The Life and Labor of American Grocery Stores

The Weekend Read

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June 13, 2026

After leaving graduate school with no prospects for a teaching job, I worked at a grocery store. What I saw was a working class struggling to survive.

A cashier assists a customer at a checkout counter in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Thursday, October 21, 2021. (George Frey / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

I landed at The Grocery Store in the fall of 2020 after finding myself unemployed. Raised in a small town in Idaho, I had attended college in Utah, where I studied English. Later, I moved to New York City to attend graduate school at the City University.

After I graduated in 2009, I spent time looking for an academic job: On or off the tenure track, I wanted to teach writing and literature. In the meantime, I lectured a few college courses and sometimes worked as an office temp at a Wall Street firm, a law office, and at a foundation. After two years of rejections from colleges and universities, I had to face the reality that I was one of many people educated in the humanities with virtually no chance of a future in their field. To boot, I was in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars for my tuition.

In 2015, I cofounded an organization called the Debt Collective. My colleagues and I lobbied the federal government to cancel the student loans of borrowers who had attended scam for-profit colleges, eventually winning billions in loan relief. Philanthropic support for the Debt Collective allowed me to earn a decent salary for a couple of years. But eventually funds for organizer salaries became harder to come by, too. Almost 20 years after arriving in New York, I was out of work. In the spring of 2020, I moved back to Utah to make a new start in middle age.

I moved into a downtown neighborhood in Salt Lake City that some called “transitional.” A few years earlier, it had been the site of a homeless shelter and a methamphetamine market. But the shelter had recently been torn down to make room for new, mostly market-price apartments. The area was now composed of a mix of residents, some who lived in the run-down, low-rent buildings that had been there for decades, and a few middle-class people who occupied the newer apartments. I paid $1,350 per month for a studio in one of the new buildings. While the weekly farmers market in the park below my apartment was a sign of gentrification, at night, the drug market continued. A couple of blocks away, people were sleeping in tents on the street. The good news was that I could walk to The Grocery Store (TGS) to shop, a necessity since I could not afford a car.

Then the pandemic hit, and the world stopped. I applied for white-collar jobs in schools and in city government but received few responses, rarely even a “thanks but no thanks.” I felt luckier than others. Members of my family were reeling. My sister-in-law, a bookkeeper, was laid off with no promise of getting her position back. (Indeed, she was not rehired when the pandemic subsided and spent almost a year in unemployment limbo.) My brother, a bartender, also lost his income when his workplace closed. For a reason that had to do with missed paperwork, which I still don’t understand, he was unable to get unemployment benefits. The virus was frightening, but I was even more unnerved by the uneven effects of the policy response. While professionals worked from home, those in basically any industry that couldn’t be done via Zoom were laid off. Stimulus checks, unemployment, and other benefits did not alleviate the anxiety of not knowing when or if anyone would get their jobs and lives back. Then there was the third group: warehouse employees, healthcare workers, and grocery staffers still on the job, worried about getting sick.

Doing my grocery shopping at TGS was a pleasant experience that brought me a semblance of normalcy, as if the store existed in another world. I was grateful (and felt a little guilty) that employees were coming to work every day to ensure that the rest of us could buy food.

One day, I lingered at the cheese counter reviewing the options. An employee approached me wearing a name tag that listed her time on the job: “Two Years of Serving You.” She asked how she could help. I said that I was craving a grilled cheese sandwich. The employee’s eyes lit up. “ You want the good stuff.” She offered a local cheddar that had been soaked, she explained, in beer. “That’s why it’s got that deep, rich color and unique flavor.” She promised that the cheese made “the best grilled cheese you’ll ever have” and recommended a store-made brioche. I bought both products.

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The encounter impressed me. The employee had treated me like an individual whose cravings mattered. She had even appeared to take pleasure in serving me, a rarity during times like those. I started to think about applying for a job at the store. I was going crazy from being isolated at home. Working at a supermarket seemed like a way to serve my community during the pandemic. At TGS, I co…