What Safeway Is Teaching Me About Work

Daniel Miller, who writes compellingly about shopping and consumption demonstrated how women showed care through couponing, managing household budgets, and the almost universal personal ‘treat’ that family grocery shoppers would include as a part of their process. Spending time weekly in a grocery story is a fascinating cross-section of human life during some of the most common experiences we all share. While some come for cleaning supplies, or in search of rose blossum water; most are there for lunch, or to gather ingredients for future meals.

Like Vegas, once you enter, the lights are always the same and it could be any time of day or night- the store is always just ‘on’. When I was little I loved when I would get access to the back room and see the pallets and prepped displays. My first ‘real’ job (shoutout Durst’s Thiftway) was at the grocery store, and when I got hired at this job my SD shared that she had always been passionate about grocery, and it stuck with me, The work of making sure humans get fed, at scale, is both a modern and wonderous undertaking.

Working at Safeway has also taught me better boundaries about how work should actually function — its limits, its dignity, and its quiet cruelty — than most of the professional conversations I’ve had about productivity, efficiency, or the “future of work.”

One of the most clarifying lessons is also the simplest: you cannot shrink time and space. Transitions take time, and productivity will drop while you institute new norms, process, and expectations, and talking about how workers should be better, in their only tiny break space, while they are taking a short rest from hard physical labor, probably isn’t the management flex you think it is.

A certain number of people can only ever pick a certain number of items. No amount of pressure changes that. Threats don’t increase output. Impossible goals don’t inspire excellence — they teach people to stop trying. When targets are visibly unachievable and there is no incentive to improve the system, effort collapses not because workers don’t care, but because they are rational.

Every so-called operational improvement reinforces this truth. When corporate operations “fix” a system, it almost always creates more delay and confusion at first. New workflows, new tools, new rules — all of it generates friction that has to be absorbed somewhere. That friction is never absorbed by the people designing the system. It’s absorbed by the people doing the work. A huge new space is great, but without a defined work flow it actually becomes more of a liability and no one knows where to stand.

Frontline workers are endlessly asked to pick up the slack created by decisions far outside their control. Managers are held responsible for talent issues involving third-party contractors they can’t hire, train, or discipline. Responsibility is assigned without authority. Accountability is demanded without power. This is not leadership — it’s institutionalized frustration.

One thing I genuinely appreciate about the manual nature of this job is that it has cured me of being “always on.” When my shift ends, my work ends. I am also not expected to perform urgency or take emotional ownership of outcomes I do not control. There is something deeply healthy about that boundary — and something deeply revealing about how rare it has become in professional-class work.

I also genuinely like the customer service part of the job. Helping someone find the right ingredients. Choosing produce carefully for someone using EBT and hoping it nourishes them well. Working in a grocery store makes the moral reality of food security unavoidable. Food is not abstract. It is material. It is emotional. It is tied to dignity, care, and survival.

That has mattered to me as a mother. Food security — against time, money, and exhaustion — has often been a real struggle since my daughters were born. The discounts and benefits that come with this job make it work for us in this season of life in ways that other gig work often doesn’t. And because I’m on SNAP, the company receives additional government benefits for employing me. That’s not shameful. It’s how policy is supposed to work.

At first, I felt shame that this was the job I could get — despite my education, experience, and privilege. It felt like a step way off the professional ladder I was taught mattered. But that shame changed once I saw the work clearly. This is honest labor. And every day, I marvel at the extraordinary achievement that is the American food supply chain: its consistency, safety, variety, and scale.

That achievement, however, is purchased at a cost. Its affordability depends on suppressing the value of the labor that keeps it running. Ninety percent of human existence is still material: living in houses, eating food, clothing bodies, moving through space, caring for physical needs. And yet a vanishingly small number of people extract more and more value from that material labor to fuel portfolios that exist almost entirely in the abstract.

The same logic shows up in bookkeeping, gig work, and countless “necessary but undervalued” jobs. If these roles paid living wages and accommodated caregiving, many people would gladly do them long-term. Instead, workers are told to acquire “skills” at personal expense, as if markets weren’t changing faster than any individual can realistically adapt. Risk is individualized. Reward is concentrated upward.

What Safeway has also taught me is what not to do: not to overfunction, not to overperform, not to take responsibility for systemic failures bigger than me. Each task takes the time it takes. That time cannot be compressed. Calling out for my children, or for myself, is not a moral failure — especially when I am not being paid for the time I’m absent anyway, and the cost of childcare far outstrips my hourly wage.

I’ve thought about this often in contrast to earlier jobs, where leaders measured commitment by how early people arrived and how late they stayed, how ‘on’ we were at all hours of the day. Volume was mistaken for value. Strategy was invisible. The nature of work was misunderstood — and people paid the price.

All of this has reinforced for me why we need a better publicly funded social safety net that accounts for caregiving, health, and recovery without routing everything through employers, PTO banks, or prior wealth. Treating basic human needs as a private negotiation makes work harder, not more productive. It creates instability, not growth.

Work is still material. Bodies still have limits. Time still moves at the same speed for everyone.

Any politics that refuses to start there is not serious about the world we actually live in.