Meet a casualty of our troubled times. I’m standing in front of a stack of avocados at the biggest supermarket in town. A store employee with an communication device in his ear and a small computer-like object in his hand says to himself, “They all say ripe, but they aren’t all ripe.”
This is true. The avocados range from lime green to basic black, but they all sport stickers that say “ripe,” which is presumably supposed to spur customers to purchase the allegedly marked down produce. I ask the young man, whose badge identifies him, we’ll say, as Matt, what he’s doing. He tells me that he’s assembling market baskets for online shoppers who place their orders via the internet, pay the same way, then pick up their bags at a drive-through lane.
I ask him how many such orders they fill and he says about 160 a week, though another store in the chain located near several assisted living and retirement facilities fills many more orders. And the practice is growing. We chat a bit more about how the world is changing and he shares a few details about his life unbidden.
Many years ago, after being in the newspaper racket for only a few months, I made an amazing discovery. If you ask people a few questions about themselves and actually listen to the answers, they will tell you a lot. Almost anything. Matt tells me he received his degree in sociology and anthropology about the time the economy swooned. He’s happy to have work, but it is certainly not what he trained for. He continues to hunt, but like everyone else he’s got to live.
He also says he likes people and providing a service that is of use to them, but his seemingly menial retail work was surprisingly stressful. Many of the people who needed the shopping service the most – obviously the elderly, infirm and ill – were also the most demanding and difficult to deal with. He also implied that the company had treated him alright, but that if he was going to stay he hoped to move up since he was obviously underemployed.
I understood all too well. Matt is just one of the legion of walking wounded from the great recession with expensive degrees, student loans, bigger ambitions and too few jobs to go around. My daughter with a degree in the hospitality business is answering a phone for an airline. Several of her colleagues are similarly over educated for their jobs. They receive lousy pay, work lousy hours, but get pretty good benefits. In this environment, many feel it is too chancey to give up the latter for a shot at the former.
The son of a friend of mine also works at the same grocery chain as Matt. He’s trying to complete a course of study in computer software design while schlepping bags and ringing up kumquats. He’s had some health issues so really needs medical benefits and as many hours as possible. But the company chooses to keep the hours for many low enough to deny them benefits.
Business is a cutthroat business now, being practiced in a cutthroat world. And the pressure is on, simultaneously, to cut taxes and government services that might once have taken up the slack in a prolonged recession or a secular restructuring such as we are now experiencing.
The transitions from feudal to capital, from farm to town to factory, from horse to steam to oil, from lamps to lights, longhand to typewritten, manual labor to knowledge work all took many years. In the long run each may have been for the best, but in the short run several generations each time were caught in the shifting tectonic plates of the economy and battered.
Matt’s generation is living through another of these upheavals and their hopes and prospects are being shredded by fundamental changes from human labor to robotic, from analog to digital thinking, from local to global competition, from middle class prosperity to a nearly medieval class divide between have and have-nots. And it isn’t clear that there’s much individuals can do to alter their situation. They must simply try to weather the storm and look for dry land.
I suggested to Matt that his own situation and that of so many others might offer an anthropologist a nice case study. Well educated but low wage workers with minimal prospects who live under pressure of meeting deadlines, who are expected to hustle but have few prospects of bettering themselves and big risks of losing their place and winding up worse off. They are less like members of our science fiction 21st century than like the below stairs denizens of a 19th century Downton Abbey with scant chance of escape.
But of course Matt has little chance to pause, to think about making anthropological sense of his predicament, to take notes on it, to design a study or engineer an alternative. He and my daughter and lots of others have to answer the phone and book a flight, or throw a computerized order in a bag and wheel it to the curb. Over and over and over.
Their generation is wasting the brains they’ve paid to educate. Matt’s got a personal problem, but Matt multiplied by ten or twenty million is a national problem, maybe even a national tragedy.