Editor’s Note: From time to time the Stansbury Forum invites students to write about their experiences.  The following piece is about one recent graduate’s experience of “service work”.

During the winter of the Covid pandemic, after graduating with a degree in Math, I got a job at a “Chain Store” as an Ecart shopper within one day of searching. At the time, I was just glad that I had gotten a job so expediently, but perhaps I should’ve been more careful. The experience doing the job was completely different from what I had expected.  

To be a “Chain Store” Ecart shopper meant that it was my job to “do other people’s shopping” for them. Orders were assembled from the previous day’s requests, including a complete and thorough listing of the desired items sorted by aisle or department, and grouped chronologically according to the customer’s desired pick-up time. I was to work my way through the store searching for items on the customer’s list, using a laser scanner to verify and mark off items as I found them, and then compile them all together into a cart. Once the items were collected, I had to bag them into categories of food type, such as all the frozen items had to be kept together, the merely cold ones were separated from that, while select meats get their own plastic bag, and wine bottles either get a nifty handbag or cardboard container, and so on. All refrigerated items were stored in a cooler or freezer to match their storage requirements, and all the remaining bagged items were left in the cart.  

Every day, starting early in the morning and working into overtime hours at night (very commonly, we were asked to stay late; there was always more work than we could do in a day), me and my coworkers shopped.  

Despite being labeled as a “low-skilled” job, I did not find anything low-skill about my task. Shopping very different orders in an entire grocery store, with thousands and thousands of different products seemingly scattered at random throughout the store, requires memorizing tons of minutiae. I never got a clear answer why the flat tortilla shells were only located on one particular aisle cap, or why the frozen pasta was next to fruit drinks. The Deli & Meat department was a mess, with food items not only in glass cabinets but frozen bins as well. And possessing a profound knowledge of different food products and their substitutes was crucial. Whenever an item was out-of-stock, it was my responsibility to find a close substitute for it to offer to the customer instead. But not only does that require having detailed knowledge of the former food item and substitute products out on the market, but it also requires knowing where the substitutes are in the store, if they were there at all. I remember clearly the day when a boss of mine, as a demonstration, helped me find a substitute cheese… by marching me to the opposite side of the store. I couldn’t help but think to myself: How could I ever find this substitute on my own? How am I supposed to memorize not only where items were, but the entire store catalog, and which items were not currently available? Most of my coworkers knew these things from years of practice, but I was asked to perform at their level now.

Another challenge of the job was the time-management aspect.  Every order was supposed to be shopped in a half hour or less, and it didn’t matter how large or small a particular order was. Now technically, most people didn’t meet this ridiculous standard, and the pros took around 45-60 minutes for an order, but I almost always was running late. For me, this meant that I was constantly stressed out about finding an item, verifying it was the right one by bar code, and taking as many copies of the item asked for as fast as I could, but commonly it would take me at least 5-10 minutes to find a certain item (or just to affirm that it, in fact, was sold out), and then either move on or spend another 10-15 min frantically looking for a substitute for an item I had little understanding of. I soon had to resort to just not looking for substitutes at all, because it was simply too time-expensive to do so, but when my bosses started noticing my trend they started giving me smaller orders. Now, to be completely honest, this was an incredibly generous and kind move on their part.  They had every reason and right to be mad, for I wasn’t living up to expectations, but instead they tried to work with me, and they said I would be tested here and there till my skills improve. Sadly, though, this warning served more to discourage me, because it meant more and more of my fellow employees would start to realize I wasn’t doing as well as them, and also, I didn’t want to get “special treatment” just because I wasn’t as skilled. I didn’t think I deserved it, for one thing, but I also anticipated people might start babying me, or grow resentful at my seemingly unfair treatment, or might start to expect me to make mistakes, and jump to assuming I did something wrong if some other mishap happened. People started double-checking my orders when I arrived, interrogating me about any missing items, double-checking that what I reported was true, and so on.  

Least of all did I expect the customers to be an adverse aspect of my experience. While trying to maneuver my way through the store, I had to circumvent and give courtesy to shoppers along the way, and not all of them were graceful. Everyone always expected me to know where every item was. There was one male shopper, for example, who asked me where he could find some obscure item, and once I admitted sadly that I didn’t know where it was, he scoffed at me and walked away. I soon learned to wait for customers to greet me rather than me greet them, as well, because early on I gave customers a warm welcome as they entered the store, saying “Hello! Welcome to “Chain Store”!”, but sometimes they coldly avoided contact and rushed off. Worst yet were the times when we had a mad customer outside waiting for their Ecart order. We delivered the orders, usually having been shopped by ourselves personally, to the very recipient customers in the parking lot. Every once in a while, my coworkers and I would run late on a delivery, and the customers would get pissed off, yelling at any of us they came in contact with until their order arrived. It was soon very difficult for me to feel like I had any respect or dignity as a “Chain Store” employee and couldn’t feel like my work was appreciated or even worthwhile.

Finally, the day arrived when my boss yelled at me in the middle of the store completely unexpectedly. I had to piece this together after the fact, but supposedly, a coworker of mine reported that she had asked me to stay late to help with some final orders the night prior, but I left at the end of my shift. I sure didn’t remember anyone asking me to stay, so when my boss asked me about it, I started to stutter that I didn’t recall her ever asking me, but my boss wasn’t in the mood for excuses and flatly shouted, “If we ask you to stay late, you stay, alright?!” That made it pretty clear how they felt about overtime: it wasn’t requested, it was mandatory. Once this happened, I had had the last straw. So many aspects of the job were not going well, and now I’m getting yelled at because I’m an easy target to blame. I finished out the week and quit.

I can keep going with many other aspects of the job that were difficult, such as a previous elbow injury acting up and causing me severe pain while trying to work, but I’ll try to wrap up with this last important point. One of the things I quickly learned with this job is the monotony and repetitiveness of its task. It’s a job that’s fast paced and very object oriented, and thus there’s not much space of time or memory to let your mind wander. In short, I soon realized that I couldn’t think about math questions or philosophy—topics dear to my heart—in the quiet of my mind while doing this job. The lack of focus slowed my pace and caused me to forget important details of the grocery item I was shopping for. For the first time ever I experienced what it’s like to be an automaton, a thoughtless and mindless cow, whose sole focus and capacity for attention was the very task in front of them, one moment to the next. There was no room for reflection, for active inquiry or questioning, or even remembering. This was especially difficult for me given my natural proclivity to thought. I could tell that as weeks became months, it started to feel more difficult to think like a philosopher or a mathematician, as I did only a few months earlier, even after my shift was over. Those parts of my mind and brain were atrophying very quickly from a lack of use, and that made it harder to even consider them outside of work. This helped me see how hard it could be to study math or philosophy on the side while holding a job like that, for it’s like asking a person to be a robot for 8 hours of the day and a thinking human during the off hours. You just can’t be both simultaneously. 

Several months since quitting, I look back on the job as a valuable insight into the lives many people are forced to lead in the US.  I have heard it said that most people spend their lives reliving the same year over and over again, my job made me see that as it was even more repetitive than that; it was the same day repeated over and over.  Nothing changed about this job – no beautiful glimpses of creativity or novelty could be found. When I look back on my experience I ask myself, what sort of worker I would have needed to have been to be especially good at it. It would have been very helpful if I had been more mindless and thoughtless, less prone to the distractions of reflection and self-conscious contemplation, as these meta-level thoughts slowed down my dizzying manual labor. It also would have been good if I didn’t have any pride or dignity, as then I wouldn’t have recognized the indignation of this job or the way my customers treated me. Furthermore, we might as well rule out all emotional connection with my work, including the ideas of loving your job or yearning to feel like my efforts were making a genuine difference toward the good of society, all of these aspirations would’ve been thwarted.  

But is this really the kind of people society wants to cultivate or needs?  Thoughtless, servile, nihilistic, and self-erasing? No wonder the turnover is so high in this area of employment. No human being wants to be like that.

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