In a big-box retail store in a fading upstate New York town, part-time workers are barely making a living. They clock in at 4 a.m., unload boxes and stock new inventory before the Target-like store, called Town Square, opens at 8 a.m. They never get enough hours to earn benefits. That’s the focus of Help Wanted, a novel inspired by author Adelle Waldman’s experiences working early morning shifts at a retailer. She held the job for six months before the COVID pandemic.
The Town Square employees are proud that they can take the boxes off the truck in 60 minutes. Waldman says in her real-life experience, she felt pressure from corporate to complete the task in that time frame, regardless of the size of the truck. However, the real motivation was self-induced.
“My co-workers and I really cared about making that one-hour deadline, not because there were huge consequences for us from corporate, but because it was a point of pride. There's something fun in the challenge of all working together to do this thing as quickly as possible. … And in a job where you don't have too many concrete material rewards, people are being paid poorly, there are inadequate raises, very few promotions — what people do have is a sense of pride and a desire to make the job meaningful and as fun as possible, for their own sake,” she explains. “The need people had to … show competence and to demonstrate how essential they were to the store, it speaks to something internal and … wonderful that was being taken advantage of by our employer.”
One passage in the book speaks to its title. Waldman writes, “To keep customers from recognizing that the lack of employees on the sales floor was a deliberate choice, corporate constantly posted large banners reading HELP WANTED –– the implication being that any lack of staff on hand was a function of the tight labor market and/or a lazy populace’s unwillingness to work service jobs.”
She tells KCRW that big box stores had to cut labor costs to keep their prices competitive and hold onto market share, but they didn’t want to reveal that publicly.
“They tried to imply … that the reason they're not staffed properly is because it's so difficult to find the staff. But it's really just a cover for a larger change that's happened in our economy. … All these jobs have become part-time jobs that enable the employer to not pay benefits. … They just scheduled the absolute minimum number of workers on the floor for any moment in time, knowing if the store gets suddenly busy, they have a desperate pool of part-time workers that they can call in to come help out.”
One of the characters in the novel is Nicole, a new mom whose food stamps get canceled due to a clerical error. While waiting for the fix, she turns to a church’s food pantry. It all illustrates the precarious and stressful financial situation many people are in.
Waldman says that at her old job, coworkers were perpetually worried about their finances. “I just found that both moving and also infuriating because I don't think their lives need to be this hard. … Most of us don't want to live in a society where a whole class of people live with this anxiety constantly all the time.”
Adelle Waldman’s new novel is called “Help Wanted.” Credit: W.W. Norton.
Another point Waldman highlights in the book is the difficulty of moving up the seniority ladder. One plot revolves around the possibility of promotions following the exit of a big manager, which makes the workers realize the existence of a pecking order.
“One thing I learned when spending time in this world … was that there are so few opportunities to move up. … In an economy where there are so few good jobs … in a town where basically the only employment opportunities for people without college degrees tend to be these chain retailer and food service jobs, there's not that much of a need for employers to work that hard at retaining and attracting employees. In fact, there's just a need for many more grunt workers than managers,” she explains.
However, the book is not all doom and gloom. It packs a lot of humor. Waldman says it was important for her to make it fun.
“When I worked this job, the thing that surprised me was that I liked the job itself. And I liked my coworkers … and we had fun together. And I wanted to reflect some of that. A big-box store in the middle of the night, you picture putting away boxes of all manner, of consumer goods, with a group of people, all different ages, races, ethnicities, genders. It's a great forum for humor. It's full of pathos and comedy. … And in any workplace environment, there's gossip, there's a hierarchy. And I wanted to convey some of that.”
She continues, “The exploitation is there, and I want it there in the book. But I also wanted to do justice to the vibrancy of the people I worked with.”