Link: “Pandemic Shoppers Are a Nightmare to Service Workers” 05.08.2021

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure. If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades. At some point, one of those transactions will be acutely unsatisfying. Those instances, instead of being minor and routine inconveniences, destabilize something inside people, Strasser told me. Although Americans at pretty much every income level have now been socialized into this behavior by the pervasiveness of consumer life, its breakdown can be a reminder of the psychological trap of middle-classness, the one that service-worker deference to consumers allows people to forget temporarily: You know, deep down, that you’re not as rich or as powerful as you’ve been made to feel by the people who want something from you. Your station in life is much more similar to that of the cashier or the receptionist than to the person who signs their paychecks.

Interesting piece, and also includes a section on the historical origins of the “service worker” (as in, when department stores came about). I would argue, of course, that this “middle-class class consciousness” is illusory, as most of these office workers are as dependent on selling their labour to fund their existence as anyone else. The differences in consciousness can be real, though.