The Other Pandemics at the Grocery Store: Part 2, 13 June 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 1 on a separate page in the website.
-Marina Resende Santos, QT editor.
A company-produced sign at a grocery store in the North Side of Chicago celebrates the employees as '“heroes” during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the store employees amended the text: “Heroes choose to be heroes. We were drafted.”
Part 2: June 13, 2020
The grocery store I work in a North Side neighborhood of Chicago is an entangled space of privilege and stark realities and histories of race and class. At grocery stores across the country, thousands of low wage workers like me have gained epithets during the COVID-19 global health pandemic. We’ve been labeled “essential” and “heroes” and “frontline workers.” This status has been met with “hero pay” boosting our minimum wages, at least in the City of Chicago, to $15 an hour with sporadic bonuses. But many of us contracted the novel virus, lost loved ones, and then saw our pay and status suddenly cut back by late May. This erasure is happening alongside widespread Black Lives Matter protests and the insurgence of needed reform and action in our country to combat rampant inequality. As streets and civic spaces are filled with activists, advocates, and allies, grocery stores remain a battleground, and a territory of fierce classism and bigotry. Grocery stores are petri dishes of individualistic pettiness, infected narcissism, assertive lethargy, and deliberate racism and homophobia; conjuring a toxic space for the working poor, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC. Is customer service really supposed to entail such compounding threats and mouth-foaming vitriol?
In recent months, many news outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and other local and national outlets have waned in their coverage of grocery stores. In this coverage, there was (and still is) consistently a blatant omission: the actual grocery store “heroes'' themselves. At first, many folx celebrated us for putting our lives in harm's way to keep America fed, but even then they forgot about our harsh disparities. Many didn't scratch the surface of the alarming class, gender, and race issues exposed in the grocery store environment and reinforced by extreme economic disadvantage, precariousness, and human rights violations. The “thank you, heroes” signs tied to fences and in windows have faded or been removed—the party is over. What has endured is our fear-based treatment as pariahs. Customers have remained combative, abusive, lazy, aggressive, rude, petty, racist, xenophobic and homophobic, and worse. They are killing us, emotionally and physically, and laughing about it while coughing on us, their reusable totes, and loyalty cards. One customer called me a “faggot”, and several called me a “fucking idiot” while threatening to get me fired for asking them to wear a mask. A white customer told me they “hoped I stopped breathing and died”. Recently, one of my Black colleagues was called a “monkey”; another coworker was described as “the one with oriental-looking eyes;” a Syrian immigrant colleague was literally slapped on the wrist by a customer; and an Iraqi-American cashier was told they “are not dark enough to be Arab.” My supervisor had a full container of Folgers coffee grounds thrown at them because our store, like most, is not taking returns during the coronavirus pandemic. Employees at my store and across the United States could expand on these with unending lists of personal attacks. I am outraged that so many of the people I work with are numb to this behavior. These actions make it clear that we are not the “heroes” for American society. We are collateral to America’s extra-$600-a-week, stay-at-home quarantined lives; this condition is obliterating us in every way possible. Is the customer really always right?
The grocery store will continue to be a battleground, especially as the United States continues to deny or reverse aggressive change and urgent reform for people of color, LGBTQIA+, and the working poor; a livable minimum wage being one example. As protests swept across Chicago and our nation in early June, many stores prepared for war. Our windows were boarded up with plywood and queues formed as twenty customers were permitted to enter the store at a time for “10 minutes of essential shopping.” I read a scripted store-wide announcement every 10 minutes asking people to limit their shopping experience. As I simultaneously answered an endless barrage of phone calls asking “why is the store boarded up?” and “why are you closing early?” and my personal favorite, a nagging “what is essential shopping?,” I was again struck by the extreme individualism of American consumers—which includes a full spectrum of people across every identity. I answered demanding and elitist phone calls for eight hours with a repetitive answer: “for the health and safety of our customers and employees.” Both phones were ringing at the same time. I was a cartoon character, tangled amongst the cords with a phone to each ear. I was often told “are you fucking kidding me?!” or “is this a joke, this neighborhood is safe” and that it was “absolutely stupid” that we were closing early and boarding up the store. How were people this aloof? Did customers actually care about the Black lives working at this store—the “heros” keeping them alive? In America, and specifically at my store, it appears that these Black lives are “essential” collateral, so most likely the answer is “no.” All lives are not equal in this tragedy. Before and after activists were exerting their constitutional rights in public spaces, we’ve been working in an atmosphere of fear and dismissiveness—I see parallel battlegrounds inside and outside the grocery store. During Chicago’s protests and imposed curfews, many of my coworkers could not get to work, either because they live on the South and West sides, which required public transportation through the Loop, which was closed for multiple days, or because they were scared to come to work. They simply lost their hourly wages for those days. And the store lost the needed support to keep up with the customers’ “essential” shopping needs in “double paper bags, for sure.” I keep asking myself, who are the “essential” Americans in these scenarios?
Now, while many customers walk around the store with their face mask below their noses, if they are even wearing one, our surreal work-lives are getting more and more complicated. The wrath of the extra-$600-a-week, work-from-home, and double-paper-bag customer is inflicted during hundreds-of-dollars transactions as they peer down the receipt greedily anticipating a misstep—heaven forbid we run out of paper bags and they have to use plastic. Arms folded, exposed nose up, they watch in disgust as we hum along. They gaslight us saying, “you should really be thankful you have a job right now!” But should we? Our weekly wages, before taxes, union dues, and health insurance (pending qualification) are $520 ($13 x 40) for full time, and $260 ($13 x 20) for part time work. At this moment, we would certainly make a lot more money, like $600 a week more, being “fun-employed,” as one customer described to their friends on a Zoom happy hour while in line. The added unemployment pay is perhaps a commendable adjustment to benefits that were previously available. But what about the thousands of workers—many of them now labeled "essential"—who can barely make a living wage working full-time high-exposure jobs, most likely without benefits? Why is it systemically okay for “heroes” to earn so little, especially right now? Instead, the store is packed with customers refusing to practice social distancing and demanding to know when our next delivery of yeast and Lysol wipes will be—the coronavirus has globally disrupted distribution, something the customer rarely wants to acknowledge. Everyday, I watch in fear as the coronavirus upends the remnants of human decency and 100+ days-worth of anxiety and tension is spat out by consumers of our robotic servitude. Anyone saying “the pandemic is bringing out the best in people'' or “we are all in this together” or “everything will be okay” is dehumanizing my experiences with a silver lining of classism and patriarchal mansplaining. I may have been called “essential” and a “hero,” but I am working because I have to, despite the low pay and severe health risks—no one is bailing me out, including my parents or the government. To me, it seems like the workers who are really being treated as “essential” are not grocery store employees, but the customers. While grocery store workers have to continue working under increasingly treacherous conditions with no meaningful benefits or relief, people working in other sectors (or recently unemployed) are given flexibility, added pay, and other advantages to continue working or stay at home and make sourdough bread—ultimately prescribing silver linings to “heroes” in order to keep us subordinate with a distorted sense of value. One of my colleagues summed this up, writing with a pen on a company-produced "Thank You, Heroes!" sign: "Heroes chose to be heroes, we were drafted.”
In This is Water, David Foster Wallace asks us to reconsider and reexamine what is right in front of us, which now, during COVID-19, especially resonated with me: “...or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.” In this vein, my eyes are opened everyday by customers who are me, the me who would probably be receiving a government bailout and throwing a New Yorker cotton tote at the cashier while on a Zoom call; obtusely performing pettiness. I have a lot to learn and unlearn. Perched at a register, I am gaining understanding of what my colleagues go through everyday, in and out of the grocery store. Through my privileged outrage, I am navigating frustrations, while trying to comprehend what those far older race- and class-based pandemics look like overall—the larger pictures of performative and actual privilege—and how the coronavirus is devastating the strategically disadvantaged. The petty and patronizing practices enacted at the grocery store are institutionalized, largely unquestioned, and have been going on long before COVID-19. The minutiae of the other pandemics at the grocery store are dense. At what point do we account for these overlapping realities and histories at the grocery store? Foster Wallace reminds us, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Pay attention to grocery stores and grocery store workers—we are a canary in the coal mine.