What are they?

So the supermarket I describe in my book is kind of a split screen.

On the one side, the supermarket is a really wonderful place.

If you think about your neighborhood grocery store, it's hard to imagine living without it.

It's a pillar of the community.

It's almost always open.

You can go in any time and find thousands of products on sale day or night.

And that included a lot of supermarket workers, right?

Tell us a bit about what it was like working in customer service.

Yeah, customer service.

I mean, one of the things in the book is like the split screen of the supermarket.

It's a contradictory reality.

There's like two sides to every story.

On the one hand, customer service is it.

It could be really a pleasure, honestly.

And maybe you could talk a few of your favorite ideas for how to repair, fix, reform the grocery industry that everybody depends on.

Tell me about him.

Yes.

Well, first I'll just say, you know, one of the themes in the book is the supermarket is a split screen.

On the one hand, it's a really wonderful community place.

Like you said, anybody can come in there.

So it serves as a pillar of the community.

You can walk in there.

Can you explain that and also say, well, what would a conversation be like if they did speak in collective terms?

No, no, none of that garbage here.

The, the colleague said, did you know someone shit on the floor today? And I was like, no, what happened? And, So she was, it was like a report that any colleague would give another.

We're got to stay on Pepsi products and we're short one cashier and now guys sit on the floor.

And what had happened is in our store, like in a lot of retail stores, there's a public restroom, but it's only available if you buy something.

There's a code on the door that you have to enter to get in.

and you get a code on the bottom of your receipt when you buy something.

But what people who couldn't afford to buy anything or a lot of unhoused people would do is they would come in and they would wait by the door and wait for somebody to come out and they would grab the handle so they could go in and use the facilities.

I mean, first of all, I think...

Tell me, why did you write this book? And did Barbara play some role in

that? I wrote this book.

I would not have written this book without Barbara's influence and without knowing about her work in lots of different ways.

I got a job in the supermarket at the outset of the COVID pandemic because I'm from a working class background, but I had...

Been kind of on the margins of the professional class.

I was one of those adjuncts professors that you mentioned in the last segment And I was also working in an organization called the debt collective that you mentioned that I co-founded But I was always kind of precarious those jobs and I ended up unemployed and entering middle age at a time when the pandemic was just getting started.

It was poor timing on my part.

But I want somehow everybody else to understand what the implications for the whole society are that this is the way one of the largest job categories, as you put it, that we have, what kind of life this means for the millions of people that are involved doing this work.

So what did you do at this point?

As a supervisor, I learned to live with the level of enforcement against shoplifting that happened in the store.

This was during COVID, too, so a lot of people were...

Maybe even more desperate than normal.

And there was just stoplifting every day.

In one incident, I'll give you another story.

In one incident, this was late at night, a security guard called.

Going up to $30 in 2027.

So what did you do at this point?

As a supervisor, I learned to live with the level of enforcement against shoplifting that happened in the store.

This was during COVID, too, so a lot of people were...

Maybe even more desperate than normal.

And there was just stoplifting every day.

In one incident, I'll give you another story.

In one incident, this was late at night, a security guard called.

Going up to $30 in 2027.

What did they get in return? Was that just about compliments?

It was mostly just about compliments.

Yes, yes, yes.

So during the pandemic, we had a very revealing thing happen, which is that we all understood for a few months at least how important retail workers and grocery clerks are to our society, where a lot of people who work from home on laptops, white collar workers could go home, nothing really changed for them.

Healthcare workers obviously were in this group and warehouse workers, but also your grocery worker.

that these people went and clocked in, worked at their low wage jobs all through the pandemic so that we could all buy food.

And during part of that period, some grocery workers earned a bonus and we even called it hero pay.

So, I mean, what surprised you the most about who actually profits from our food system?

Tell us a little bit about set the scene for the opening of the book because i think it's a great opening for a hell of a page turner of

a book oh thank you so i had been at the store a couple of months at that point um it was i was really it was hard work i was exhausted um and you know i i haven't i've i've written before articles and things and i kept thinking you know this is the pandemic and i should write an article about this people should know what this is like but i was too tired i was too exhausted going home from work i just fell asleep um So one day I get to work, it's a couple months after starting, and a colleague, we're by the time clock punching in, and she says, oh, by the way, a guy shit on the floor this morning, right there.

And it was just like a normal report that you would hear, oh, you know, we're short one cashier, there's a sale on Pepsi products, a guy shit on the floor.

And it turned out that, like you, as you introduced it, what we all assumed was a homeless person had been waiting outside the door for somebody to exit so he could grab the handle and go in, use the facilities.

He didn't make it, so he just shit on the floor.

And it created this kind of split in the store that day.

Some of my colleagues were sympathetic.

Did working at the store change the way you think about personal morality under capitalism?