The People around Us

I was looking for an item in the grocery store the other day and I asked an employee if he could help me find it.  I usually try to be cognizant of the fact that just because someone is stocking shelves, it does not mean that they are an employee of the store.  Often they work for the bread or pop company, for instance.

On this particular day, the employee had a vest on that indicated he was an employee, so I asked him if he could help me; he responded by indicating that he was a “virtual shopper” and went on his way.

At first I didn’t realize what he said, and then I looked at the bins he was placing items in and realized he was shopping for people who had ordered online.  This was the first time that I had come across someone doing this.

I thought it was interesting that he didn’t help me, since he clearly would have known the placement of a ton of items in the store, since it was his job to shop!

Anyway, a few days later I read with interest the article What We Lose by Hiring Someone to Pick UpOur Avocados for Us (Ginia Bellafante) after my recent shopping experience.

While working toward her point, I appreciate the author did acknowledge that this sort of service can be helpful to the “housebound, to single parents, to others paralyzingly constrained by time.” 

But as I experienced personally, she concludes with the concern that “The act of turning grocery shopping into an occupation threatens something larger — we are losing a way to bridge differences in a world already collapsing from its stratification.”

Surprisingly, she centers her point on “Instacart” workers themselves (*the guy filling the bins for people) because they “barely have the luxury of looking up because the orders they are fulfilling are all on their phones and the faster they complete them, the more orders they can fulfill . . .”

It was clear to me that the guy I encountered couldn’t make time for the customer in front of him because he had to be laser-focused on filling his bin.

In her article, Bellafante quotes a couple of sociologists who add the exclamation point to all of this:

“Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, in his book, “The Great Good Place,” have [sic] analyzed the importance of the “third place’’ in the urban world. Home is the first place, and work is the second place. But it is this additional realm, he argues, of informal sociality, that is so crucial to the maintenance of civic engagement and just civility.”

“Eric Klinenberg, has written about their position in the social infrastructure of cities, the “set of physical places and organizations that shape our interactions,” and that when neglected or lost, can foster a dangerous strain of isolation.”

Isolationism is a real concern today.  It is not healthy, but it is, I believe, a growing phenomena.  To work against it, each one of us can make an effort to really see the person in front of us and allow the light of Christ within us to highlight the beauty in them.

To ignore those around us works against the mission of the Church in which Christ calls each of us to participate.

Janet Cassidy
janetcassidy.blubrry.com
janetcassidy.blubrry.net (podcasts)

*   My local grocery worker was probably not an actual Instacart worker. According to Bellafante, “Founded eight years ago by an Amazon alumnus, Instacart is an app-based grocery service that will deliver within two hours and sometimes as quickly as an hour.”