10 things to characterize grocery stores as COVID-19 workplaces

1. The impossibility to relocate temporarily. Most grocery store workers are employed for ‘low-skilled’ work which requires their on-site presence. Supermarket clerks can't work from home.
   
   
2. The impossibility to cut down on work or opt out. Supermarket clerks either work for a minimum wage or earn internally-established wages which only minimally exceed the statutory minimum wage. Grocery store clerks are usually dependent on every single hour they work to earn a wage that covers their monthly spending. Grocery store clerks can't opt for short-time work or other measures that would allow them to expend their workload.
   
   
3. The provision of critical infrastructure. Apart from individual dependences on working to sustain themselves, grocery store and supermarket clerkship, from early on in the unfolding of the pandemic, had been deemed ‘essential workforce’. Especially in the months of March and April, Germany went through a surge in grocery purchases which posed a serious challenge for the existing staff of many stores to keep up with their daily workloads.
   In her address to the nation, held on March 22, 2020, German chancellor Angela Merkel mentioned “those who are too seldom thanked. Those working as supermarket cashiers or restocking shelves, who are currently doing one of the most difficult jobs that there are at the moment”, telling them “Thank you for being there for your fellow citizens and for keeping us all going”.^1
   Relatedly, whatsapp and facebook messages circulated during that time which requested its recipients to step onto their windows, out onto private balconies or gardens at 9 pm to join in for a public clap for essential workers, including grocery store clerks working in retail.^2
   With Germany being sensitized to the possibility of a breakdown of the grocery supply infrastructure, grocery store clerks – whose statutory minimum wage^3 is the lowest for all industrial sectors – transiently received recognition for their service.
   
   
4. The subjection to (expected) market volatility. Clerks working in wholesale grocery stores face a different situation altogether. Since restaurants and other service providers dependent on food-preparation went out of business during the legally mandated shutdown, wholesale stores expected to lose a bulk of its customers. As a counter-measure to expected economic losses, wholesale management, already during the early days of COVID-19, decided on releasing parts of its employees.
   
   
5. Bodies on the line. Grocery store clerks act as spherical joints in the logistical retail structure. Embodying the links of a supply chain that has goods – not ‘flowing’ but – being produced, prepared, packed, loaded, transported, unloaded, handed over, received, unpacked and carried from one site to another, grocery store clerks translate their bodily movements into the necessary motions that the distribution and vending of groceries demand.
   With a bulk of the replenishing work done before opening hours but extending over the entire day, grocery store clerks skillfully navigate pallets via pallet trucks – in German ‘electrical ants’. Moving through the store quickly, mounting displays and placing items into shelves and racks requires concentration and a focused control of human physicality that leaves little leeway to pay attention to physical distancing. Grocery store clerks are constantly in physical proximity to each other and in touch with mechanical devices, items and surfaces that slip through many hands.
   
   
6. The usage of every bit of space. In other instances, yet related to the demand of turning the store into a functioning infrastructure for grocery supply, clerks are required to make themselves ‘invisible’ as they replenish the store during opening hours. This requires them to negotiate space, again, quite expertly, which is near impossible if they can't use – as their operating space – every corner, passage, and looming room in between customers to full capacity.
   
   
7. The enforcement of security measures. In Germany, grocery stores are legally mandated to restrict the number of customers who are allowed to enter a store at a time. For the state of Hesse, this amounts to one customer per 20 sqm of sales area.^4 Grocery stores are responsible to enforce these rules and face being held liable by either the public health department or the regulatory agency of each municipality for a breach of the mandate.
   In situ, these rules are enforced either by externally hired security guards who work outside the entrance of a grocery store or the clerks themselves. The security guards working outside are critically exposed to a large number of people. They ensure that any customer who wants to enter the store utilizes a shopping cart (supermarkets have limited the number of available carts to ensure that only as many customers as there are shopping carts will enter the store). They also ensure that any customer who seeks to enter the store is wearing a face mask. As a matter of course, the customers the security people come especially close with are those who are non-compliant. Security guards are also often tasked with disinfecting the carts after each use.
   In a desperate attempt to be able to hand out ‘cart chips’ while the store had run out of dispensable cart chips (either 50 cent, 1 Euro coins or cart chips are necessary to obtain a shopping cart), a security guard once approached me at the checkout and asked me to please exchange his own 5 Euro bill for coins that he could hand over. He said, “customers are asking me for chips and going mad outside”.
   That the enforcement of such state or municipality mandated laws can have dire consequences for security workers was recently reported in relation to a security guard working outside a Dollar Store in Flint, Michigan.^5; He had barred a woman, whose daughter entered the store without wearing a face mask, from being served at the checkout. In revenge, relatives of the woman later sought him out in front of the store and fatally shot him in the face.^6
    
8. The dependency on responsible conduct. In stores that rely on the goodwill of customers to stick to the rules (the rules are printed on large signs^7 attached to the doors and to the shopping cart dispenses outside, usually accompanied by a small, mobile sanitary facility that carries paper towels and disinfectant), the store clerks will have to alert non-compliant customers to the necessity of utilizing a shopping cart, keeping distance, or wearing a face mask. Especially since in some cases clerks aren't allowed to solicit for customers to leave the store if they violate customer policies, clerks will have to endure whatever the customers decide is acceptable in terms of proximity and exposure.
   A customer once complained to me about the half-sized palettes piled up next to the checkout counter to keep customer and checkout clerk (merely two feet) apart from each other (the obstacle by implication complicates picking up goods and loading them back into the cart): “What is next? Will the store management buy Bundeswehr^8 hazmat suits for you?”. He pointed with ridicule to the measures taken, but what he also conveyed was that grocery store clerks aren't ‘worth the hassle’.
   
   
9. The sufferability demanded. Discount grocery stores or such that have neatly clocked schedules for in-store daily procedures choose to employ reliable and stalwart workers who need to show themselves to be insensitive to physical exhaustion and emotional drain. Especially in such stores with internal policies of both extreme rationalization (every motion through the store serves a particular purpose, the daily workload is to be completed as quickly as possible) and extreme customer affinity (customer attention is priority), grocery store clerks have to ‘grin and bear it’ when customer attention bars them from completing their assigned tasks early. They also have to ‘grin and bear it’ when they're consequently scolded for not leaving the store early (‘not budgeting on performance’). Evidently, they have to accept working in a job that leaves them little opportunity to experience a sense of achievement. Exhausted in this manner, subduing the worry about heightened exposure during a pandemic becomes just a facet of a job that requires them to ‘swallow’ their sense of merit, worth and deserving protection.
   
   
10. The disentanglement of labor and viral agency. Lastly, grocery stores are places replete with ‘compartmentalized nature’: The items present, which a grocery store clerk intimately works with, comprise histories of making nature, in its ideal form, as well as human nature, in the form of labor, disappear in wrapping and packaging.^9
    In his essay More than world, more than one health, Steve Hinchliffe (2015) alerts readers to the circumstantial making of disease – that although internationally institutionalized biosecurity agendas from the last decade center around keeping a potentially pathogenic nature neatly separate from an unimmunized populace and although these agendas prioritize eliminating points of contact to circumvent the spread of disease, it is such unavoidable points of contact between nature and human infrastructure where both disease and health are patched together. Even if the grocery store is an environment that houses nature in its processed, pasteurized^10 or boxed^11 form, nature is neither absent from the site nor contained. It is, among other things, the practices possible under the site's working conditions – regimes of how one can relate to one another – which determine whether grocery stores are safe public spaces or replete with viral loads.
    In the U.S. alone, as the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is reporting, the number of COVID-19 contractions climbed from 1,557 to 10,453 during the past five weeks.^12 Whereas on April 12, 2020 the Washington Post reported on four of the first publicly known cases of grocery workers deceased due to COVID-19 in the U.S.,^13 as of May 25, it is reporting that at least 100 workers are known to have died – data which they had to compile “from the nation’s largest grocery workers union, other workers’ rights coalitions and media reports” since especially seven of the largest grocery retail chains in the U.S. (5 of which are considered part of the 10 largest food retailers worldwide)^14 are unwilling to disclose internal information to either local health officials or media representatives.^15
    In interviews, employees of these retail chains have stated that they are increasingly worried about their safety, attesting to internal failures to protect them against the spread of the virus, refusals to cover for employee absences, and terminations as a result of speaking about their concerns.^16
    

Footnotes

^1 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/coronavirus/statement-chan...

^2 https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/corona-dank-helfer-101.html

^3 https://en.dgb.de/fields-of-work/the-minimum-wage-in-germany

^4 https://www.hessen.de/sites/default/files/media/lesefassung_cokobev.pdf

^5 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michigan-security-guard-killed-poli...

^6 Notably, for black Americans deciding upon whether to cover their face with a mask in public is a delicate issue, exceeding the question of whether or not to comply with mandated orders. Black citizens are “at greater risk of being suspected as criminals and targeted by police” (Linly 2020). Hence, many find themselves in a “‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’” situation if it comes to wearing a face cover in public (ibid.) – like two Illinois men who, a little more than a month ago, had been escorted out of a Walmart in Wood River for donning surgical masks (Jurado 2020).

^7 Customers who are not sufficiently literate in written German or otherwise lack the means to stay informed may remain under-alerted or unreached by such publicly distributed information.

^8 The German armed forces.

^9 Coded into a can of pork and beans, for instance, is “the history of industrial capitalism, [...] the history of the canning industry, the history of standardization and war, the history of the possibility of sustaining the particular penetration into nature that the break up of the African Continent by the European colonial powers in the 19th century [allowed]” (Haraway in Paper Tiger TV 1987: 17:40–18:03).

^10 see Latour 1988

^11 see Bauer/Schlünder/Rentetzi forthcoming

^12 https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/24/grocery-workers...

^13 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/supermarket-workers-d...

^14 https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-costco-7-eleven-kroger-lidl-bigg...

^15 https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/24/grocery-workers...

^16 https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/24/grocery-workers...

References

Bauer, Susanne; Martina Schlünder; Maria Rentetzi, eds. (forthcoming): Boxes: A Field Guide. Manchester: Mattering Press.

Hinchliffe, Steve (2015): ‘More than one world, more than one health: Re-configuring interspecies health’. In: Social Science and Medicine 129: 28–35.

Jurado, Joe (April 6, 2020): ‘Black Men Kicked Out of Walmart for Wearing Masks During Pandemic’. In: The Root <https://www.theroot.com/black-men-kicked-out-of-walmart-for-wearing-mask... Accessed May 26, 2020.

Latour, Bruno (1988): The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.

Linly, Zack (April 12, 2020): ‘Black Man Forcibly Dragged Off Bus for Not Wearing Face Mask’. In: The Root <https://www.theroot.com/black-man-forcibly-dragged-off-bus-for-not-weari... Accessed May 26, 2020.

Paper Tiger TV (1987): Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic on Primates. 29 minutes.