Clean Up on Aisle Five: Essential Work and Poverty Wages at America's Grocery Stores w/ Ann Larson (G&R 502)

Grocery store workers in America are essential yet systematically exploited, earning poverty wages while facing relentless surveillance, no benefits, and impossible schedules—despite the industry's massive profits. In her new book *Clean Up on Aisle Five*, activist and writer Anne Larson reveals how her own experience as a supervisor at a Salt Lake City grocery store exposed a system where workers are treated as disposable, even as they keep the nation fed. She details how automation like self-checkouts doesn’t save labor—it creates new jobs for tech support and increases worker stress, while surveillance systems mirror carceral environments. Workers, many of them elderly or financially desperate, are forced into snitching on each other, denied vacation, and paid so little they rely on food stamps to survive. Yet amid this dystopia, Larson also documents unexpected solidarity—workers carpooling home at night, supporting each other through hardship, and resisting quietly. The episode argues that the crisis isn’t just about wages, but about a broken system where corporations prioritize shareholder returns over human dignity, and where antitrust laws exist in name only. The solution, she suggests, lies not in individual heroism, but in collective action and systemic reform. The most shocking revelation? The people who sell food often can’t afford to buy it. And as corporate profits soar during crises like the pandemic, workers get a $2/hour ‘hero pay’ that vanishes overnight.