Inside the Box

Statistics Canada reports that “retail trade” ranks first among all employment ­sectors in this country, accounting for 11.5 percent of the labour force. That’s 1,907,980 workers, and for seven years, I was one of them. I did the retail thing throughout my time at McMaster, continued a while afterwards, and then caught a lucky break. It couldn’t have come sooner.

Increasingly alienated those last few months, I experienced what Karl Marx called Entfremdung. It’s a common, some might say universal, disillusionment among retail workers: the higher‑ups direct the slightly less higher‑ups, who direct the next level down, and so on and so on, until eventually the orders reach the bottom — you — and any sense of ownership or agency has evaporated.