Grocery Update- Every Clerk Can Govern: An Oral History Series.

Featuring Kathleen Scott, Cashier, Stock Clerk, and UFCW Shop Steward. Part 1.

Every Clerk Can Govern: An Oral History Series. Featuring Kathleen Scott.

Every Clerk Can Govern is an ongoing, long form interview series in the spirit of Studs Terkel and Staughton Lynd, featuring essential workers and change makers in the grocery industry.

Interview with Kathleen Scott, cashier, stock clerk, and a UFCW shop steward in Southern California. Part 1 of 2.

Interviewed In April 2023. Part 2 coming soon.

“I have done every possible job you can do that doesn't need a college degree.

I've been a waitress. I've been a bartender. I've worked in retail. I did call a center for a while. I cleaned pool decks and on and on and on and on.

“I've been working in the grocery industry for about 12 years now. I started off in the bakery at a Ralphs and then took about a year and a half off because of the PTSD and started at the this little neighborhood Albertsons by my house. And I'm currently a GM clerk that does just about everything. Sometimes I'm working up front as a bagger. Sometimes I'm doing the drive up and go. I still get called in the bakery, sometimes late at night, because I work 4 to 12. I work the closing shift. That's the only possible way to get the same schedule in retail is to take the shift that nobody wants.

I'm kind of naturally a vampire, so that worked. I'm lucky in some ways that I work at kind of the best possible scenario. The Albertsons I work at is a small neighborhood store. We have so many people who walk there from the neighborhood, it's upscale. It has a very good income. We do great sales.

“We still have the same staffing issues. We still have the same crime issues. We still have all of that. But it's as good as it gets in retail. And I know this because the Ralphs that I worked at was the opposite. It was a store that was not making money. It was a store that was severely understaffed. It was a store with much higher crime and much more violent crime and with customers that were not regulars and not polite, etc… So I do know the difference. So if I talk about the problems in the grocery store, remember that it's coming from a best case scenario.

“I'm a shop steward.

I like helping people. I was able, for example, to get together two different people who were bookworms and couldn't go to the library anymore and get them to swap their books at the store. I'd say that 90% of the customers we have are wonderful. We probably had ten anti-maskers come into the store and they were all people I'd never seen before, and I think they were just hitting every store until they got something good for their Tiktoks.

I really like being able to talk to my coworkers about what's going on. I really like being involved in organizing. And there are so many small opportunities to do something really well, like if you're packing a bag of groceries and you make that perfect spot for the eggs. It's just satisfying.

I am a cashier. So like I said, I'm a GM clerk who is filling the holes that are left by the fact that we're understaffed. So sometimes I'm a bagger, then I'm the cashier, then I'm at the self-checkout stand, then I'm picking up items, drive up and go, and then I'm in the bakery for one day a week. Not so much lately, but I was doing that. So I'm, you know, taking cake orders and filling up bakery shelves sometimes at night, if the store's closed, I'm helping the night guys because I'm a GM clerk, I'm allowed to do that. So I'm stacking, stocking, toilet paper, I'm putting stuff on shelves. I do all of the go-backs. I do a lot of the facing. I do everything. Except like produce and dairy.

“We are severely understaffed right now, which is causing I mean, everybody feels as if they're doing the job of three people. There are so many small, nit picky, corporate bullshit areas.

So I'm in the register. I've got lines to the back of the store. Right. And I'm still cheerful, polite, and I'm very quick on the register. But you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to get yelled at because I didn't clock that 6:30 sweep, not sweep the floor. That is very frustrating and the expectation that we can and will be in two places at once, you know, which is just mind boggling. We have no security. You know, I mean, there was one time I told the store director, you know, we had 20 shoplifters that i counted in the store yesterday, and he said to me, how many did you stop? And I said, That's not my job. And it's dangerous. It is.

“There's nobody in Los Angeles working in a grocery store who is not making within 20 to 25% of poverty wages. So there's not a single person in that store who is making enough money to support themselves.

All right. And at the same time, they're expected to do more and more and more and more. And that on a daily basis causes frustration. It causes resentment. It makes my job harder as steward because they feel they've been let down by the union. And I see why they feel that way. They forget that the union worked to get us the 5% hazard pay raise for a few months. You know the good things that the union does. They forget how much their insurance would cost. But yeah, I mean, who've been working there for 20 years, never had to think about health insurance. But they don't know how good it is. They have nothing to compare it to until their kid gets a job with no insurance. And then they're like, Whoa.

We can't get raises, but they can make enough money to go destroy an entire other industry. One of the reasons why they're looking into sort of a delivery model is because a people who get delivery make more money and no shrink. Right. If robots are doing delivery, there's no shrink. There's nobody coming in and stealing. There's no employees stealing. There's no employees. There's no frozen pizzas being left in the bread aisle.

“The upper echelons of any corporation do not like labor. They see labor as leeches sucking off their bottom line because labor is usually one of the biggest expenses. Right. And if you want to cut expenses in a way that you can take to your accountant and say, we're going to do X, Y and Z and expenses will be cut by Q, you go for labor because you can project labor cost. So when you have a collective bargaining unit. When you have workers who can come together to speak in one voice, you have an ability to stand up to people who see you as sort of a writhing mass of maggots who are destroying everything they want to build. Keeping them from being Bill Gates or whatever.

And I love that about all unions. I love how a lot of the people who are in my union are people who would not speak up on their own. They are, a lot of them, first or second generation immigrants. Some of them don't have education or their English is not as perfect as they would like. And yet when they go through the union, they have a voice, and a lot of times they feel confident in that voice. I mean, the last time we went to vote on our contract, we had something like 95% of our union members vote. Right. And it's amazing to me to see.

“People that I know at the store will never raise their voice to a manager, will never question, but who will stand up and vote and say, ‘No, I don't like this contract’ and I love that. I love that it gives them power. I love that we have a contract that is a legally binding document, for example, of one of the things you are not allowed to do according to our contract. In the legally binding document is there's something called the courtesy clerk program with courtesy clerks are baggers. You are only allowed to have baggers in a cashier position for 15% of the time for every hundred hours of cashiering. 15 hours of that can be baggers, right? Because cashiers make the most money, baggers make the least money. Right. So of course the stores are like, well, why don't we just fill up the registers with baggers? And the union was like, no, no, no, no. It can be 15%. 15%. Great. If somebody needs a lunch or somebody has to go home early, you have a little wiggle room there. It's also enough time that the baggers can get training as cashiers, and if that position opens up, they have the possibility of moving up in the ranks. So it's a good system, but it gets abused a lot.

So I noticed, especially during COVID, that my store was abusing it ridiculously. We were at about 50-50 baggers versus cashiers, which does two things, right? One, it saves the company way too much money on labor and two, it takes hours away from cashiers. So I got Sam, a union rep, to come down and do an audit. Three times. If you are audited and shown to be abusing the system three times, then you are penalized and you cannot use any baggers in any cashier's station for 90 days. So based on the third audit that was coming up, I got four people promoted. Was the proudest moment of my life. I could not have done that without a union. If I worked at Wal-Mart, sure, I can’t go to the store director and say, ‘You got these newbies in the register and the people have been here for ten years, are getting 24 hours a week. That is totally wrong’. So, yeah, so that's what I love about a union. A union is a very good tool. You have to use it. You have to learn how to use it.

“Nobody wants to work self-checkout because, A, you have to keep track of in our store, we only have four and got some stores have six or eight self-checkout stations. You have to keep track of all of them. That's where the most theft happens. And you're out in the open and you don’t have a table between you and a customer. So if a customer is angry, there's a physical barrier when you're at self-checkout where the most theft is going to happen. When you're exposed, you have nothing between you and these potentially aggressive, hostile people. The other thing is you're supposed to keep an eye on four registers while people are scanning. As if people are just going to know how to work a self-checkout, as if people are going to know what the number code is for bananas, right? Well, actually, they all learn the number code for bananas so they can type it in when they're getting something more expensive like rainier cherries.

So now you have to focus on this person while simultaneously watching everybody else. And it's just exhausting. It's so much more exhausting than being in the register. It's frustrating for the customers. All right. Some of them think it's going to be faster and that's when they go into that line and then they end up being there for five minutes and they're getting like four items.

“I can see where self-checkout is good for a company. I cannot see where self-checkout is good for customers or workers. It makes everybody involved frustrated.

But I would like to repeat that my store is a best case scenario and we have theft and frustration and wasted time and lines at self-checkout to the back. It's the most inconvenient for everybody involved. And the Ralphs I used to work at, that was the hellhole there right around the corner from my house. So I still occasionally shop there.

They have, I believe, eight self-checkout stations and one person manning it. And that one person always looks like they're about to start crying. They just have that look that they're holding in like a rage cry.

And I have stood there in line, waiting on the self-checkout and seen people walk out with stuff. They have off duty police officers with guns. That's how much security they have. People still walk out. I mean, it's completely useless. There's so many studies that show that that a shrink in a store goes up by significant percentages, I don't have the study with this, but I believe it's 20% increase with self-checkout. So it has to be about labor. They're willing to show that they can cut labor. So it's basically just a shrink center. It's a theft center.

You don't have to deal with the cashier. But boy, do we have some information on you that we can sell. So we don't even really have to worry about the shrink because we can tell people that this person with this credit card, which leads to this Social Security number, is buying, I don't know, pregnancy kits this week. And hit them up with some baby ads or if they're in a demographic where they're more likely to get abortion, why don't you hit them up with some vacation ads? Because maybe they're going to feel like they have to take care of themselves afterwards, if our society was better set up with a safety net, I can almost see how certain things would be better automated.

Like if they fully automated the McDonald's, then I am kind of almost for it because I have worked fast food. And nobody should have to work fast food. It is a frickin’ nightmare. There's nothing good about it, from going home with your hair smelling like cheap ass hamburgers, to dealing with people, to mopping floors. It's all bad, right? So if we can get people out of fast food, but they can still have, like, rent and food, I'm okay with that. As far as grocery shopping goes, no, I don't think it's the right business for it. I mean, it's just either you have a place where people steal or you have a surveillance state that is beyond terrifying.

Because the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, we appreciate you’. And then there was sort of the middle of the pandemic where everybody was just a dick, right? Because they were frustrated. They were broke. They didn't know if they were going to have jobs, it went on too long. They were lonely, lalala. And we were some of the only humans they saw. So we got all of their emotions. I had never seen so many people crying in my life. And so customers post pandemic are actually ruder than they were pre-pandemic. Not as bad as they were at that kind of end stage pandemic. Right. But still not so great. So they're more short tempered. They're more demanding.

Most cashiers work a 6 to 8 hour shift. If they are working under 6 hours, they get one break. So they are in. That break is usually 15 minutes long. But standing for 3 hours and then having a 20 minute break and then standing for another two and a half hours is brutal. And the other thing is a repetitive motion injury. But on the weeks where I've been primarily in the register, I get muscle aches that start sort of behind my ear, go all the way down my neck and down my back and down my arm to the point where it wakes me up in the middle of the night because the whole side of my head is just cramped.

“I don't know a single cashier who has been a cashier longer than ten years who does not have a permanent injury, wrist, shoulder, neck, back, legs.

“There was one guy, Eddie, who already had really bad knees and a really bad back and he had a stroke. And when he came back, he was on a walker. He was very weak. We had to fight to get him a chair. He could not stand up without a walker. And the union had to fight to get him a chair. I've been working grocery for 12 years. I was a bartender, I was always moving. And you take breaks and you sit down in the back if you have to. And also, I was very young and bounced back more easily on. My shoe size has grown. I went from a nine to a ten and a half in the last ten years from being on my feet, like my arches are falling. So yeah, that's brutal.

And then they can't sit down because customers will complain. They won't think we're working hard enough. And I can totally see that. I can see that if a customer has to stand in line, he's going to assume that the cashier is slow. He's not going to assume the store needs to hire more cashiers because that would be cuckoo-banana-pants. He's going to assume that the cashiers who are available are not working fast enough, and it's because they're sitting and then there will be complaints. Even though studies have shown that when cashiers can sit and have the option to sit, they are faster because their body is not exhausted.

“You need to be able to remember where everything goes, in a store that's constantly changing. You can't put the $6 toilet paper where the $16 toilet paper goes. You have to be able to scan those, but you also have to be able to quickly and efficiently put thousands of pounds worth of product exactly where they go. You tried to stack cans, right? First in, first out. So you got to pull the old cans out, throw all the new cans back, put the old stuff back. And while you're doing this, you have to sort of almost instinctively know that eight cans takes up this much space, takes up the shelf space you have, and then they're two high. So that's going to be 16 cans. You have seven old cans and you're putting back in ten new cans, which is going to be too much. So you're going to have to put some of the new ones behind the one next to it, which is not as popular.

“You have to drive a pallet jack. Not just the electric ones. Those are fine. I'm talking about the ones where you just jack it up by the hydraulics. And you have to steer it contrary to how you think things go, because it's a mirror image through a store that has piles of water in glass jars stacked up for a display. And you have four inches on either side to get an eight foot pallet through quickly and efficiently in less time than you actually need. I hated pallet jacks when I worked in bakery. It was my job to get the load from the freezer to the bakery, unload it before anything could unfreeze, put it into the freezers, pull out the old stuff, put the new ones in, put old stuff back. In an in a short enough time, nothing defrosted because if anything starts defrosting in bakery, there's a chance that it's going to start to swell because a lot of it's frozen bread. So the yeast is going to start working and then you have gross bread that has to be thrown out. But getting that pallet from the freezer to the bay was the worst part of my day. Every time it was incredibly stressful. Anyone who thinks it's an easy job to steer a pallet job just around one corner in one grocery store one time.

I don't understand why we don't close on Sundays or Mondays or any pick a date. Just closed the grocery store, clean everything, stock everything. Just check everything. Our stores right now, because we're understaffed, are filthy and understaffed. And like I said, best case scenario, I don't know the last time a register belt was cleaned because nobody has time. It's disgusting.

“Food delivery services are so annoying. They have limited time to shop. They work primarily for tips. So they will walk right up to you and shove a phone in your face and go, ‘Where is milk’? And I'm like, Why are you doing Instacart if you cannot find milk in a supermarket? They literally took jobs away from union members to give them to the Instacart. Drivers who are getting no benefits.

“The grocery store chains have lost sight of what a grocery store is.

All they know is that people got to eat. And they can make money off that.

“They forget that a grocery store is a community center. And that having a place to get food makes the community better.

Extreme example is food deserts, where you have children who are not getting access to adequate nutrition. So they are doing less well in school and then they are having worse outcomes in later life. This is just sort of a net negative for any communities, and it's a net negative for the wealthier aspects of that community because, you know, we're all interconnected and a problem in one area doesn't stop at a border.

“The pandemic showed us how much grocery stores are needed in a community. Not just for food, but just to touch base with your neighbors.

We had one guy who was coming in about once a week and he would stand by the White Claw and he would wait and wait. And about 15 minutes later, a girl would come in and they would go, ‘Are you so and so?’ ‘I am’. Talk a little bit. And then he'd grab a White Claw and they'd leave. It was his tinder hook up. I took him aside and I said, ‘I can't help but notice you're not buying condoms. So given the amount of people I see here, I'm just going to suppose that you're going to need more condoms than you're buying. Take that as a compliment’. He said, ‘Yeah, I mean, I get them on Amazon. They're cheaper’.

And I was like, ‘Okay, glad to hear that’. So, I mean, that's the benefit of being a middle aged woman. You can say things like that and it's, you know, it's maternal. It's not creepy. But I was really worried.

“I mean, if you take 15,000 union jobs out of a community, you've now got 15,000 people who don't have health insurance who maybe are not able to pay their rent, etc., etc… It ripples out. It's kind of the opposite of the velocity of money, where somebody gives $10 to a cab driver for a car and that $10 on groceries at the grocery store pays the cashier who gets… etc., the velocity of money.

When you start shrinking down people who have enough money, you have the black hole of money. Our homeless population in Los Angeles right now is three times bigger than the biggest Hoovervilles. But except the Hoovervilles actually had churches and brothels and bars and shops. They were a community. We're not a great community. We're not a safe community. They were not a paradise or a utopia, but they were a community. And people did, within reason, help each other. There were schools. After the popularity of Hoovervilles, they started passing a bunch of laws like, ‘We're not going to have this happen again’. So instead of fixing the problems, they basically just outlawed it.

“We have a significant portion of our homeless population that are rent refugees. Their jobs are here, but they can't afford rent, so they live in their car. And so the more you take better paying jobs, jobs with benefits away from the community, the larger community problems you have.

“Grocery stores are just a microcosm of what's happening in America.

You're taking jobs that used to be good, that used to be stable, that provided for a family. I mean, the people have been here for 30 years. They owned their homes. Yeah. Right. The people who are coming in now. No, they do not. They will not. They never will. Right.

“But food is essential.

“We can't keep finding ways to make food more expensive for shareholder (profits). And they've admitted it. They've said this is part of the inflation going around. So we can justify raising our prices. And we need to find some way to make grocery stores not exempt from profit, but exempt from profiteering.” -Kathleen Scott, April 2023.

Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon.

peace.