Cindy had been bagging groceries for nine years when I became her colleague at a grocery store in Utah.
My coworkers agreed to speak with me about their experiences, so long as they remained anonymous.
Cindy is in her late 70s. When we worked together, she distributed candy and stickers to the children who came through her line and wowed shoppers with her ability to lift 12 packs of soda and 20 lb. bags of kitty litter into carts.
Cindy was also a gifted storyteller. She regaled workers and shoppers alike with tales from her time as a high school majorette. “I marched at football games and twirled a baton—a baton that was on fire!” A great-grandmother, Cindy had not lost her flair for the dramatic. She wore colorful eye shadow and adorned her employee uniform with beaded necklaces and brooches more suitable for a Mardi Gras parade than a supermarket.
Soon after Cindy and I began working together, I observed signs of food insecurity. For lunch, she usually bought a two-dollar child’s chicken fingers meal or a small cup of soup for about the same price. With her employee discount, the meals cost even less. She told me that it was all she could afford.
To keep her energy up, Cindy kept a bottle of Diet Coke under a checkout counter and sipped on it throughout her shift. “It’s the only drug I’ve ever been addicted to,” she said. Colleagues teased her about the lukewarm beverage. But she didn’t see the point of buying a fresh, cold bottle. “It’s still got caffeine, doesn’t it?”Cindy’s economic precarity was not unusual. In 2021, the year that I was on the job, grocery staffers earned under $15 per hour on average. Even as profits spiked during the pandemic, employers did not pass the benefits to workers. Kroger offered buybacks to shareholders, lining the pockets of wealthy investors. Since 2024, grocery workers’ wages have actually declined when adjusted for inflation.
It wasn’t always as bad as it is today. At some stores, as late as the early 1990s, unionized employees earned middle-class wages. But pay fell off a cliff along with unionization rates. These days, only about 4 percent of retail workers are unionized. Grocery staffers are essential workers with a range of important skills, but they have no bargaining power.
At the grocery store I worked in, Cindy was not the only colleague struggling to keep food on the table. Some cashiers qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. A federal program that provides limited food aid to working people, 23 million adults used SNAP in 2023. Thirty-five percent of beneficiaries were children. The program has regularly been targeted for cuts by both parties. President Ronald Reagan demanded reductions as part of the 1981 federal budget while, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s welfare reform policies led to significant cuts. In 2025, Donald Trump further slashed the program.
The typical SNAP recipient is a woman who cooks for a family after coming home from work. And one program user may be serving another at the supermarket—around 22% of cashiers rely on SNAP.
Since I was hired directly into a supervisor role at the store, my pay of $15.80 was a couple of dollars higher than what regular cashiers earned. Earning around $500 per week, more than half of my monthly income went to rent. I wondered how my colleagues were surviving on less.
A cashier named Willow suffered from a severe case of eczema. The skin around her nose and eyes was red and flaky, her knuckles and fingers white and blotchy. Skin flaked off onto her register as she worked. The 30-year-old had trouble sleeping because letting her skin touch anything—even the sheets of her bed—was painful. “Is there a treatment?” I asked. Willow used an ointment, she said, but it didn’t always help. “There is a shot that would clear it up, but it costs four thousand dollars, and I can’t afford insurance.”
I asked about Medicaid, the federal insurance program for low-income people. Willow said that she earned just over the income limit to qualify. “I would have to reduce my hours to get it,” she explained. “But then I would have less money for food.”Another cashier suffered from a toothache so painful that she could barely eat. “I need a root canal,” the 25-year-old told me. Since she did not have dental insurance, she was waiting for a spot to open up at a dental school. “If you let the students practice on you, the treatment is free,” she told me. A week later, I asked her if she had seen a dentist. She was still waiting for an appointment. “The good news is, I eat ice cream for dinner. It’s the only food that doesn’t hurt.”
In the U.S., a person’s class status is often apparent from the moment they open their mouth. One-quarter of adults over the age of 65 are missing most of their teeth, and our country has one of the highest rates of toothlessness in the world. And since tooth pain is a common cause of absences from school, a lack of dental care can keep children from getting an education.My grocery store colleagues treated their ailments as best as they could. “Did I tell you about my shot?” Lucia asked one day in between customers. “I just found out I have diabetes.” The cashier was talking about a blood sugar test. I asked about her treatment plan. “I don’t have insurance. But the clinic prescribed pills and told me what not to eat.” Lucia was referring to a low-cost clinic where people lined up for treatment for everything from cuts and broken bones to heart disease.
It was not the first time my colleague had visited the clinic for a serious condition. She had also gone there to get treated for arthritis. Now she was juggling medications and was unsure about when to take them. “I can’t take the diabetes pill at the same time as my arthritis medication,” she said. “So, if you treat your diabetes, your arthritis flares up?” I asked. “Today I took the diabetes meds, but now I’m in pain,” Lucia explained. “Tomorrow, I’ll skip those and take the arthritis pill instead.” While I worked with her, Cindy began to lose her hearing. She could no longer chat with customers or ask children how they were doing in school. Hearing loss is associated with economic hardship. One reason may be that low-income people are more likely to work in high-noise environments like construction sites. Another is that, like Cindy, they cannot afford adequate health care. Impaired hearing is not just a physical disability. It can lead to social isolation and depression. One day, my colleagues and I learned that Cindy had been selected to appear on a television news program. The show featured local people who needed financial help. A reporter would interview the long-time bagger on-air and then make a “surprise announcement” that a corporate sponsor was donating $3,000 for hearing aids. Cindy knew about the donation in advance, but she was supposed to feign surprise.
The morning after the program aired, I found the segment online. My colleagues and I gathered around my phone to watch Cindy’s star turn. She had joined the show remotely.
My colleague beamed. Her dark purple eye shadow matched a floral brooch that bloomed on her chest. Cindy gushed about how she loved helping people and how she loved her job.
When the reporter announced the donation for hearing aids, she expressed Oscar-worthy astonishment, thanking them profusely.
I was happy that Cindy would finally get hearing aids. But the longer I worked at the grocery store, the more troubled I became by my colleagues’ struggles. From seeking out alternative forms of care to pushing through pain, workers were fighting individual battles to survive.
I began to consider organizing a union. As the cofounder of the Debt Collective, an organization that had won loan relief for student debtors, I had organizing experience. I knew that it was only by joining forces that my colleagues and I could improve our conditions.
But I hesitated. Most colleagues did not talk about our common problems in collective terms. And I had never heard the word ‘union’ at the store. The prohibition was not explicit. No manager, to my knowledge, had ever warned us against unionizing. But I sensed that if the news that workers were organizing got to management, everyone involved would be fired. Everyone even rumored to be involved would be shown the door.
I knew that such retaliation was illegal. But the bosses might fire people first and answer questions later. My colleagues needed their jobs to make ends meet. Fear, precarity, and poverty made collective struggle feel like an idea that belonged to a different, more privileged universe, one my colleagues and I didn’t live in and couldn’t imagine visiting.
While I mulled over the dilemma, Cindy’s health deteriorated. Her weight dropped to ninety pounds. Once, she called the store to say she didn’t know what day it was. “Do I work today?” she asked. Another time, she hit her head and ended up with a purple goose egg.
In Work, Retire, Repeat, the labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci described a “tale of two retirements.” While the affluent are living longer, healthier lives, and retiring with a nest egg and their dignity, low-income workers are facing destitution. Since almost half of families have no retirement savings, millions must work until they die. The number of older people still on the job spiked after 2008, when many baby boomers lost their homes during the Great Recession. These days, many would-be retirees are punching clocks in warehouses, toiling as home health aides, or serving customers in retail stores. One solution is expanding social security and offering all workers access to a publicly funded pension. In the meantime, supermarkets are benefiting from the financial desperation. For years, companies have recruited older people under the assumption that their life experience makes them good candidates for customer service roles.
Occasionally, the plight of elderly retail workers breaks into popular culture. In 2022, a Walmart contractor posted a video from a store break room where an employee looked exhausted and miserable. The clip went viral and helped to raise $170,000 for the woman. Another video featuring a homeless Kroger cashier raised tens of thousands of dollars.
Shoppers are rightly horrified at the idea of people staffing supermarkets into old age. But viral campaigns are not a solution to retail worker precarity. At the store I worked in, customers saw welcoming smiles and heard friendly greetings. They didn’t know that cashiers were suffering.
Near the end of my time at the grocery store, Cindy had a stroke. My colleagues and I were told that she would be out of the job indefinitely. A few days later, my colleague called the store from her hospital bed. She was despondent. “I want to come back to work,” she told me. Cindy missed her customers. But her main concern was that she was broke. “I don’t have enough vacation days to make up for all the time I’m missing,” she said. If she missed too many workdays, she would not be able to make rent.
I tried to be encouraging, telling Cindy that everyone at the store was pulling for her. “You’ll be back on the job in no time,” I said. A few months later, she would be dead.
Excerpted from Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register by Ann Larson with permission from Simon & Schuster
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