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

By: Larson, Ann

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 brutality and violence as well as solidarity and the promise of change.

Unemployed and looking for work during the pandemic, journalist and activist Ann Larson found a job as a cashier at a supermarket in Utah. Though she had written about low-wage work for years, nothing could have prepared her for what she experienced.

Informed by her time behind the register, Cleanup on Aisle Five is Larson's deep dive into supermarkets and how they operate from the inside out: from the low-wage workers stocking the shelves and the customers coming through at all hours, to the communities these stores serve and the larger capitalist forces and corporate interests at play that control how we shop for food. In the process, she chronicles the evolution of the grocery store, unpacks the political implications of the battles between shoppers and staff, and invites us to imagine grocery stores as places where one can foster community and even equity--if we can separate food distribution from profit motive.

Deeply reported and refreshingly insightful, Larson follows the interactions between the workers, including Stanley who can't afford a sandwich, Nick who doesn't have health insurance, and Scarlet who is all out of patience, and customers, including the old lady who finds comfort in tidying the shelves to the one homeless guy who only comes in to use the facilities. From the unforgettable characters to the common challenges we face when it comes to food, Cleanup in Aisle Five will forever change the way we look at grocery stores.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1668094509
• ISBN13: 9781668094501
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Poorly written and edited

Ann Larson wants to have her cake and get you to buy her next slice too. Holding a Master’s degree she is between jobs and down on her luck during the pandemic. She moves back to her home state and gets hired at a supermarket. In one breath she urges “ her college- educated peers to abandon the idea that our degrees entitle us to lives of dignity denied to others” in the next she says “ As a holder of a graduate degree,I should have been rewarded with a significantly higher wage than colleagues who held the same position. But I was paid at the same rate as others.” She has trouble learning procedural skills like voids and returns but is fast-tracked to supervising. She has contempt for upper management and is performatively rebellious to win favor with baggers and cashiers under her. She hints that she could organize a union but easily moves on from that idea as it starts to look like too much work. She says jobs should be “ securer” and self check-out is “ deskilling “ for cashiers. Publishing house editor in the house? The WORSE part of the book is how she co-opts Dr.Martin Luther King jr. at the very end of a book she has spared less than a paragraph for about black shoppers. A definite hard pass if you can avoid it.