're all in this. We're all in this collective situation together. What I found was actually quite the opposite of that. A lot of workers were at each other's throats. There was a great deal of competition among workers over things like pay and hours and different jobs that people wanted to do that were slightly better than other jobs, and there was just not a lot of solidarity at all. 00;20;47;15 - 00;21;16;23 Ann Larson There was a lot of teasing and a lot of mockery, you know, between colleagues that that that were working together, just there was a general sense that if somebody else got something, it came at someone else's expense. And I think this was something to that, that, you know, this was a nonunion store. I should emphasize. I've heard from some people since the book came out that that environments can be a little bit different in union stores, where there is a sense that we're all in the union together. 00;21;16;23 - 00;21;48;23 Ann Larson But that's rare. Only about 5% of grocery workers are in unions. So most people that work in these environments and we're talking retail stores. But in any nonunion environment, there's no built in mechanism for feeling like your conditions are connected to anybody else's. It's every person, every worker for themselves. And this was also true, you know, when managers got promoted, say, when a cashier became a manager and I was I was hired as a supervisor, there's a sense where you feel like I want to be a good supervisor. 00;21;48;23 - 00;22;09;20 Ann Larson I want to be easygoing. I want to be one of these cool supervisors that everybody likes. But over time, as I document in the book, I found that that was really impossible, that when you're in a position of authority in a place like that, you, you, you without, without wanting to, you sort of become one of these people that you that you did not intend to be. 00;22;09;20 - 00;22;41;06 Ann Larson I ended up really struggling with feelings of frustration and negativity and even sometimes real anger towards colleagues in situations where they really didn't deserve it. But that was just the position that I was in as their as their boss. For example, I had to schedule breaks, so one of the jobs of a supermarket supervisor is making sure that every worker gets their 15 minute break every two hours, and there were workers that would take their 15 minute break and try to stretch you into 20 or 25 minutes. 00;22;41;06 - 00;23;03;19 Ann Larson That was incredibly common. And as a supervisor, I thought, oh gosh, I'm not going to, I'm just going to let them take it, you know, what do I care about 5 or 10 minutes? But what you learn is that those extra long breaks put pressure on other employees. The next person can't go on their break because they're waiting for the person before them to come back, or the lines are extra long at the check stands because somebody is taking an extra ten minutes. 00;23;03;19 - 00;23;26;28 Ann Larson And this creates endless problems in the supermarket. So I ended up you can't be that that that friendly, easygoing supervisor who's like, sure, go ahead and take extra minutes. You end up becoming a bit of a tyrant and demanding know you need to come back exactly at the right time. And so I had many, many situations where I just ended up behaving in ways that I could not have anticipated at the beginning. 00;23;27;01 - 00;23;56;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: It makes me wonder too you, right in the book about how supermarkets came to be right. And there used to be the the mom and pop stores in a community, and the experience was that the worker would find the food for you and right, like get your order ready. But the shift that happened to no, let's put that onus on the consumer to find their food and bring it to us. 00;23;56;10 - 00;24;29;04 J.R. Jamison Allowed franchising to happen with with supermarkets. And so it makes me wonder this pressure is in many ways the incorporation of supermarkets as a as a company, as a franchise, and how that's shifted, why a worker in a grocery store would have been years ago. And I don't know if we could ever go back to the way things had once been years ago. 00;24;29;05 - 00;24;41;24 J.R. Jamison Right? Like our population is larger expectations have changed about the way that we interact with the world. But do you see the connections between all of that? 00;24;41;25 - 00;25;03;20 Ann Larson Larson: Yeah, I don't think we can go back to the way it was. But I will say, you know, as you mentioned, early in the 20th century, grocery stores were the clerk was behind the counter. These were small, independent businesses. This was in the era before chains. And it was usually, you know, there's a grocery store in every neighborhood and you would show up and there was a clerk behind the counter, and he had all the goods behind him. 00;25;03;20 - 00;25;19;18 Ann Larson And so you would line up behind your neighbors and you would ask for, you know, a pound of coffee and two cups of sugar or whatever. And he would give you, you know, what he had and he would and there were no prices posted. So you had to negotiate with the clerk and you didn't know whether he was going to give you something. 00;25;19;20 - 00;25;40;08 Ann Larson You can't look at it before you take it home and then opened it up. So the question of quality was always at issue. Women then, as now, did most grocery shopping. So they had really tense relationships, often with the clerk. They had to like, flatter and be very and be very kind in order to get the best goods. 00;25;40;08 - 00;25;58;22 Ann Larson There were, you know, favorite customers, all that kind of. So, you know, once one of the things that started happening in the 20s and 30s is chain stores started to open up, big companies came in and bought out these small mom & pops started opening chains. And one of the things they did is, first of all, they brought the clerk out from behind the counter. 00;25;58;23 - 00;26;28;05 Ann Larson They invented check stands, and their idea was we were going to make customers do the work of bringing the groceries to the check stand. So this is a this is a shift. And we see this happening all along. The history of the supermarket is that work is being transferred from workers to shoppers. So when you are walking through the aisles with your cart, picking stuff off the shelf and bring it to the check stand, you're performing a kind of labor for the store that the company now doesn't have to pay for. 00;26;28;07 - 00;26;44;19 Ann Larson And so this is really the invention of the shopping cart. In the night before the 1930s, there were no shopping carts. Customers would show up. They would bring baskets from home or bags from home, and they would simply walk through the aisles and fill up their bag and then take it to the check stand. But what? There was a guy. 00;26;44;19 - 00;27;03;04 Ann Larson He was from Oklahoma. His name was Sylvan Goldman in the 1930s, and he didn't like the system because he noticed that shoppers weren't buying enough stuff. You know, they would only buy what they could carry out by hand. So he invented this this basket with wheels. He called it a carrier basket, and he offered it to and he offered it to shoppers. 00;27;03;04 - 00;27;29;16 Ann Larson And at first they didn't like it. They were like, I don't want I don't want any. I don't want to push this around the store. Women thought they looked like baby carriages, and men thought it was unmanly to push a card through the store. And so it took a while. Sylvan Goldman had to actually hire models to walk through his store and kind of encourage shoppers to use on the, the, the, the carrier baskets, which then customers started calling shopping cart. 00;27;29;16 - 00;27;53;17 Ann Larson So it did take some time. But that was another moment when the labor of running the store is being shifted from workers to shoppers. So that's another way I talked to a few minutes ago about, you know, we're on opposite sides of the check stand, workers and shoppers. And there's a sense that we have we have different needs and desires, but actually we're all doing the same job in a way, as we're helping to run the supermarket. 00;27;53;19 - 00;28;30;15 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Well and run the corporation, right. And make money for, for the for the, for the supermarkets. You also right to though that this franchising of supermarkets. Right. And supermarkets becoming what they are today or as they were moving toward what they they became today, there was some equity there where black Americans often were mistreated or not served. If they went to a mom and pop store before franchise supermarkets, sometimes they weren't waited on. 00;28;30;15 - 00;28;46;05 J.R. Jamison There were discrimination issues, but putting the onus on the shopper, actually picking their products and putting in a card and going going to a cashier changed that equity, which is kind of an odd thing to think about, talk, talk more about this. 00;28;46;06 - 00;29;06;22 Ann Larson Larson: Yes. This is so important. All through the history of the grocery store, in the early days, black shoppers were discriminated against. Even in the north, black shoppers that moved north as part of the Great Migration to escape Jim Crow and to find work. They often found that the grocery store was similar to its southern counterparts. They were black. 00;29;06;22 - 00;29;26;29 Ann Larson Shoppers were treated poorly. The clerk had a lot of power. Again, this was when the clerk was behind the counter. A racist clerk would overcharge black shoppers or take a piece of gum to the bottom of a scale to to charge more for for meat, for example, rotten meat was sold to black shoppers. And these folks, you know, they couldn't do much because what are you going to do, call the police? 00;29;26;29 - 00;29;51;12 Ann Larson Who's going to the police? Officers are going to come and probably side with the with the, the clerk. So this was very a very big problem. A lot of black shoppers, I tell the story. My book opened their own stores. They created co-ops, the people's grocery store that was that opened up in, in the South to sort of to sort of serve this community that wasn't being served. 00;29;51;12 - 00;30;14;28 Ann Larson But you're right, the centralization and the corporatization of the industry had a benefit to black shoppers, because all of a sudden the clerk isn't behind the counter anymore. Every shopper is being treated the same and they're being offered standard service. A black customer can walk into a store and pick something off the shelf and take it to the chicken, and the prices are posted now, so they're going to pay the same price as a white shopper. 00;30;14;28 - 00;30;44;02 Ann Larson So this this was a sea change in most black shoppers experiences. So black shoppers preferred these corporate stores. Totally understandable. And I think the lesson here and you know, corporations weren't trying to they didn't care about civil rights or they weren't doing a form of anti-racism. Right. Nothing at all. They were trying to make money. And they had discovered that posting prices, that streamlining service, that making shoppers do some of the work was more profitable. 00;30;44;02 - 00;31;08;10 Ann Larson And that had this byproduct of being more fair to to black shoppers. So I think one of the lessons here is that centralization and standardization, these are not inherently bad things. It's not a bad thing to have, you know, I think in a nation of this 350 million people or whatever we have at this point, if we're going to have supermarkets, we're going to have grocery stores. 00;31;08;10 - 00;31;30;05 Ann Larson There's going to have to be large industry, high degree of centralization, and we're going to have to enforce anti-discrimination laws, which requires a strong government in place to be able to do that. So I think the lesson is that, you know, my book doesn't romanticize small business or the mom and pop. I mean, I think those are those can be important parts of the industry. 00;31;30;05 - 00;31;47;16 Ann Larson And if we have a mom and pop store in our neighborhood, that's an alternative to the big corporate stores. There's nothing wrong with supporting them. But I do think centralization and standardization are also not there's nothing wrong with it. And in fact, if it's done right, it can be beneficial. 00;31;47;19 - 00;32;19;23 J.R. Jamison Jamison: It makes me think, too, about how and I don't have the stats in front of me. So I'm being very transparent to my listeners about this. But observation wise and in other reading I've done about food deserts and the percentage of Black Americans who do live in areas that are food deserts, where a convenience store might be the only option for them to get food, and they would have to go far and far to make it to a supermarket. 00;32;19;23 - 00;32;47;09 J.R. Jamison And we are seeing co-ops. Co-ops have a kind of reemergence. I had some guest on a couple years back on an episode called Agra, Baltimore, where folks in the Plantation Heights area of Baltimore are beginning to grow their own food and create a co-op, which was really exciting, but it was their response to being in a food desert, which they call food apartheid. 00;32;47;12 - 00;33;08;14 J.R. Jamison This is not what your book was about, but I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about that. Is there a reemergence of co-ops within black communities, or serving those in food deserts that now, all these years later, supermarkets? Maybe. Maybe it's had a different effect on marginalized communities? 00;33;08;14 - 00;33;27;07 Ann Larson Larson: I think I just got done saying, you know, that that centralization and standardization, having a big industry that serves the country is incredibly important. I also completely agree with you. We have to have alternatives to these corporate chains. Corporate stores are not going to invest in communities where they can't make a profit, right? They're just not going to do it. 00;33;27;07 - 00;33;49;13 Ann Larson They are profit driven institutions. So yes, we do have food deserts in the country where many people live, in rural areas where there's no food desert. And even in cities in some parts of New York City, Atlanta residents live in food deserts, rural areas like North Dakota, people live in all over the country, and this does disproportionately affect black shoppers. 00;33;49;14 - 00;34;09;07 Ann Larson And so I trace this in the book to discrimination in the industry from the beginning, where black shoppers were mistreated in stores, sold rotten food, higher prices. That discrimination hasn't ended. It simply changed form. And now it looks like food deserts. People having to go to convenience stores to buy their groceries. A lot of people don't have cars. 00;34;09;11 - 00;34;27;01 Ann Larson So even if you've got a grocery store within a couple of miles, if you don't have a car, you can't get to it. So this is this is an incredibly important part of the story that we do need these alternatives. I talk in the book Black Shoppers. There's a whole very long, interesting history of black shoppers opening cooperative grocery stores way back. 00;34;27;02 - 00;34;52;06 Ann Larson You can trace it to the 19th century. I talk about a resurgence of this in the 1930s where black shoppers, particularly socialists, were coming up with ways to serve their community, opening stores all over the country. There's a very, very important tradition of co-op stores. I see that tradition continuing today in stuff like in policy ideas, like what Danny is doing in New York City. 00;34;52;08 - 00;35;14;04 Ann Larson This is municipal grocery stores. Like like those are there are a few of them around the country. So it's not just in New York, but I think what mundane is doing in New York is really important because it's really setting a standard. He's proposing opening five stores, one in each of the boroughs, where public funding would make would subsidize the costs for some items. 00;35;14;05 - 00;35;31;22 Ann Larson Right. So this this is incredibly important. It taps into this long history of racial and social justice that we have in the country. And it's simply, you know, a lot of people come. Is it communism? Is it this, you know, is it going to is it going to ruin the local bodega? But I actually think there's just there's a long history of this in the country. 00;35;31;22 - 00;35;49;21 Ann Larson Is government coming in and subsidizing food and helping people that don't have access to it be able to afford their groceries. And what else is it government for if not making sure we can access basic needs? So I'm really excited about that. And I think that there's a lot to be there's a lot that we should all support those initiatives they're going to be. 00;35;49;22 - 00;36;08;02 Ann Larson It's going to be difficult. I don't think it's going to you're going to overnight. We're going to have successful municipal supermarkets. And around the country, corporate stores are really powerful. They can spend a lot of money on lobbying. They would prefer that you go to their store to buy buy your groceries. So there's going to be, I think, a fight over this. 00;36;08;02 - 00;36;17;27 Ann Larson But I think it's an incredibly positive development. 00;36;17;29 - 00;36;47;11 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I want to go back to the stories of your coworkers. You write about them with such eloquence and nuance, and you show us their lives and hobbies before TGS, and also what little life they often have outside of TGS once becoming an employee. Are there coworker stories who have stayed with you long after you've left? Personally, I'm thinking about Bonnie, your coworker who worked well into old age and essentially died on the job, right? 00;36;47;13 - 00;37;01;09 J.R. Jamison I mean, she didn't. You don't say that she died in the supermarket, but she's taken away from the supermarket in an ambulance and never returns. Talk more about her or others whose stories have stayed with you day after day. 00;37;01;17 - 00;37;17;18 Ann Larson Larson: Yeah. So I worked at the store with a woman who was, I call her Cindy in the book. She was 79 when I when I got the job there, and she'd already been on the job for nine years. So she, I asked her one day, you know, why are you still working in the supermarket? Well, past retirement age. 00;37;17;18 - 00;37;34;26 Ann Larson She told me again that this reflects the split screen of the supermarket. She said, well, first of all, I love my job. I want what would I do at home, stare at the wall. I love my customers. She was very popular in the store. People would go through her line just simply to chat with her. It was a real social hour when she was there. 00;37;34;26 - 00;37;50;26 Ann Larson But also she's like, I need the money. My Social Security does not allow me to pay my rent. So Cindy was somebody. She never took a day off. She couldn't afford it. She started getting sick. During the last months I was working at the job, and so sometimes she would have to call out sick because she couldn't work. 00;37;50;26 - 00;38;12;08 Ann Larson And every time she called out sick, she told me, I need you to mark it down as a vacation day because I can't afford to miss even one day of work. So she was she was poor, and that's why she she worked at the supermarket. But as a 79 year old person, the heavy labor, the constant demands on your body and on your on your on your mental health took a toll. 00;38;12;10 - 00;38;31;19 Ann Larson She had a she suffered from a kidney disease and so that was a factor. But she did end up working at the store. And she collapsed one day on the job and had to be taken out in an ambulance. And she died a few days later. So I told this story to talk about elderly people in the supermarket industry. 00;38;31;22 - 00;38;56;02 Ann Larson One of the fastest growing demographics of people who work in these stores are elderly people. There have been some viral stories of elderly workers behind a check stand that have gained public sympathy. Like somebody will make a post on on Facebook and the post will go viral. And the GoFundMe account we'll get set up. And all of a sudden, we have this heartwarming story of a 75 year old cashier who can who can suddenly retire. 00;38;56;02 - 00;39;17;02 Ann Larson And but to me, these stories are less heartwarming than a real sign of a sickness in our society. Many people that are well past the age of retirement simply can't afford to stop working. And so the retail industry has benefited from this. Studies show that these employers really like to hire older workers. They have a lot of experience. 00;39;17;04 - 00;39;40;05 Ann Larson They're really reliable. They need their jobs. And so they're hiring folks. My colleague Cindy, that I write about in the book made $14 an hour. That was her wage, and it didn't really budge the whole time she was there. So this is, I think, do we want to you know, for me, it's a question of values, right? Do we want to have a society where 80 year old people need to work in the supermarket to pay rent? 00;39;40;07 - 00;40;00;19 Ann Larson Or is there is this is this a sign of a problem that we need to solve and figuring out retirement and what that looks like? There's an economist called Theresa Dutch who talks about a gray New Deal that we actually need to rethink retirement policies, retirement programs that come up with public funding, ways that older people can retire with dignity. 00;40;00;19 - 00;40;25;07 Ann Larson This is especially crucial for people that have manual labor jobs. Even I work with many people who are middle aged or in their, say, 50s 60s not old enough to retire, but their bodies were simply worn out. They couldn't do the job anymore, constantly taking off work, constantly not able to come and do their shifts. So I think we have a problem where people, people who do manual labor, who work on their feet for decades, they can't wait till they're 65. 00;40;25;08 - 00;40;29;12 Ann Larson They are. They're simply going to need another option. 00;40;29;14 - 00;40;54;20 J.R. Jamison Jamison: It says much about our system overall. I mean, one piece we haven't talked about yet is all of your credentials you have as an academic. And you talked a little bit earlier about how you couldn't find the right opportunity. And you talk about this a bit in your book when you went back to where you're kind of your home, home space, you couldn't find an opportunity in academia when you landed at TGS. 00;40;54;22 - 00;41;29;29 J.R. Jamison I also think it's important to note that some retail customer service facing jobs actually pay more than adjuncts or even first year pretenders. Faculty, the American Federation of Teachers found in in April 2020, study that 40% of US professors are paid near poverty wages and 63% being paid $50,000 a year or less. In October of 2023, as we were in the middle of the pandemic, academe magazine released a study that shows 68% of US faculty are now in contingent or adjunct roles. 00;41;30;00 - 00;41;38;09 J.R. Jamison That's a jump of 20% over the past 35 years. What does all of this say about the work in our country as a whole? 00;41;38;17 - 00;41;56;06 Ann Larson Larson: I'm so glad that your that you're pointing out all these statistics as, as somebody who has a PhD and who tried to find a job in academia for many, many years and wasn't able to do it. I'm very familiar with what you're describing. I think what what it tells us is that higher education is in deep crisis, right? 00;41;56;08 - 00;42;13;04 Ann Larson I told you, I mentioned that I worked as part of the debt collective to when debt relief for student borrowers. We have a situation where higher ed tuition is astronomically too expensive. Families can't afford it. And not only that, you would think, oh, people who are doing the teaching must be making the money then. But that's not the case. 00;42;13;04 - 00;42;32;00 Ann Larson The people that are doing the teaching are also earning poverty wages. So where is this money going? We have a problem where public funding, we do not publicly fund public colleges and universities anymore. They're privately funded. Even the public schools like University of California and Cuny in New York City, where I went, the we do not publicly fund these schools. 00;42;32;00 - 00;43;07;05 Ann Larson We require private donations. We rely on tuition dollars. So we simply we don't have public goods in this country the way we used to have. One of the debt collective's platforms was a return to public goods, to publicly funding basic needs, and that includes education, Medicare for all. In terms of health care, we live in a very wealthy country, a very wealthy society where we spend a lot of money on war and where, you know, the the oligarchs and many of the people and the tech industry are just making untold amounts of money, but we simply don't fund our public sector. 00;43;07;06 - 00;43;28;19 Ann Larson One of the things I discovered in the supermarket is a lot of times people would come into the supermarket looking for help, you know, they would be they would be stranded and they needed directions. Or at one instance where a woman came in who had been beaten up and she came into the supermarket asking for help because access to doctors, access to therapists, knowing where you go, where you need to go and you need help. 00;43;28;25 - 00;43;51;12 Ann Larson It's very people don't know where those institutions don't exist anymore. They're really hard to access. So the supermarket has kind of become a place where people seek out different forms of care. And I think higher ed and what's happening there and the lack of public funding and the then universities turn towards adjunct labor is another symptom of this problem. 00;43;51;14 - 00;43;51;20 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Well. 00;43;51;20 - 00;43;52;18 J.R. Jamison They're extremely think. 00;43;52;19 - 00;44;15;17 J.R. Jamison To that this all is a ripple effect right. And while your book clean up on IL five is a narrative journey, it's I mean, it's also an exposé into unfair wages and those ripple effects of being part of the working poor. And that's not just the employees in the store, that's also customers who are coming in as well. 00;44;15;17 - 00;44;25;10 J.R. Jamison And also, right as we were talking about, that bleeds into other areas like academia. What actions can a reader or a listener do to help make change? 00;44;25;14 - 00;44;40;10 Ann Larson Larson: Great question. I mean, I think one of the things we need to do is one of the most important thing that grocery workers need is unions. As I mentioned, not not very many of them are a part of unions. So they don't have any voice on the job. They don't have any collective bargaining power. We need to change that. 00;44;40;12 - 00;44;59;19 Ann Larson We need to support retail worker unions. One thing people can do is even if you don't work in a grocery store, is unionize your own workplace, right? By creating unions. In my normalizing unions, we really create the conditions so that other workers who maybe don't have the same privileges that we do, can do the same. So I think I think that's incredibly important. 00;44;59;19 - 00;45;20;02 Ann Larson I also talk in the book about this a bit wonky, but I talk about the need for enforcing our our antitrust laws. Right now, the grocery industry is controlled by a handful of extremely large corporations. Only about 3 or 4 companies sell most of the groceries that we buy or own these big retail companies. And that means they can. 00;45;20;06 - 00;45;39;22 Ann Larson They have a lot of what what scholars call monopoly power over wages and prices. Stores can can keep wages low, and they can boost prices as they're doing now because shoppers don't have an alternative. You can't go to the mom and pop down the street. You can't go to a store across town because it's all owned by the same companies, and they're all charging the same prices and paying the same wages. 00;45;39;22 - 00;46;01;00 Ann Larson So we have antitrust laws in this country that have been on the books since the New Deal that we're not enforcing. So I talk about, you know, voting for candidates, electing officials who support enforcing antitrust laws, who support a fair economy where workers and shoppers are have an opportunity to to be able to afford to live a dignified life. 00;46;01;02 - 00;46;26;28 Ann Larson I think also just at the level of the store, this is really simple, but it's just to treat the people that are serving you in stores of all kinds with, with kindness and respect to understand the conditions that they're working in. If you have a bad experience in a store, if you're not treated with the kind of customers, if you're not receiving the kind of customer service that you that you like or that you think you deserve, it's probably because the conditions there are poor and people aren't being treated well. 00;46;27;00 - 00;46;52;14 Ann Larson So to see the structural conditions that that produce our experiences in stores, I think is really important. Those are just some of the things I think we can do to, to improve, you know, improve situation for everybody. And again, one thing I would stress is on opposite sides of the Czech stand, we are in the same boat, we have the same overlapping needs as somebody who's serving us, even though we often are led to believe that's not the case. 00;46;52;16 - 00;47;01;24 J.R. Jamison Jamison: What have you had with grocery workers since your book came out? Have they recognized their own experiences in the pages? Tell me more about this. 00;47;01;25 - 00;47;33;20 Ann Larson Larson: Yes. I've been really gratified to. I've received many emails, notes online from from former workers who most of them have thanked me, you know, for for being honest about what the job is really like. You know, I've heard it's gratitude. It's it's it's it's also I've heard some pretty big horror stories I heard from just the other day from a guy who emailed me, and he's he was he responded to the chapter where I talk a lot about employee injury on the job, repetitive stress injury and injury from heavy lifting. 00;47;33;20 - 00;47;50;05 Ann Larson And he told me a horrible story about spending decades in the grocery industry and hurting his back and being unable to work and then having no recourse couldn't. He couldn't work, and there was nothing that he could do. He had to simply quit and and going unemployment and then not have a job. And he didn't know what he was going to do next. 00;47;50;07 - 00;48;12;00 Ann Larson So these are people are in really dire situations if they can't keep working. And so I've heard I've heard from several of those people too. So, you know, I think people are who work in the supermarket are, are just delighted to see their experience in print and to see people talking about it. And that's been it's been really gratifying to me. 00;48;12;00 - 00;48;30;15 Ann Larson At the same time, you know, I didn't I didn't write the book so that to, you know, it's a little weird as a writer because you write a book and then people, people want to talk to you. And, you know, I'm not in the industry anymore. I passed through the industry very briefly, and I wanted to share what I had learned, and I thought that was important. 00;48;30;15 - 00;48;48;08 Ann Larson But I also really want the focus to be on the millions of people that still work, that work in these stores and the colleagues that I knew and those I will never meet. And I'm really hoping that that we can find ways to just improve our society and to make sure that people can live with dignity. 00;48;48;11 - 00;48;48;29 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Well, after. 00;48;48;29 - 00;48;49;21 J.R. Jamison Spending so much. 00;48;49;21 - 00;48;54;19 J.R. Jamison Time with these stories, what have you learned about empathy itself? 00;48;54;21 - 00;49;17;19 Ann Larson Larson: Yeah, empathy is kind of hard to come by. You know, I think it's a real challenge to be empathetic. As I talked about in the store, there are just so many pressures bearing down on us that want us to be anything but empathetic. People take their frustrations out on, I think, retail workers. If you've had a bad day, I saw this numerous times. 00;49;17;20 - 00;49;39;09 Ann Larson If you've had a bad day, if you're stressed out, if you're in a hurry and the line is long and I've done it too, right, you tend to take your frustrations out on the person that's just doing their job and that's trying to serve you. And that's a very, very hard to unlearn. And as I mentioned, store workers, people who work for low wages, who are tired, who are in pain, they can be pretty stick to each other. 00;49;39;11 - 00;49;58;07 Ann Larson There's a lot of a lot of people at each other's throats at the store where I worked, a lot of interesting tensions, and that's also very difficult. So I think empathy is a practice, and it's something that we have to work at. It doesn't come naturally. The conditions that we live in, in society right now are not conducive to empathy. 00;49;58;07 - 00;50;19;05 Ann Larson So it's going to have to be a collective struggle to keep, to remember who we are and to remember our values. And I think, you know, one of the things I argue is that if we can, if we can practice empathy, if we can practice a treating each other with kindness at the supermarket, then that's a good place to start for the rest of society. 00;50;19;07 - 00;50;28;25 J.R. Jamison Jamison: When readers finish clean up on IL five, what questions do you hope continue to linger in their mind long after they've finished reading the story? 00;50;28;27 - 00;50;48;26 Ann Larson Larson: I hope that you know this book is about the supermarket, and I hope that it's also about larger questions about our society and the values that we have. And some ways, it's not about the supermarket at all. I end the book thinking about a speech that was given by Martin Luther King just a few days before he died. 00;50;48;26 - 00;51;15;19 Ann Larson He was in he was in Memphis, Tennessee, and he was standing in solidarity with striking sanitation workers who were carrying signs and on strike and protests for better working conditions. And he gave a speech around that time. And one of the one of the lines, one of the things he said in the speech is that the doctor who cures disease, or the person that picks up your trash on the street, is just as important as the doctor who cures disease. 00;51;15;20 - 00;51;39;17 Ann Larson And to me, I just think this is a wonderful vision for our society. It's a wonderful horizon. We can work towards that. We all count, we all matter, and every job that you do, all workers, are essential. An important line from that speech is all labor has dignity. And to me this is this should be a mission statement, not just for the supermarket, but for our society. 00;51;39;19 - 00;51;49;14 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Ann Larson, author of cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register. Thank you for joining me on the Facing project. 00;51;49;14 - 00;51;51;05 Ann Larson Larson: Thanks for having me. Jahr. 00;51;51;08 - 00;52;08;02 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Clean up on Aisle Five: essential work, poverty wages and the view from behind the supermarket Register is out now. Everywhere books are borrowed and sold. More about Ann Larson can be found online at and Larson writes. 00;52;08;05 - 00;52;35;07 J.R. Jamison Thank you again to an Larson for joining me on today's show and to our publisher, One Signal, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, for providing a complimentary copy of cleanup on IL five essential Work poverty wages in the view from behind the supermarket. Register. To listen to past episodes of this program, visit Indiana Public Radio. August project, or find us on your favorite podcasting app, or on YouTube or on the NPR network. 00;52;35;07 - 00;52;59;20 J.R. Jamison Or just ask your smart speaker to play The Facing Project on NPR to continue the conversation about this episode. Find us on Facebook and Instagram at Facing Project. The Facing Project is recorded at Indiana Public Radio at Ball State University and Beautiful and Wonderful in Evergreen, Muncie, Indiana, and is produced by the amazing producer and audio engineer extraordinaire Sean Ashcraft. 00;52;59;21 - 00;53;11;21 J.R. Jamison The show is distributed nationally through PRX. I'm your host, J.R. Jamison. And until next time, I wish you the courage to share your own story and the empathy to listen to others.