Oh, how you hate waiting.
Time spent in the grocery store line is the worst, with nothing to do but note the many brands of gum there are these days. Nothing to do but read tabloid headlines and eavesdrop. Oh, well, hold tight. At least your favorite checker is working today and after you’ve read “Cleanup on Aisle Five” by Ann Larson, you’ll be even nicer to him.
As the founder-director of an organization that lobbied for college debt relief Ann Larson earned “a decent salary,” and she loved her job. Alas, opportunities in her business all but dried up during the Covid-19 pandemic and so she moved back to Utah, where she’d attended college, “to make a new start in middle age.”
Jobs were hard to come by there, too but, impressed by her experiences at a place she calls “The Grocery Store” (TGS), she uploaded her resume and landed a job. The morning after being hired, Larson arrived at TGS, becoming “one of almost four million people who… [toil at] one of the most common jobs in the country.”
She learned to cashier first, eventually moving up the “Front End” of the store beyond the check-out areas. There, she “raced” from register to register, filling in, bagging, replacing call-outs, fixing problems, and ordering product as needed. She learned how to best care for her team, who were mostly older folks who lived financially on the edge, the quintessential one-paycheck-away-from-disaster population who worked through injury, depression, and age-related illness because they couldn’t afford not to.
“Grocery stores may all seem the same,” says Larson, but they’re actually complex places, staffed by different personalities, with customers of every kind.
At TGS, she learned who deserved sympathy and grace, who could be ignored, and how far she could push. She considered organizing TGS’s workers, but then thought better of it. And she thought about how a store worked, extending back to “the workers who drive trucks, stock shelves, cook the food… and sell it at checkstands.”
Your local grocery store wouldn’t exist without any of them.
You’d be mighty hungry without your favorite grocer, wouldn’t you? Yep, so get a belly full of what it’s like to work there by reading “Cleanup on Aisle Five.”
In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed and Maid, there’s a lot to learn inside this book — some of it amusing, all of it eye-opening. Here, author Ann Larson blasts the automatic doors off once-hidden work spaces, to show how grocery store employees survive on low-paying jobs, and why they stay despite that random strangers can be dangerous, scheduling can be life-altering, and expectations are harsh. Larson also offers advice to both sides of the cash register, customers and CEOs alike, reminding readers that, during the pandemic, grocery store workers were lauded as heroes.
Isn’t it time to re-establish that honor?
This is a book for everyone who eats, for store owners, shoppers, and social workers. If that’s you and the pantry’s empty, then find “Cleanup on Aisle Five” and check it out.
“Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register” by Ann Larson c.2026, Atria / One Signal Publishers $29 257 pages
NOTE — For a similar look at work that flies under your day-to-day radar, pick up “Trash! A Garbageman’s Story” by Simon Paré-Poupart (Melville House Publishing, $18.99). It’s the story of a garbageman in Montreal, and it’ll make you appreciate the people who make your refuse just go away.