Grocery Update Volume 2, #3: Every Cashier Is A Celebrity.
Also: Specialty Food Awards!
Discontents: 1. Specialty Food Awards. 2. Every Cashier Is A Celebrity.
1. Specialty Food Association Announces Leadership, Hall of Fame, and Lifetime Achievement Honorees for 2025.
The Specialty Food Association is thrilled to announce the winners of its Leadership, Hall of Fame, and Lifetime Achievement Awards for 2025. Collectively known as the “People Awards,” these three programs recognize individuals who have shaped and are currently shaping the $207-billion specialty food industry.
This year, the Specialty Food Association (SFA) has adjusted the categories for the Leadership Awards, making room for two new award types: Next Generation Leader, of which there are three winners for 2025, and Volunteer of the Year, recognizing someone who has directly contributed to the Association’s success.
This year’s honorees are:
2025 Leadership Awards.
Equity & Opportunity: Felicia Vieira, Crafted Brand Company
Citizenship: Collette Divitto, Collettey’s Cookie Corp.
Vision & Sustainability: Ayissi Nyembe, EMKAO FOODS
Outstanding Buyer: Holly Long, Whole Foods Market
Next Generation Leader: Caroline McGinley, Gringuita Cookies
Next Generation Leader: Devin Powell, Protein Candy
Next Generation Leader: Rina Perrault, Sun World International
Volunteer of the Year: Sarabjit Sawhney, South Amboy Kitchen, LLC
Click here to learn more about the 2025 Leadership Award winners.
2025 Hall of Fame.
Case D. Fischer, Fischer & Wieser Specialty Foods, Inc.
Patrick Ford, Bone Suckin’ Sauce
Karta Owens, Associated Buyers, Inc.
Kerry Bamberger, BWI, Inc.
Mitchell Berliner, MeatCrafters, Inc.
Matt Nielsen, Nielsen-Massey Vanillas
Heather Paul, Specialty Food Association
Norm Jelsma, Milo’s Whole Gourmet, LLC
Click here to get to know the 2025 Hall of Fame inductees.
2025 Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Annie Chun, Annie Chun’s, Inc./gimme Health Foods, Inc.
Stephen Broad, Annie Chun’s, Inc./gimme Health Foods, Inc.
Becky Renfro-Borbolla, Renfro Foods, Inc.
Doug Renfro, Renfro Foods, Inc.
Pamela Barefoot, Blue Crab Bay Co.
James Stott, Stonewall Kitchen
Jonathan King, Stonewall Kitchen
Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s
Click here to explore the bios for the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award winners.
"One of our most important roles at SFA is celebrating the specialty food industry's successes, and the people behind them. We're proud to recognize accomplished leaders each year through our People Awards programs," said Bill Lynch, SFA President. "Congratulations and thank you to all the honorees!"
All 2025 honorees will be recognized at a special SFA People Awards ceremony, taking place on Monday, June 30th, at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City and hosted by Jeni Britton, co-founder of Floura and founder of SFA member brand Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams.
The Summer Fancy Food Show—June 29-July 1 at NYC’s Javits Center—will showcase thousands of specialty food products from domestic and international exhibitors, educational programming, networking opportunities, and more. Registration for the Show is open now for qualified members of the specialty food trade, industry affiliates, and journalists. For more information, please click here.
2. Every Cashier Is A Celebrity.
Cashiers are essential. They make the retail world go ‘round. Cashiers are superstars. Forget celebrity chefs. Cashiers are the real celebrities.
Cashiers have arguably the toughest job in grocery retail. They are the last interaction for a customer and probably the most important and most lasting impression a customer will have in a store. As much as pricing, assortment or displays, they determine the retail experience for shoppers. Cashiers also collect most of the payments that a grocery store receives, despite being low paid, sometimes even entry level workers.
As a cashier you are the frontline of frontline workers, ringing up customers to make sure every penny is counted accurately. An accurate till is your holy grail. Miss it by a few pennies too often and you are out of job in most circumstances. So you are counting cash and staying present in the moment to make sure you give correct change.
A cashier is herding dozens of customers every hour, making eye contact, occasionally smiling or making small talk. They are handling customer complaints and comments, from belligerent customers mouth breathing all over the kiosk, to the special diets customers who couldn’t find their gluten-free cauliflower crust pizzas. Or being gentle and helpful with harried working parents trying to herd their kids through the register with a load of groceries and out to the minivan. All in a day’s work.
When an item doesn’t scan correctly, or a customer thinks the sale price was X and not Y, the cashier tries to resolve it or quickly gets on the intercom and buzzes a supervisor to mediate the momentary crisis. When the grocery department is out of a customer’s favorite item, or during a pandemic or natural disaster when out of stocks are hovering over 30% of all store inventory, the cashier, doubling as a guest services diplomat, has to let the customer know the situation is temporary that the store appreciates their business and hopes they come back again.
When trade war tariffs or Avian flu or other climate change induced natural disaster price inflation hits and prices are going up and customers aim their frustration toward cashiers, most handle it politely and efficiently. On a well-staffed shift, the store has a bagger packing customers’ items into shopping bags and loading them into carts. More often, cashiers have to switch gears from scanning items and dispensing change and receipts to doing the bagging themselves, 15-20 items a minute, 15-20 times an hour. Occasionally, a helpful customer even bags their own groceries. Cashiers are the alert eyes of the store, always holding things together even while they are whisking customers through the registers.
Cashiering also takes a toll on the body. According to Kathleen Scott, a UFCW shop steward and a longtime cashier and clerk, “Most cashiers work a six to eight hour shift. If they are working under six hours, they get one break. They are standing for three hours and then have a twenty minute break. They are then standing for another two and a half hours. It is brutal.”
Yet even this is somewhat fortunate. Non-union cashiers can get two ten minute breaks per shift and a thirty minute unpaid lunch break.
And that’s not all. “The other thing is repetitive motion injury. On the weeks where I've been primarily in the register, I get muscle aches that start behind my ear, go all the way down my neck and bend 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 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 had a stroke. He could not stand up without a walker. And the union had to fight to get him a chair.”
The chair issue is one that would seem to be humane and common sense. It is indeed so in much of Europe. There, where unions are more influential and grassroots social movements have had more sway, retail workers are able to sit down at the register. It seems like a simple victory for working people, but it is profound, if you have ever stood at a register for shift after shift. Many cashiers at European retailers have other privileges that most of their American counterparts do not enjoy, including better benefits and job security. But here, retailers resist the chairs. They assume that sitting down would give customers the wrong impression. Customers won’t think cashiers are working hard enough. They are not breezing customers through the registers at their utmost speed and efficiency. Or maybe they need the exercise. But it should come as no surprise that allowing cashiers to sit down makes them work better. They are not exhausted and uncomfortable. Sitting could also reduce workplace injuries and worker’s compensation claims, especially where the company is paying the health insurance premiums.
There is also, of course, the political economy of cashiering to consider.
In 2018, 3.3 million people worked as cashiers, making it the third largest occupation in the U.S. Retail sales or cashier jobs are the most common jobs in 46 states. There are over 865,000 cashiers in the grocery industry, accounting for 30% of this overall workforce. Such retail workers tend to be younger, over 70% are women. They are disproportionately Black, Latin/Hispanic and immigrant. Most cashiers do not have Bachelor’s degrees. They are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty and have Medicaid.
The mean wages for cashiers hovered around $12.00 an hour in 2019 and has not grown much since. The median earnings for full-time cashiers was just over $22,100 annually in that timeframe, and has not kept pace with inflation. Considering their jobs are to harvest and account for every single transaction that happens in the retail store, they are woefully underpaid and undervalued. And what they don’t receive in hourly compensation they make up for in sheer numbers. A bustling, busy, full service grocery store will have from ten to thirty cashiers buzzing along during any given shift.
Wally Waugh is a front end manager at a grocery store on the East Coast and shop steward for his union. He is responsible for the operations of the customer service department, including cashiers at the checkout. He’s done the job for many years. Wally carries himself with that weight of experience, but he is humble and good natured.
“This is the only job that I've held for the last 38 years. I get the most joy out of developing people. I walk a tightrope each and every single day of getting the job done, but it also making sure that the union members are treated fairly. I do have to maintain a certain amount of a certain authority. I do have to be firm at times, but fair.”
“The challenge comes when a union member has a problem with management or has a or they feel that they're not being treated unfairly. But the easiest part of my job in that aspect is that that I can always I listen to their concerns. I bring it to management. And if it's not resolved, I have the luxury of passing it off to the union rep and it's their job to represent the member. And I've never had I've never had an issue where I had an employee or a member complain about me because I wasn't treating them fairly.”
The parameters of working in a union organized checkout are obviously appealing. Most non-union employees are “at will”, meaning they could be fired “at will” by their employers. One non-union employers’ HR policies states is quite bluntly:
Your employment at (non-union grocer) is at-will unless state law provides otherwise. This means that your employment is not guaranteed for any definite period of time and either you or (non-union grocer) may terminate your employment at any time, for any lawful reason or no reason, and with or without notice, consistent with applicable law… (Non-union grocer) may amend, revise, or eliminate any policy, procedure or benefit… with or without notice at its sole discretion. Only the Chief Executive Officer of (Non-union grocer) or his or her authorized representative has the authority to enter into an agreement that changes or alters the at-will employment relationship and any such agreement must be in writing and signed. No other (employee) has the authority to enter into employment contracts or agreements for employment- express or implied - for any reason.
The CEO has absolute power in this very much one-sided equation. It’s not that working at an at-will employer can’t be fun, fulfilling, even fortuitous and lucrative if you figure out the hustle. You can still love working with your colleagues, build solidarity and friendships, even find a romantic partner. Just don’t get too attached to the work, because there are no guarantees in life, especially at an at will employer. The company goes through a downturn or is pushed to cut expenses by shareholder, a new CEO comes in and wants to flex his/her/their fiduciary muscles, or you run afoul of your supervisor, and you can take those cashiering skills elsewhere.
As front end manager, Wally is not just responsible for the cashiers, but he is effectively the gatekeeper for all payments that come into the store. He explains a common operating model at the checkout and how assures accuracy:
“Now, in order to cut costs and time, everybody works on a community till. So every lane will have a drawer already in it. And when the cashier comes to their shift, they'll sign on to that drawer. When they leave, another cashier will come in and sign on to that drawer. So there's usually three to four cashiers on a lane on any given day, including itself, because if it gets busy, I'll just hop on.
“Now (let’s say) that drawer comes up short. If that till comes up short, that lane comes up short. Then what we have to do is put everybody that's on that lane of what is called cash control. And what that means is, that when that person comes in, we have to count the till before they come in and count it after. If the draws okay, they're off cash control. So now say you have somebody that's on cash control that comes up short again. So that first issue, they get written up and it’s usually just a verbal warning and the write up is just documenting that the conversation took place. If they come up short again within a reasonable amount of time after that, then we have to have a union meeting and that's when the delegate comes down. And then after the third one, disciplinary action is taken. It could be suspension, it could be termination, depending on the amount of the shortage, depending on the situation, if it was deemed that the cashew was completely negligent. Usually what we'll do is we won't fire them but will move them to another department because help is hard to get. So you just don't want to go firing people or letting them go. But there's a process in place to handle till shortages.”
At one non-union chain, I asked an employee, who quite reasonably wanted to remain anonymous, how inaccurate tills are handled. Like in a union shop, the grocer wants to save labor expenses by combining tills and moving cashiers between them as the needs arise. But unlike a union shop, one inaccurate till can mean that the whole shift gets a write up. This means that even a cashier who has been accurate every day for years can end up with a disciplinary record. It also created psychological pressure for each cashier but also intense peer pressure not to let down your colleagues. And once it happens again, and the shift gets another write up, you are well on your way to termination.
And when that frequently inevitable third inaccurate till comes up short, whether from a long term colleague who is having a bad day, a newly trained cashier who was distracted by a rude customer, or even a colleague who is burnt out and just doesn’t give a shit, and you are unlucky enough to be on that shift, you can be terminated. And at a non-union shop, it is unlikely that you will get moved to a new department. You are damaged goods, you are now dead weight. You have harmed the company’s cash flow, you have put the jobs of your fellow employees at risk and you should now seek gainful employment elsewhere. Such is “at will” employment at the checkout.
Like barcodes and electronic shelf tags, reducing the number of cashiers at retail is all about saving labor dollars and boosting profitability. Those jobs won’t likely be reassigned elsewhere in stores. What else is there to do other than stocking products, helping the occasional customer or wiping down shelves or shopping carts. Now that algorithms are reordering products, electronic price tags are adjusting pricing, and customers are checking themselves out at self-checkouts, what are clerks and cashiers for? Labor is the major variable expense in a grocery store and when cut, it goes right to bottom line improvement.
A grocery store typically budgets about 12-15% of their sales for labor. This is even lower for mass merchants and discounters, typically well under 10%. Cashier and customer service teams can account for 20-25% or more of total store labor dollars in a full service supermarket. Amortized against total store expenses, cutting back on cashiers could mean saving 2-3% that could get plugged right back into gross margins. Even when this radically alters store operations and the customer experience, and requires highly skilled, frequent maintenance, the company P&L looks fantastic. Shareholders would swoon, portfolios fattened with dividends. Yes, some younger and tech-enthusiastic customers would flock to the self-checkouts, but their big draw is usually because cashier staffing gets cut back and stores will have a handful of registers open with long lines.
To wit, in the summer of 2024, during the Specialty Foods Show and the annual Pride Celebration, with 100,000 celebrants down the street at Washington Square Park and a packed Union Square across the street watching an impromptu concert, the bustling, $2 million a week Union Square Whole Foods flagship store had one cashier on shift and a line thirty customers deep for the self-checkouts. I asked the on shift supervisors what they were thinking and he was defensive and blamed “corporate” for the staffing cuts, but there was nothing he could do about it. Meanwhile, the one cashier on shift looked like she was going to plotz. I felt so bad for her.
Working in retail during the pandemic has caused many grocery staff to question their career paths. Turnover in grocery was at record levels during the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of employees changing jobs or leaving the industry for months on end. Fed up with low wages, poor benefits, difficult and rude customers, erratic schedules, unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, long hours and lack of paid childcare or sick leave, retail workers were a leading force in the so-called “great resignation.” And while many retailers have since raised wages and increased benefits in order to attract and retain workers, these boosts were usually well below what constituted livable wages in most major metro areas. There is no major grocer that pays all full time workers enough to cover rent, childcare and occasionally going to the movies or a cheap vacation, and working part-time definitely won’t cut it.
Kathleen Scott articulates this further, “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. 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.”
This compensation threshold is typically north of $50,000 a year after taxes, or what the minimum wage would be if it had kept up with productivity growth since the 1960’s. Retailers have used workforce turnover and staffing issues as a justification and opportunity to invest in more automation and de-skilling technologies, such as auto-replenishment systems that does the ordering based on machine learning and algorithms. Progress tends to be linear and it means that once these jobs are gone, they are gone for good.
For cashiers in particular, who are at the frontlines of retail and are the last and best impression customers get during their shopping experiences, these issues of staffing, technology, power and profit are systemic, even existential.
Kathleen Scott nails it. “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. And how much grocery stores are needed in a community.”
And how much cashiers are needed by the industry, their customers and their employers. Cashiers are essential. Forget celebrity chefs.
Cashiers are the real celebrities.
peace.