Police pushed the remaining crowd across Lake Street to the Target parking lot where the protesters eventually barricaded themselves with stacks of red shopping carts. Once again, a mega just-in-time retailer became a site of righteous outrage against a brutal murder at the hands of police. S.O.S. indeed. I listened to the sounds of heavy rain and rounds of
“less lethal” weapons popping well into the night.
The next afternoon, I woke from a nap to the sounds of helicopters buzzing overhead. My partner was gone. “Where r u?” I texted him. “At the police station,” he replied. We lived just a few blocks away. “Is something going down?” He responded with a photo of a crowd facing the precinct with their hands in the air. Three officers stood on the roof. One had his weapon aimed at the crowd below.
A friend and I headed back to the scene that evening before sunset. Even more officers flanked the roof and the precinct perimeter, sporadically firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the streets. Roaming the blocks surrounding the intersection, we witnessed the liquor store being looted and graffitied, people smashing the windows to a check-cashing place amid cheers, others seeking protection behind a barricade of Target shopping carts, and young people hanging out the windows of graffiti-covered cars. The mood felt as varied as the people in the streets. There was rage, mourning, celebration, fear, and cooperation, all at once.
We headed to the bustling Target parking lot, which was seemingly devoid of law enforcement. Vehicles joyfully rolled through. Throngs of people entered the store’s back door while even more came out the front with their arms full. I looked around to take it all in; I noticed two rainbows hugging the sky. Someone had spray painted near the store entrance:
“everything for everybody.”
Target, Lake St. Source: CC/Flickr/Lori Schaull.
If my ethnographic research taught me that many contemporary retailers rely on technologies originally crafted for law enforcement, Target flipped that script by developing technologies later utilized by police. Following the abovementioned Minneapolis Uprising, Target Workers Unite—an independent initiative run by rank-and-file workers—tweeted a series of news stories about Target’s role in high-tech surveillance and policing. In 2011, Target had told Minnesota Public Radio News that it allowed Minneapolis police to access its “forensics crime lab” free of charge.1 On top of that, Target Corporation worked with the Minneapolis Police Department and donated $300,000 to develop the SafeZone Collaborative, which created an extensive network of video camera surveillance across downtown Minneapolis.2 The company rolled out similar initiatives in cities across the country.
In the months that followed the uprising, Minneapolis, as well as communities around the United States, took the prospect of defunding and abolishing police more seriously than ever in recent history. Target’s role as an innovator in surveillance tools should encourage us to consider retail corporations as a potential site of struggle beyond the abolitionist horizon.
Without police, will Target, Amazon, Walmart, Zara, H&M, and other major retailers step in as cities’ new security?
The Minneapolis Uprising—known also as the George Floyd Rebellion
—brewed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created another opportunity for corporations to build their worker-monitoring
muscles. A few days after the infamous burning of the Minneapolis police’s 3rd Precinct, along with widespread fires and looting across the city, I checked in via email with some of my community college students who worked at nearby Target locations. In earlier conversations, they told me about the lack of personal protective equipment as COVID-19 hit and the difficulties of maintaining social distance in cramped shopping aisles. One student emailed me back: “Thanks for checking in. I’m doing well. Very mentally burned out though, having worked through COVID and now looting threats.” This students’ comments reminded me of my student in New York City, described at the beginning of this book, who expressed similar sentiments (minus COVID) several years prior. In this case, Target was directly involved in the exploitation and slow death of its workers amid the pandemic, and potentially implicated in extrajudicial killings of surrounding community members by developing technology used by law enforcement.
As I write this afterword, the United States has been suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic for two years. While many white-collar workers labor from home, retail workers who are still employed have not had that luxury.3
Earlier in the pandemic, sometime during the summer of 2020, I went to the Mall of America, mostly out of curiosity. It did not feel much less crowded than usual. I felt frustration and anger simmer at the roughly one out of ten people not wearing face masks. Evidence of the disproportionate impact of COVID on poor communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color abounds.
Meanwhile, the world of online shopping has exploded, and so too have accounts of worker exploitation. With far fewer brick-and-mortar stores, we see retail workers’ struggles ongoing at the point of production, including among garment workers in Myanmar, who have been leading militant strikes and pro-democracy protests.4 In March 2021, H&M paused placing orders with its forty-five Myanmar-based suppliers.5 Workers’ struggles aren’t limited to the garment workers, either. We also see them behind the curtain of the white-collar retail tech companies, where multiple employees have committed suicide in the face of intense pressure.6 And in between the factory floors and corporate offices are the same kinds of workers I describe throughout this book who continue to sell in person.
Across Amazon distribution centers and among the few remaining brick- and-mortar stores, new technologies have emerged to track the spread of the coronavirus among “essential” workers. Although these tools aim to protect the people who must be out in public to receive their paychecks, critics say these technologies can potentially violate workers’ privacy.7 Because there are so few laws about worker surveillance, and because these tools purport to do good, there is even less oversight than usual. When and if this pandemic ends, we may very well see a new precedent of ever-more- limitless worker monitoring.
The good news is that we are living through a high moment of struggle, meaning workers, activists, and everyday people are regularly coming together to create change. Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, attempted to unionize through the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union,8 the same union that the Retail Action Project was created out of (chapter 4). Recognizing the difficulty of formal unionization in this historical moment, the Teamsters are organizing Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers in Iowa to push for higher wages and less stringent productivity requirements.9 Across the board, retails’ app- mediated workers—including those who deliver goods through Target’s app, Shipt10—are organizing to improve their work conditions.
I hope that this book inspires more agitation, movement, and organizing across the global supply chain.11