Behind the Scenes at the Supermarket: An Ethnographic Investigation of Grocery Work as Skilled and Emotional Labor

The industrial food distribution system is a prominent site of food studies in our historical moment. Public perception regards grocery workers as low or unskilled, low-wage workers despite the intense physicality and interpersonality of this type of customer service work. Because of their ubiquity in the 21st century global north, grocery stores receive much scholarly attention that focuses either on customers' psyche and experiences or the physical impact of the job on grocery workers, with little focus directed to the emotional work of grocery employees. Therefore, I investigate grocery work as skilled and emotional labor through ethnographic data and autoethnographic accounts. I find that customer perceptions of grocery labor and assumptions about grocery employees shape specific circumstances that require grocery workers to have elevated capacities for skilled and emotional labor. Such labor is demonstrated through the technical and interpersonal requirements of day-to-day grocery work. While COVID-19 brought recognition to grocery workers as an "essential" labor population, the title was stripped away just as quickly, leaving grocery workers to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile customer service environment. This exacerbation of existing issues in the grocery industry points to both the lasting necessity and social salience of grocery work as food and labor are both identity-shaping devices. Customers use their shopping choices to construct their identities, which places unique pressure on grocery workers to provide those means. At the same time, grocery workers are shaping their own identities through the work they are doing. Shedding light on one branch of essential work in industrial society opens up the conversation to further examine the social treatment of the workers who allow the world as we know it to run.