How It Started
In June 2020 I quit my job working as a Prime Shopper at the Whole Foods in Portland, Maine, a job I hadn’t been hired to do. It was in October of 2019 that I came aboard as a full-time Bakery Team member (coffee bar, juice bar, bakery proper), the same month I moved to Portland to live independently for the first time in my life. I had graduated in the spring of that year and this was my first full-time job. So I was of a certain temperament.
Prospective Whole Foods employees are encouraged to adopt the frankly dystopian mindset of Customer Obsession, which is just off-putting Customer Service. Part of the praxis of Customer Obsession is a policy that allows customers to sample almost any product in the store. I never saw this happen once, but the point was that it existed at all, and it’s an apt metaphor for Customer Obsession and Whole Foods in general. The ideology spreads from the inside out to build an impression of Whole Foods as altruistic, stressing to their employees that if they were not applying themselves, it may be that they believe in themselves less than Whole Foods does. The Orientation video was thirty minutes and very inspirational except for the segment advertising their weird neocolonialist projects, boasting that it was what they liked to call “New Capitalism.” I remember this vividly.
I was trained to be able to work at any of the three spots that the Bakery administers, but after about a month I had settled into a routine of evenly split hours b/t juice and coffee. The two stations were positioned right across from each other and right near the entrance. The coffee bar was the more desirable shift. No one thought the juice bar should exist at all. I got along pretty well because of my proclivity to do the job as it was explained to me. Everyone was cool and my age and I was being paid $15/hr with an in-store discount–it was honestly a tight situation for a while. I like teams and I like having enemies to band against, and that’s exactly what customers are. I worked to get customers away from me and my co-workers as quickly as possible. This was my own righteous and furious creed, my own Customer Obsession. Coming in to work on the Eve of Thanksgiving or Christmas was like making an entrance to the Colosseum, proud to sacrifice my body in an opportunity to prove my worth. I made friends I like a lot and the managers were on the level. My co-workers were all skilled and friendly people who worked with the dream of doing something else one day.
But it was a job. Quickly I started to indiscriminately hate customers. I hated customers so much that I was embarrassed to be one there or elsewhere. The average Whole Foods shopper are often wealthy, white, middle-aged, healthy professionals whose brand of politeness comes from never having a doubt about getting what they want. These people could be brutally condescending whether they meant to be or not.
For example: Early on in my tour of duty, I was working the odd shift at the bakery. I sliced bread, packaged pastries, tried to be useful and stay out of the way. The bread slicer was right next to the customer-service counter, so many people asked me a question about the Bakery’s vast and intricate stock that I could not answer. When this happened I would scurry to the back to find someone who did. One day an older gentleman with a cleanly bald head and a face lined like a well-loved baseball mitt approached the counter while I was trying to slice bread and asked me if we still had the chocolate cake with “all the nuts on it.” I had no idea. I looked in the cake case and saw that we had a chocolate cake with macadamia nuts, so I asked if that was it.
“No,” he replied slowly with a sad smile on his face as he recognized me as a prisoner of my own ignorance. “It was a cake,” the man elaborated, gesturing with his hands to give me a sense of what a cake is,”that was chocolate and–no,” he interrupted himself when he saw my eyes dart back to the macadamia cake,”It wasn’t that one. It had,” now with reverence,”All kinds of nuts on it. Peanuts. Almonds. Macadamias. Pecans. Walnuts. Pistachios. Hazelnuts. All kinds of nuts.”
“And,” he added as he saw me opening my stupid mouth,”It has always been here. It’s a bit of a tradition for me and my wife, see.”
He smiled to threaten me with plasticky chompers.
“Right…” I hesitated, wracking my brain to see if I could possibly help him without making it someone else’s problem. But I couldn’t, so I asked him to hold on and fled to my manager. “There’s this guy and,” I sighed,”he says that he wants this cake with quote unquote ‘all kinds of nuts’ on it and it’s not the chocolate macadamia one we have.”
She nodded and I followed her back to the front.
“Hello, sir, is there something I can help you find?”
And so again with the labored description of this fucking cake with all kinds of nuts. Still smiling and shaking his head, he suffered the indignity of doubt as my manager rattled off all the different cakes we had available. None were it. I was not needed anymore but I stayed to bear witness and provide muscle. Many customers liked to be dismissive of my manager because she was a small woman. When it was clear that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted, the man provided one last description of the cake, this time as a eulogy, a death knell.
“You’ve always had it. A chocolate cake just covered in all kinds of nuts.”
My manager shook her head one last time and apologized. Clearly the guy thought we were lying to cover up a mistake on our end. He waved us off and tottered away.
She sighed.
“We’ve never had that cake.”
Customers like the Nut Cake Man think they know exactly what they want and can notice the difference between what they want and a slightly different option. But they don’t. Customers don’t know shit. I would provide people with incorrect orders at the coffee bar in moments where I had to fudge it a bit just to keep the ball rolling, and they wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care. The flubs would be imperceptible, the difference between a light and a dark roast, sweetened or unsweetened almond milk, four scoops of mocha instead of five, amount of sugar/milk/cream, etc.
This was part of a larger epiphany for me, that a lot of stuff I thought was standardized in the manufacturing and selling of a product is just randos assembling the product via a series of arbitrary decisions. Having not figured it out myself up to that point, I assumed most other people hadn’t made the connection either and I decided to exploit that by sneaking shortcuts through the margins of error, making note of what I could get away with, how far I could bend to make life easier for everyone involved. I figured out what they didn’t care about before they did, and took care to make my flubs hidden, for the customer’s wrath could be great. Desires unsated were unfathomable, and I think Customer Obsession begot this behavior, not the other way around. I honed in on my own version of Customer Obsession where efficiency was motivated by fear and rage. It made me really good at my job but my mental was suffering. Even the most patient and hospitable folks were pathetic to me. Their kindness was but a trick they used to feel exceptional. The only good interactions were those that were so bland I couldn’t map a motivation to them. I had set my emotional auto-pilot to simmering angst. What was the impetus for me to waste energy adjusting how I felt about any one customer over the course of a forty hour week?
How It Started Going
My whimsically bleak attitude towards customers and the ensuing stratagems employed with my co-workers kept me distracted and entertained. It was winter now and I was still struggling with transition blues, but at least I could count on my job to put my mind elsewhere for a bit. But in January 2020 I checked my schedule and saw that I was to be trained for the store’s newest and dumbest job: Prime Shopping. I knew what Prime Shopping was by that point. Like being able to pay with a watch, this was another sci-fi thing Whole Foods introduced me to. Prime Shopping is a service whereby members of Amazon Prime can shop at their nearby Whole Foods without ever leaving the safety of their home. Around November 2019, two co-workers from Bakery had started getting scheduled for Prime Shifts. At this time, Prime Shopping was staffed entirely by existing employees and most of their shifts would be the job they had been hired to do, and then occasionally they would Prime Shop.
Prime Shopping opened my eyes to the truth that for every undesirable chore, there is a job for poor people to do it for people who can afford to not. These jobs are grossly underpaid because the work is small and menial, but that’s exactly why the people doing them should be paid way more. They’re doing this thing for someone who should be very embarrassed that they are too lazy to do it. The market lacks a crucial amount of shame necessary for decency. In retrospect, it was incredibly naive to think of this service as niche and frivolous, a side attraction.
Upon seeing the news of my own induction, my heart sank. I thought my performance had been flagging so I asked around, but that wasn’t it. It was just my time. I was trained by the single Prime Shopping Manager at the time, a middle-aged, curt-yet-amiable man who cooly identified certain steps in the Prime Shopping process that could be finessed, as in skipped; the training you usually have to do for yourself. It is difficult to present a standard version of what one “Shop” looks like because so many of the steps and rules were being frequently amended, so I’ll just describe it as it was to me when I was trained.
After clocking in, the journey begins in the back of the store, which was my favorite place because it looked like labor, the naked truth, food’s home until it was undignified by being sold. It wrapped around the perimeter of the store, useful as a sort of secret passage from one end to the other that lets you avoid having to walk the floor. It was a concrete wonderland furnished with the finest freezers, sinks, shelves, and mops, all connected by long narrow hallways that made me feel like Pinochio going through the intestines of the whale. There’s a cardboard compactor and a big ol’ chute to throw garbage in. I liked that you got to go outside to dispose of compost and cardboard in their respective bins.
I would fish an iPhone from the locker that doubled as a charging station and log on to the Prime Shopping app as myself. Immediately a Shop is assigned and I accept it because if I do not, the phone will receive a call from Portland, Oregon and an automated voice will bother me. The number of items in an order can be as low as two and as high as one-hundred and forty-six, and both suck. Groceries are categorized first by their location in the store, then as “ambient,” “chilled,” or “frozen.”
I nab a shopping cart from wherever I can find one, and then I’m shopping. Groceries are put in dedicated paper bags stamped with barcodes for later identification and I can fit four in my cart, five if I put one in that little space near the handle. My attention being divided by the phone plus the difficulty of maneuvering with a shopping cart made me feel like an in-the-way idiot, so to avoid the hassle I would nestle my cart in some nook where it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way then go to and fro, collecting items from the list.
If a requested item was missing, I was obligated to offer a replacement, a process that is particularly humiliating and an apt measurement of how much Whole Foods panders to persnicketiness. If an item isn’t available or I couldn’t find it and didn’t want to look anymore, I tap an “item not available” button on the app. Immediately a screen comes up asking you to scan a replacement, but if I tap “replacement not available,” a map of the store comes up with one or more spots highlighted and I am asked if I’ve checked these areas for the original item. Then it asks if I sought a manager for help and to scan the barcode on the back of managers’ name tags as proof. I will admit that Whole Foods was merciful and quickly provided Shoppers with their own barcodes so we didn’t have to find a manager every time. This compromise was particularly relieving during the first outbreak of COVID when so many items were going out of stock. After you’ve scanned your barcode, a screen comes up with “suggested replacements,'' along with the option to scan an improvised item and the nuclear option, “continue without replacement.”
The man who trained me said, “Listen. I don’t care what you replace an item with. Ideally it’s close, but the bottom line is you have to give them something. I don’t care if it’s a basketball. But give them something.” It wasn’t a threat, but more a plea for me to just go with it, but I didn’t because I disagreed with the notion that it’s better to get anything rather than not exactly what you wanted. It’s what I would prefer if I were on the other end, and appropriate substitutes were rarely available; often the only similarity between the requested item and the suggested replacement was that they were both things that could be bought.
A significant amount of time can be spent re-arranging items among bags and getting more bags to accommodate overflow that stemmed from either sheer amount, awkwardly shaped groceries, or items like gallon jugs of milk that take up one whole bag. The average size of an order was forty-to-fifty items, and that usually called for five to eight bags. I move on to put the grocery bags on their respective shelves, their location depending on each bag’s temperature needs. I scan a barcode on the shelf that tells a delivery person on another app where it is, scan a barcode on the bag to officiate its presence, and tap “Finish order.” I had this shift like two or three times a week at this point.
Aisles can comfortably contain only so many customers and their carts, and I do not think the architect of the store anticipated them doubling. Shoppers of all species wait for each other to get out of the way, wait for their turn to get to the shelf. They apologize to the person behind them, apologize to the person in front of them, and all will wait, feeling uncomfortable and wanting to die. Many more people are familiar with this situation with the advent of COVID, but Prime Shoppers got a head start on that “Guilty to Exist” feeling. If I made space for someone and gave the nod for them to go ahead, they would invariably duck their head, quicken their pace, and squeak out an, “I’m sorry,” at me.
Everyone is so fucking sorry. Please stop saying “I’m sorry” when you mean “Excuse me.” Say you are sorry when you have done me wrong, not when we make eye contact coming around the corner. I already hated that trend, and hearing it constantly for eight hours a day made my internal reaction to it become instantly and unreasonably furious. I do wish I could have just chilled out, but I am mentally ill.
The delivery people, or “Drivers,” as they were called, were not hired by Whole Foods. I do not know how one gets hired to be a Driver, but I imagine it’s not unlike getting hired to Uber or Lyft. Just like those companies, drivers had to use their own cars, stuffing mounds of groceries into the trunks of Honda Civics and Subaru Foresters. Most of the Drivers were middle-aged, black and brown immigrant men, and most of the people suddenly being hired to be full-time Prime Shoppers were young, white, conventionally attractive women. The white women strolled around the store, a palatable sight for the Whole Foods demographic, while the Drivers were smuggled in through the back.
How It Ended
Then it was March, now known for being Doomed. Those of us working in grocery stores during that first month post-outbreak were probably traumatized. There is a certain amount of panic and worry you can inflict on yourself, and there is a certain amount of panic and worry a straining mass of apocalypse-preppers can inflict on you. In the face of catastrophe, the store’s Customer Obsession messaging took a step back (mine didn’t) just to be replaced by something worse. The “Essential Worker,” or “Hero,” sloganeering, short-lasting and insulting upon arrival, was advertised as a re-acknowledgement of the necessity of our kind, but in reality it created a pressure for us to accept our ongoing dehumanization and unfit compensation. Antagonize us all you want, it said, just as long as you flirt with the notion that if there is no worker, there is no worker to antagonize.
The juice bar was shut down immediately, never to be reopened in a post-COVID world. Employees who worked in similar prepared food roles were funneled into doing the most menial shit, like manning the temperature-taking station installed for workers, supervising customers waiting in line for an open register and sanitizing the handle of all things with handles, never to be trained anew for a job that required any skill. This is the sad story of many employees whose jobs were made null by the virus. Most quit or shifted to part-time. Since I did not quit, remained full-time, and agreed to Prime Shop, I had the most coveted of schedules: Half of my shifts were closing the coffee bar and half were Prime Shopping. Since health precautions dictated that the tiny coffee bar could only safely hold one employee, as opposed to the usual three or four, the number of available shifts per day went down drastically to just two, opening and closing. Recognizing my good fortune as extremely volatile, I erased all prospects of taking time off.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Prime Shopping was exploding for the obvious reason and a whole new workforce of white young people were getting hired to do it full-time. Where the number of orders used to ebb and flow, they were now neverending. Customer service would receive call after call asking when an order would be fulfilled and the answer was always, “It usually takes about three days, but no promises.”
The collective trauma created a nice week-before-summer-vacation vibe at the store. Everyone, co-workers and customers even, tried to be slow and nice and were more likely to catch you a break. The number of customers allowed in the store was capped, which helped a lot, but like the hazard perks that were begrudgingly rolled out, it lasted for too short a time to matter, just two months. In this time, hazard pay bumped us up from fifteen to seventeen dollars an hour, free coffee for employees became a thing, though it should have always been, and penalties for calling out were revoked. This last one was my favorite perk because working in Whole Foods felt like Death.
Towards the end of May, a hostile depression motivated me to put in my two weeks but I reneged after one. I had been effectively gaslit by my co-workers into staying, though they had my best interests at heart, I know. It's just that everyone kept asking me what my plan was and when I said I didn’t have one, their bemused/lightly skeptical reaction made my inconsolable loathing for my job feel petulant and naive. The consequence of my infraction was getting switched to Prime Shopping full-time. I was called up to a manager’s office and he explained it to me. By signing this document, I effectively gave up the job I had been hired to do, but I could get it back once there were openings in the schedule again. My lack of seniority had finally gotten the best of me, and I had the sense they had been waiting, though not unkindly, for a reason to do this to me. I asked if I could take the form home to look over because that seemed like the sort of thing I should do. In a tone blunted by hopelessness, he responded straight to his monitor:
“Yeah. You could.”
In early June I signed away my job and received a new name tag with a new name: “SHOPPER.” The poetry is obvious and sad, but I didn’t mind because I didn’t want to be known by anybody anymore.
“Are you Shawn?” I was asked one time by some girl.
“I don’t know,” I blearily responded, red-eyed and out of my mind. After that I started showing up less often, taking full advantage of the hazard perk and money saved. I would normally not be so flaky, but there was nothing at stake in a no-call-no-show for Prime Shopping. I left three or four hours early a handful of times without letting anyone know, even clocking out when I left, but no one ever followed up with me about it because no one was paying attention to me.
One day I showed up to work and was told that, in a week, all hazard perks were going away. I got my Shopping iPhone and logged on to see that there were no shops available. Or rather, there were few enough that there were more Shoppers than shops, and there were no new ones coming in. Having given it some thought, I walked out. It took a week and four missed shifts before I got an email asking why I hadn’t shown up “yesterday.” That was really validating, and I told them I had quit, thank you very much.
Every once in a while I like to check in with my friends who still work there to boast about my radical exit (that made me feel like shit) and to see how the situation inside has progressed. Apparently it still sucks to work at Whole Foods. I’ve always disliked grocery shopping, but now it’s practically triggering. The worst part is checking out and knowing that, no matter how nice I am or how many times I wish them a good day, it is not unlikely that the cashier and bagger are chewing on a quiet but complete hate for me, the shopper. I want to apologize for existing but bite my tongue. It’s the least I can do.
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