Everyday Low Wages

Lessons from 4 A.M. Shifts in Walmart’s Produce Aisle

When I turned sixteen, I couldn’t wait to get a job at Walmart. That blue vest dream was it for a small-town kid growing up twenty minutes from the nearest anything. There weren’t many ways to earn money outside of the gas station or a paper route. So the minute I was old enough, I applied and got hired. For a few months I borrowed my mom’s minivan to get there, long enough to save enough money to take out a loan on a ratty old Saturn. Pure teenage freedom. I felt like I’d made it.

They put me in the shoe department first. I helped people try on shoes (do they still do that?), restocked shelves, learned the intercom codes, and helped in the neighboring fabric department cutting bolts of fabric to order. It wasn’t glamorous, but it wasn’t terrible either. Sometimes the job was almost fun, like climbing those tall ladders to the top shelves to grab size-12 work boots felt like a small adventure.

I worked hard. Too hard, probably. I maxed out the top of the pay scale early, which was around a whopping nine dollars an hour. This was the most any sales associate could make whether you were sixteen or sixty.

One afternoon I was in the back room, breaking down cardboard boxes with a ballpoint pen (because I wasn’t quite old enough to use a box cutter) when the grocery department manager walked by. He literally stopped mid-stride, backed up, and watched me for a second.

Then he said, “You know what? You should be in Grocery.”

Work ethic, I guess. Or maybe just the sheer determination required to stab packing tape with a Bic?

The transfer to Grocery came with a pay bump. If I recall, the pay increase was about forty cents per hour more and as I was getting ready to head to college, it felt significant. So I did it. And that’s how I ended up in the produce department.

Shifts on the produce side started at 4 a.m. And let me tell you: walking into a Walmart at 4 a.m. is its own experience. The store feels too bright and too empty, humming quietly like it isn’t fully awake yet. The overnight crew? Unfriendly. The whole vibe of the place is more graveyard than “happy smile in every aisle.” Just plain scary, honestly.

The first task every morning was culling. Before you stock anything, before you face a single shelf, you walk the department and pull anything bruised, molding, or past its expiration date. That’s how the bad stuff disappears before customers ever see it.

Most of the produce sits right out on the floor: bins of onions and garlic, stacks of apples, piles of potatoes. At 4 a.m., before the air moves and the doors open, everything smells stronger. Nearly-too-far-gone fruit. Extra garlicky garlic. Something in the back of the display that’s just starting to sour. You learn fast that your nose is the best tool in the department.

I can still smell it…this nearly indescribable mix of fresh and spoiled layered on top of each other. It’s probably the most honest introduction to our food system I could’ve gotten.

One morning, on my way to toss a cart of culled produce into the back (yes, all that spoiled or expired food goes straight to the trash. Not to feed livestock, not to compost, not to a community fridge: trash), I cut through the Bakery. The ovens hadn’t been turned on yet; everything was still quiet. The store manager and a department manager were talking low, but not low enough.

There had been an argument between two workers. The store manager (the Dr. Phil looking creep who rarely looked any of us in the eye) told the department manager to fire them both. No explanation beyond:

“They’re a dime a dozen.”

Not he. Not she. Not even a name. Just “they.” Like we were interchangeable parts, not people waking up at 3:15 a.m. to make eight or nine dollar wages stretch far beyond what they were ever meant to cover.

I remember standing there frozen for a moment, realizing that this place I was giving all my early mornings to saw me exactly the same way: a dime a dozen. Replaceable. Expendable. Cheaper than the produce I was tossing out.

At the time, I didn’t have the words for it. But now I do.

It’s the same logic that keeps wages low and keeps workers struggling. Walmart has built an entire business model on Everyday Low Wages.

Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash

Walmart brings in $30–35 billion a year from SNAP purchases alone. And a painful number of those SNAP dollars come from Walmart’s own employees—people paid so little they have to use a government food assistance card in the same store where they earn their paycheck. Thousands upon thousands of SNAP users are Walmart employees. Thousands.

Think about that. Walmart underpays its workers so severely that tax-funded food assistance isn’t a safety net, it’s part of their business model.

And here’s a sick twist: Walmart gives employees a 10% discount on most goods, but not on food. I could get a deal on a flatscreen TV, but not on the calories I needed to make it through a shift. Yes, food margins are thin. I get it. But before anyone rushes to defend that choice… do I need to remind you how much Walmart makes in a year? Hundreds of billions. Enough to bend an entire economy around itself. Enough to offer workers a discount on a bag of apples without breaking the business model.

And this time of year, it is especially stark.

Every Thanksgiving, Americans flood Walmart for the cheap deals: turkeys stacked in freezer bumpers, pumpkin pies priced at a loss, discounted plastic bags of stuffing mix. But behind all that abundance are workers making somewhere around minimum wage, quietly culling spoiled produce at dawn, hoping their paycheck stretches far enough to put their own meal on the table.

And this year, when Donald Trump proudly claimed Walmart’s “Thanksgiving meal package” was cheaper (never mind that it wasn’t actually cheaper, just smaller), I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Cheaper for whom? Certainly not for the thousands of workers who can’t afford a full cart of groceries without SNAP benefits—the very benefits the administration is stabbing with a Bic at every turn. Certainly not for the taxpaying public subsidizing Walmart’s poverty wages.

It’s easy to brag about bargain turkeys and budget meal kits when you don’t have to think about who made those prices possible or what it costs them to keep those shelves full. That cheap food sure is expensive.

Walmart loves to say it’s helping American families save money. But the truth is uglier than any 4 a.m. produce bin: Walmart doesn’t make Thanksgiving affordable. It makes us all poorer.

So this year, as you sit down to your meal, I hope the food on your table did more than fill a cart. I hope it strengthened a farmer, a worker, a community. And if you’re struggling with food security, I hope you remember this: you’re not failing. The system is. No one should have to fight this hard to eat in the land of plenty.

Happy Thanksgiving.