The Other Pandemics at the Grocery Store: Part 1, 11 April 2020
06/17/20
By an anonymous cashier at a Chicago-based, nationally-owned grocery store
The Other Pandemics at the Grocery Store is first-hand testimony in two parts. The first part was written back in April, when most of the United States was shut down to a varying degree due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and healthcare workers, public transit employees, service clerks, and other “essential workers” were called “heroes” while working the frontlines against the virus. At the same time, grocery stores were filled with material excess and emotional tension as customers panic-bought toilet paper and baking flour and began to see workers as potential transmitters of the virus. The second piece was written in June, just after the wave of protests demanding racial justice and reform or abolition of the police following the murder of George Floyd. This was another moment that increased tension at “essential businesses,” as they boarded up to prepare for potential looting or destruction. At that moment, when the streets seemed to become a war zone, inside the grocery store was–or continued to be–an entangled battleground of class and race privilege in American society.
The two parts have been published on June 17th, in a sequence, on Quarantine Times. You can see part 2 on a separate page in the website.
-Marina Resende Santos, QT editor.
Running out and restocking. Photos from the author’s grocery store during the pandemic.
Part 1: April 13, 2020
In February, after numerous failed job applications and mounting debt and expenses, I applied for a minimum wage job as a cashier at a grocery store. I thought this would be a temporary solution to stay afloat until I found something permanent. Within days, I was swept up in a pandemic. This corrosive and pervasive virus is not the coronavirus, but a classist performance of privilege and toxic behavior inflicted on grocery store employees—the people now on a frontline of a global pandemic, COVID-19.
I grew up in a large working class family, but I have been performing as “cultured” for almost 15 years. My CV includes a nationally ranked university degree, an international artist residency, an award-winning architecture firm, published writing, commissioned projects with lauded creatives, professional work at major institutions, and on and on and on. I boast about the number of intriguing people I have worked with during my tenure as a cultural producer. But the moment I put on my name tag and uniform at the grocery store, my life, health, intellect, and safety are neglected and belittled; I become disposable. However, because of my education and prior experiences, I make a few dimes more than minimum wage with the possibility of health insurance in May; part time employees qualify after one year.
Prior to February, my performative privilege shielded me from the class disparity and pretentious behavior upheld at grocery stores. Now I know I was part of the problem in thinking, “it is not my fault you work at a grocery store.” Performative class privilege is a behavior that I see everyday, by customers of every race, gender identity, income level, political affiliation, and age. Regardless of the customers' actual lived realities, at a grocery store they are ready to prove they are immensely more valuable than me. They show me this through degrading behaviors that depreciate me and my time. A brown paper bag or cotton tote in this situation is more than just a vessel. It is a symbol and stand-in for environmentalism and feminism. On a surface level, they are showing the world that they care about the planet, nevermind the humans who processed their groceries. My name tag indicates I am a person, but in this performance, it is a signifier that I am, in fact, not a person, but a service robot. My uniform is a confirmation that I am culturally incongruous with their world. I do not hold cultural capital and I am reminded of this with nearly every transaction. I see parents teaching their children how to perform for us, “tell him that the bread should go at the top so it is not squished; tell him that that is an avocado; sir, the price of those was supposed to be $1.49, not two for three dollars; you know, your competitor does not do it this way and I have been shopping here for years and have really seen this place go down hill; double paper bags, for sure”; and even how to obnoxiously scrutinize a receipt to find a mistake that the cashier “intentionally” made by charging for a yellow pepper instead of an orange pepper despite the price being the same. I have refunded someone one cent to their American Express black card for a mistake they made at self-checkout. Each customer's self aggrandizing performative pettiness, classist demeanor, patronizing comments, and faux environmentalism are continually inflicted onto me and my co-workers, which include an intersection of LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, disabled, immigrant, elderly, veteran, and working class/poor perspectives.
I am an educated white cis-presenting male—I exude privilege. This is clear in the ways customers treat me at work in comparison to my WOC colleagues. My checkout lines are generally longer and customers mostly treat me in less condescending and prejudiced ways. I get a smile, or a “how did someone like you end up here?” comment after I say “kwa-son” for croissant or know what an endive or radicchio is. Yet, I am consistently horrified when I witness and experience the bigoted, sexist, and racist manner enacted onto me and my coworkers. We get called “sassy bitches” and “fucking idiots.” We are criticized for the ways we look and speak. We are told to smile and that we should be thankful we have jobs. We collectively see, hear, and experience this behavior every single time it happens; yet we rarely confide in eachother when this happens. We give a nod that we are okay and briskly move on to the next customer. From my observations, people treat their eggs and bread better than minimum wage workers at grocery stores. This behavior is insidious, profoundly abusive, and destructive. I want to proclaim: we are not here for your amusement, we are here because we have to be, in order to make ends meet.
As the uptake of media coverage and pandemonium from COVID-19 continues, so does attention to grocery stores. It is hard to miss news coverage, social media posts, or a casual conversation that does not include a jovial remark about “the lines” and the “craze” of people stocking up on toiletries. There was a shift shortly before the official shelter-in-place order came into force in Illinois: grocery store workers were included in lists of “essential” employees and certainly not encouraged to stay home, but instead required to be at risk. According to a tweet by Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot, we are “vital.” We, like doctors, are “essential” and must go to work to keep everyone else alive. Nevermind that many of us have to come to work regardless of our new “superhero” qualification. This visibility felt good for a few days. Our company even gave us each a $300 bonus. But the abusive customer behavior has only picked up; there’s a darkness looming in their overflowing carts.
Our essentialness and desperation is not a meme. Congested lines of frenzied customers wrap around the store. Pure panic has set in as the standard operating procedure. The opposite of social distancing is happening with overcrowding and rambunctious customers pouncing on anyone un/intentionally trying to budge in the checkout line or grabbing two bales of paper towels. Any attempts at restocking the shelves are futile. Customers are hoarding carts full of $600 worth of quarantine supplies. They laugh about their purchase total, we do not. $600 is more than I make in a week of full time labor. Some receipts are several feet long. Every hour is a Black-Friday-at-Walmart style of pandemonium. Some aisles feel post-apocalyptic. Individual anxieties are amplified by mass anxiety and chaos. As we kindly ask customers to stand on the six-foot floor markers, we are barked at and told to “mind our own fucking business” or told to use “our manners.” I am spending eight or more hours a day on a dystopian hamster wheel of perishables and infected people. I have customers coughing in my face and laughing while they tell me they should be in quarantine. Others sneeze on their cash and throw it at me. Others tell me, “you know, you should really be wearing a mask for my safety.” It was only on April 11 that we received our first store-provided disposable masks. But the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and bigotry is turned up and blasting at us. I get snapped at more often than not by almost everyone in line, sometimes for no apparent reason. I was told recently that I was “worse than Donald Trump” for not having hand sanitizer at my register. After I said, “We are doing our best during this global pandemic to stay stocked and prepared” the customer demanded that we “should try harder.” I wish these were hyperbolic stories and experiences; instead they are downplayed and edited.
Grocery stores are a stage for the drama and tragedy of our collective global crisis: the place of day-to-day explosions, where people take out their frustrations, feed or appease their anxieties, indulge in aggressive behaviors, engage in social performances. When I asked my religious 60-year old coworker how she copes with our customers’ exacerbated individualism, entitlement, and emotional abuse, she said calmly, “this is nothing new”—this performance is not a symptom of a global health pandemic. This is a class pandemic.
Grocery store employees are working during a global pandemic and now encouraged by our government to put on a mask if we are infected—statistics point to an increased rate of infection of “essential workers” on the frontlines, including several of my colleagues. I now realize, in early April, I had intense coronavirus symptoms, but without insurance, I was unable to get tested and instead went to work. My colleague lost two immediate family members and at least half of my coworkers have taken at least two weeks off to quarantine or care for someone sick with the virus. I have been reduced to a pariah to my family, lovers, and friends. I am collateral damage to a novel virus and unnovel behavior performed by customers and the economy at large. COVID-19 exposes me to depressing depths of narcissism and class divides. My double exposure to these pandemics leaves me physically exhausted, emotionally depleted, and unable to smell or taste. What does it mean to be an essential worker and intentionally mistreated in the midst of a global health crisis fueled with individualistic and collective anxieties? What does it mean to be a prop in someone else's performance of systemic disrespect? I am essentially unprepared to process, communicate, and cope with the answers to these questions.
Read Part 2: 13 June 2020, here.