Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register

This illuminating debut chronicle turns Larson’s pandemic-era stint as a grocery worker into a rallying cry against corporate greed. In the fall of 2020, with her career prospects in teaching and journalism stalled, Larson took a cashier/supervisor job at TGS, a nonunion store in Utah, hoping it might also remedy her feelings of isolation. The job proved (mostly) fulfilling, but Larson soon discovered that her colleagues made substandard wages and suffered from health problems they couldn’t afford to address. Mid-pandemic corporate cutbacks increased pressure and stress to the point that some of Larson’s coworkers wore diapers to eliminate the need for bathroom breaks. As a former organizer at a nonprofit, Larson asked herself, “What might responsibility and solidarity look like at TGS?” She details taking small but subversive steps—like allowing parking lot workers to wear headphones despite the store policy—to make her colleagues’ lives easier, all the while “run[ning] into the barrier of my own exhaustion and pain.” Dotting her empathetic account with historical tidbits about the evolution of customer service and American productivity, Larson offers a firm rebuke of late capitalism. It’s essential reading. Agent: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, Frances Goldin Literary. (June)