Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register

In the tradition of bestselling classics such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries comes a character-driven exploration of the modern supermarket, unpacking what works and what doesn’t, and delivering a blueprint for a better way to shop.

Grocery stores may all seem the same. But the supermarket as an institution is anything but ordinary or one-dimensional. At the supermarket where I worked, I found a microcosm of society: a place of bruta...