For workers, it's not so super at the supermarket

In terms of the number of different crummy jobs I worked in my youth, I almost ran the table. Factory worker. Waitress. Grill cook. Ice cream scooper. Office temp. Admitting clerk in a hospital. Department store clerk. Admin. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but one commonplace job missing from my grunt work portfolio is grocery store cashier or bagger. Despite the fact that it was in my blood, kind of - my Grandfather Wolf had a grocery store and all his kids worked there at one point or another - I never worked as a bagger at Stop & Shop, a cashier at A&P.

While I do enough grocery shopping to realize that a lot of high school and college kids still work in grocery stores, for more and more folks, it's their real job. And they're considered essential workers, out there on the front lines, making sure we all have access to all the food we want and need. 

When the pandemic shutdown started going into effect here, once I did my panic sweep through the Roche Brothers, I stayed out of stores entirely for a few weeks. Then I started going back, making sure to exchange pleasantries with and thank the stockers, the cashiers, the guys who slice the Cabot's cheddar and weigh out the fresh but deveined shrimp for me. And I'm always, always, always conscious that, for a lot of workers, these aren't the crumb-bum summer and after-school jobs of the teenage years, but their real jobs. 

And they're jobs that, despite all the hand-washing, plexiglass barriers, and one way signs on the aisles, put workers at greater risk than the shopping risks faced by stay-at-home professionals who - if they actually go into a grocery store, vs. taking advantage of home delivery or curbside pickup  - sweep pell-mell through a store every couple of weeks. 

For the first few months of the pandemic, grocery workers were hailed as heroes, right up there with healthcare workers. Many got a hazard pay boost to their hourly wage. And then pandemic fatigue, our sheer boredom with "it", set in. So now:

Grocery workers across the country say morale is crushingly low as the pandemic wears on with no end in sight. Overwhelmed employees are quitting mid-shift. Those who remain say they are overworked, taking on extra hours, enforcing mask requirements and dealing with hostile customers. Most retailers have done away with hazard pay even as workers remain vulnerable to infection, or worse. Employees who took sick leave at the beginning of the pandemic say they cannot afford to take unpaid time off now, even if they feel unwell.

The mounting despair is heightened by the lack of other job options: Supermarkets are among the few bright spots in an industry that has been ravaged by covid-related store closures and a sharp drop-off in consumer spending. The retail sector has shed 913,000 jobs and chalked up more than a dozen bankruptcies during the pandemic.

“At the beginning they valorized what was deemed a dead-end job, but four months later they don’t even treat us like humans anymore,” said Fox Wingate, 24, who works at a Safeway in Maryland. (Source: WaPo)

Okay. I have to get it out there. I'm gonna say that I'm not all that worried about a 24-year-old named Fox Wingate who uses words like "valorized" and "deemed." I suspect that Fox will have other career options to explore. Still, I have plenty of sympathy for grocery workers, many of them women and people of color, who make, on average, $27K a year. There's making a living and there's not making a living and, unless you live in the backwoods, $27K a year ain't a living. And if you live in the backwoods a) there are probably no grocery stores; b) you're probably being paid well below the national average. 

And for that $27K, you're in a risky business - 130 grocery store workers have been killed by COVID - and you have to put up with nasty customers.

Thankfully, on my treks to Roche Brothers or, on rare occasion, Whole Foods, I haven't seen anyone ill-treating a grocery store worker. I did, however, see a set-to at the Copley Square Farmers Market last Friday.

During the over-60 hour, I was in a short, spaced waiting line for one of the farm stands. I was behind a guy who appeared to be older then me. In front of him, and next in line to get waited on and buy some corn and blueberries, was a woman who I judged to be younger: early 60's. 

Anyway, the woman felt that the older guy was standing a bit too close for her liking, so she started to tell him off - and rail on him because his mask had slipped down under his nose. They went back and forth for the few minutes we were waiting for our little line to move, and it was all pretty entertaining. I learned that she has a compromised immune system, and he's had prostate cancer. They went back and forth, but it was only with slightly raised voices - this was, after all, the oldie hour in front of Trinity Church in Boston's Back Bay, where you can easily imagine that most of the shoppers still have a McGovern button somewhere in their possession. Insults hurled, but no punches thrown. 

I passed her a few minutes later and she was bitching to two friends about the older guy.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, grocery workers are trying to figure out how they're going to survive, both physically and economically. 

They've had new tasks added to the roles - like disinfecting the card machine after each transaction, and the dreadful enforcing of the face mask requirement - and they've often had their hours cut, as more shoppers opt for home delivering and more former shoppers are standing in breadlines, not checking to see whether there's any TP on the shelves and whether they have their coupon for Skippy Peanut Butter. Many grocery workers don't have any paid sick leave, and when you're only making $27K a year, the idea of taking unpaid time off is not all that attractive. 

It's really not such a super world out there, is it?