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Today I am reviewing Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register by Anne Larson. you. t’s a relatively recent book and one that I picked up because for one summer when I was sixteen, and I learned a lot and forgot little despite, twenty-five years passing. Ann Larson worked for a bit longer — one year — in a grocery store she calls TGS (The Grocery Store). Larson has a master’s degree, but adjuncting wore her out and in 2020, she applied for and got a job as a supervisor at TGS. While she didn’t plan to write about her time at TGS, one incident made her realize perhaps she should: a customer shit on the floor. Larson acknowledges, “The shitting incident forced me to reconsider. Maybe this story was bigger than just the pandemic. I was perplexed by my colleagues’ reactions. Why had some denounced the man, while others had been sympathetic?”

Whether a person responds sympathetically while in TGS is a big theme of Cleanup On Aisle Five. The longer Larson works for TGS as a supervisor, the less sympathetic she is as her colleagues call out sick, are no call-no show, leave early, or abandon their cash registers because she has to manage the front end team. When she is stranded, Larson has to juggle the fallout of angry managers and customers. Sometimes, Larson is Team Customers, striving to make things flow smoothly. Other times, she is Team Co-Workers, such as feeling sympathy when a man who stole from TGS was caught: “We tased a guy over doughnuts and milk last night,” one co-worker lamented. Should TGS employees report food theft during the pandemic when the economy tanked? Or uphold the law and store policy?

However, Cleanup On Aisle Five is not testimony only; Larson relays how her coworkers are just as poor as the customers who steal. Some don’t have food for lunch. Another had to leave work because her period started and couldn’t afford sanitary napkins. They all lack access to medical care or time off to recover from the backbreaking labor of moving thousands of items per hour while standing on a cement floor.

Because “broken” workers prove to be unreliable, rather than paying them a fair wage and health care, TGS, like many of its brethren, install self-checkout lanes. Interestingly, Larson notes that when a machine breaks, the cashier overseeing the many machines is expected to fix it without technical knowledge. Typically, technicians must be brought in, delaying customers more. Larson explains that a “2022 study showed that theft is rampant at self-checkout, with companies attributing as much as 23 percent of losses to the technology. Stores, including Target, Walmart, and Dollar General, have all cited theft as a reason they are limiting or replacing cashierless checkout.” Therefore, as I read Cleanup On Aisle Five, I was learning about the business of grocery stores in addition to Laron’s and her coworkers’ anecdotes, which sadly matched my own memorable summer as a cart pusher.

Much of working in a grocery store sounds awful, but on top of that is the indignity of having no control over your life, and Larson emphasizes that indignity clearly. She points out how employees are scheduled only when the store needs them, including weekends, evenings, and holidays, and the schedule is sometimes only posted a week in advance, meaning you cannot plan a vacation, even something simple like a beach day, because you don’t know if you’ll be scheduled, and you are so broke you can’t afford to lose your terrible job. To really churn the orphans in the orphan churning machine, so to speak, Larson writes, “A person may even be assigned a split shift: working during a busy period, clocking out during a slowdown, and then returning later when business picks up again.” As a capitalism tool, the grocery store is a microcosm of what is wrong with unfettered greed, snatching rights from workers.

While we may gnash our teeth are large grocery stores, I did learn they have a positive aspect to them. Larson learned that when “mom and pop” grocery stores were the norm, in the American south, Black customers not only were served last at the kinds of places where the clerk hands you grocery items from behind a shelf, but they were charged more, too. After chain stores with cashiers were built, the unequal costs went away.

Cleanup On Aisle Five is highly readable not only for the anecdotes but for historical lessons and added data about how stores function to show that TGS is not one grocery store, it’s all of them.