Brendan O’Connell
Long the province of high schoolers and retirees, there may be no less glamorous work than stocking a grocery store. But let us sail through those automatic double doors on a refrigerated tour, the free rein afforded an employee.
We head past the cashiers to the locker room where a shelf of what we call ‘non-perishables’ are on offer. These are the chips, tubes of toothpaste, and sourdough loaves damaged in transit or aged past their ‘sell-by’ dates. Next we grab a box from the loading dock and head to the cooler. ‘Perishables’ are those items that leak, bleed, crack—those that can or did or will perish—bruised tomatoes, expired milks. R. has saved Bulgarian yogurt for me. We cruise on to the cubby housing tools of our trade—gloves, box cutters, sticker guns, packing tape, sharpies, an ungovernable mess—and find dry goods to be scanned out: sesame crackers, a ginger beer missing its label. C. has saved a bag of jackfruit for me. My coworker G. gives me a rose geranium hydrosol sent from the manufacturer and a handful of herbal sleeping pills from her personal stash. Down a hall of backstock I meet R. who hands me a locally farmed tomato, then C. who offers an organic cherry. Jag a right to the edge of the capacious kitchen where saag paneer, tofu scramble, burritos, and chili have been removed from the hot bar; beside them, date cookies, a pile of Swiss cheese, and slices of overripe watermelon. Can watermelon be overripe?
Out on the floor, laden with bounty, I meet M. who gives me a cutting of his snake plant to propagate. C. has found an open package of strawberry macaroons that we share. Up to the employee lounge for a darjeeling tea with oat milk. There are gluten-free cupcakes and a mixing bowl of salad greens for the taking.
We’ve not spent a red cent, people! Nor engaged in criminal or even underhanded activity. Of course, we humble grocery staff are only paid a couple bucks above minimum wage, so we can’t afford market-rate food in today’s economy. Never mind. We have stale focaccia and probiotic coconut yogurt.
I do spend money occasionally, though not on ordinary staples. Duck eggs with huge, golden yolks, New England clam chowder to pair with free oyster crackers, THC beers, fancy epsom salts for my new repetitive stress injuries. Working in retail is dangerous for the easily bored and totally frivolous, accumulating desires as the day wears on. What is tamarind paste? Schisandra berry? Half the proceeds go to the rainforest, after all. Half the proceeds go to addiction recovery services. “Let’s give it all away,” Paul Newman beams from a packet of mint-chocolate cookies, now on sale. Buying is good, buying is ethical. I’m so tired and in so much pain.
During the three weeks I’ve worked at the co-op, the store unionized. I was too new to vote, but, by God, I wore the t-shirt. My boyfriend moved in, his union went on strike, he chose to be a strikebreaker because he prefers working to picketing—resulting in late nights of intense conversation. But we stayed together, the heart preceding ideology. Mere days later the UAW came to an agreement with the university and ratified the new contract. So he cooks for nine hours, picks up a woman with scavenged groceries and a rotten attitude, drives us to our country shack, prepares an astonishing restaurant-quality meal from aforementioned slashed and dented things, sleeps like the dead, wakes at dawn to drive his daughter to school, returns home to make me breakfast. I love his breakfasts so much I request second breakfast. Ever-gracious and ever-cheerful, he obliges.
How does one honor such a person? Are my love languages clean laundry and jokes? True love keeps no accounts, but reciprocity feels better. And so I aim to treat the mundane activity of my job as reverence for generous, delightful co-workers, domestic chores as reverence for my beloved. Nineteen-thousand-step days don’t leave much left of me, and my knees and feet are already on the brink of mutiny. So let’s get back to the drawing board, friends, comrades, patrons. Our dueling concerns of entrepreneurship and anti-capitalist economics will have to join forces: first we’ve got to get out, and then we’ve got to GET OUT.
The manager under my manager—the sub-sub manager, if you will—created a little paradise inside a triangle of wild vegetation between parking lots. I call it ‘The Island.’ He furnished the hidden clearing with lawn chairs, pink parasols, and a milk crate. It’s shady and quiet, a branch of chokeberries within reach.
I spend much of each day looking at the packaging of natural food products, taking special note of tiny illustrated farms. Shrinking myself down by a factor of a hundred, I enter the landscape of tidy crops, red barns, and eternal sunrise. Sometimes there’s a tiny unmanned tractor with tiny exhaust fumes. I hoist myself up and go for a joyride.
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Always the reverence for beauty in the quotidian. I am learning so much from you.