The sad part was, for some of us, that act alone was a small thing that made the job meaningful — it was the one thing we could control. The other was helping customers, which wasn’t all that often because we weren’t given maps/directories of product/shelf location and the most frequently asked questions we got were typically around product placement. [All part of the data gathering I was doing about the grocery experience.]

I learned a ‘lot’ and the darned job cost me a lot too. Paid $6/hr. because of the ergonomics of the counters and my height (avg female 5′4″) I messed up my shoulder/elbow dragging cases of beer over the scanner. Because I didn’t make the connection of the injury to the job until after I’d quit, it wasn’t covered (wouldn’t have been once I quit anyway — they were self-insured, and that was the terms of their agreement). Women with 20 years at the company were kept under 40 hours so that they were never given benefits. But they could have chosen to leave and didn’t.