Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

Advisor(s)

Gretchen Purser

Keywords

Connective labor;Customer service;Ethnography;Retail work;Technology

Subject Categories

Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

Abstract

This study attends to the lived experiences of retail grocery customer service workers to examine how economic forces, namely the growth of online retail and technological advancements in information systems and data collection, are reshaping retail work. It draws upon in-depth interviews, content analysis, and eight months of participant observation working alongside predominantly college-educated customer service workers at Whole Foods Market, an upscale retail grocery chain with hundreds of locations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Prior to the 2010s, Whole Foods Market’s decentralized management structure successfully deployed a hegemonic “post-industrial work ethic” rooted in environmentalism, organic foods, and community while paying subpar wages. Amid market pressures to centralize and standardize operations in the 2010s, Whole Foods Market’s hegemonic managerial logics began to crumble. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market. This study elucidates how Amazon’s market control is felt far beyond the warehouse, influencing, reshaping, and controlling the future of brick-and-mortar retail work. The addition of Amazon customer-centric technologies and disinvestment in Whole Foods Market technologies leave workers with jobs that feel spoiled – containing work that is past its shelf life, its meaning expired. Amid a backdrop of understaffing, deskilling, surveillance, and intensification, customer service workers’ responsibilities are expanding to include routinized tech support and package handling through reverse logistics labor. The transformation of Whole Foods Market customer service workers into sales representatives and warehouse workers for Amazon gives rise to disfigured labor – a set of unrecognizable tasks that workers had no intention of doing when they signed up for the job. The managerial tactics deployed by the Amazon regime are exacerbating understaffing and deteriorating the shred of dignity left in Whole Foods Market customer service workers’ jobs. This study illuminates the innerworkings of these processes, showing how spoiling, coupled with new, disfigured labor, produces a heightened sense of disillusionment and despair among retail customer service workers.

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Open Access

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