“I think she was just trying to scare us,” my coworker Ana told me.1 We had completed our new employee orientation at McFashion and were waiting in line to scan our fingerprints, so they’d be on file with the company bioscanner. The last time I remembered someone keeping my fingerprints on file was when I was arrested for public intoxication in college. However, we were assured the bioscanner was both accurate and convenient. No need to worry about what time it was; the bioscanner kept track of that for us. I had told Ana I thought it was strange that we were assured that working at McFashion would be easy and fun, but we were also warned that someone was always watching us even if we didn’t realize it. Ana shrugged. She didn’t seem too concerned, but I couldn’t quite make sense of this combination of playfulness and creepiness.
The orientation had begun two hours earlier when I found myself sitting with forty or so other new hires at the back of the store. I was excited to finally start working after waiting over a month since being hired to get called back, in part because I was feeling strapped for cash. I tried to pay attention to the training manager, Jo, a petite twenty-one-year-old who had been with the company for nine months. I admittedly had a hard time concentrating. The store soundtrack was bumping as usual, and I shivered from the arctic-blast air conditioning. My back ached from the stiff, metal folding chair and reminded me that I was indeed older than most of my new coworkers. “This is literally the most people I’ve ever trained before,” Jo said, “so I’m gonna have to be yelling at you.”
Over the course of our two-hour review of the employee handbook, Jo explained many things, including the elaborate procedure we were to follow when coming and going from the store. Before we clocked in on the first floor, we were to secure our belongings in an employee locker on the third floor. Then we returned to the first floor where the bioscanner was located
at the end of a long line of cash registers. Clocking in even just one minute late was considered tardy, but we also were not allowed to clock in more than five minutes prior to the beginning of our shift. Before we clocked out, we were to have our bags checked by security to make sure we hadn’t stolen any merchandise.
The handbook also stated that anything we posted on social media could potentially be accessed by McFashion. Jo warned us about one employee who was working in the fitting room and had apparently posted a selfie on Instagram with the caption: “Supposed to be working. Haha #timestealing.”
I tried to keep my mouth from hanging open. I was shocked and, to be honest, impressed. Even though the employee quickly realized her error and deleted her post, Jo assured us that a manager who followed this employee online had taken a screenshot of her post and appropriately disciplined her.
On another occasion, an employee said he couldn’t come in because his mother was in the hospital. Later that evening, he posted pictures online
“popping bottles in the club.” The moral of these stories? Employee tracking went well beyond the physical confines of the store. Even in cyberspace, our behavior could be seen and punished.
Despite throwing all these rules at us, Jo regularly peppered the training with jokes and tips about how to evade trouble. We weren’t supposed to stand around chatting with friends who visited the store. Jo suggested, “Just walk and talk. You’ll be less likely to get caught that way.” On the topic of alcohol and drug abuse, she said, “I’m sure you all drink, even if you’re not twenty-one years old yet. And trust me you’ll need a shot after your shift!
Just make sure you do it on your own time.” Perhaps this was all part of the plan, I wrote in my field notes that evening, always blurring the line between boss and friend, work and fun.
My McFashion orientation clued me in to how retailers are concerned with cataloging and thwarting various kinds of “shrink,” or lost revenue.
The most well-known is what retailers call “external theft” by shoppers or organized crime rings. As I was coming to learn, retailers also anticipate
“internal” shrink by employees. Clearly, this was where the employee bag checks came in. Digital tools prevented additional forms of internal shrinkage, such as “time stealing,” when employees are paid for time not worked. It could be as little as a few minutes but supposedly added up to big costs for corporations. That explained why McFashion was such a
stickler about clocking in with the bioscanner and warned us about posting on social media while on the clock. According to a 2020 survey by the National Retail Federation, “dishonest employee” cases—including theft, time stealing, or “sweethearting” (when workers give their friends special discounts)—cost retailers an average of $1,139.32 per case.2
Social theorist Bernard Harcourt helps makes sense of how working at McFashion was framed as fun even while its employees were treated like potential criminals. Harcourt says the mix of desire and discipline is central to life in the digital age. What’s unique to this “expository society,” as he calls it, is that people are disciplined not just with authoritarian, top-down forms of punishment. In addition, people willingly engage in activities—
like social media—that simultaneously entertain and surveil through exposing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors: “so many of us are giving all our most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately—so voluntarily.”3
Consider the employee who posted the #timestealing selfie. That post might have offered temporary reprieve from a boring shift, luring her in with the potential dopamine hit of racking up likes and comments. But the post also told her manager exactly what she was doing—not working when she should be—and led to her punishment and perhaps even termination.
Managers like Jo sure seemed friendly; why wouldn’t we want them to follow us online? That blurring of connection and coercion makes the potential boundaries of surveillance almost limitless.
In the last chapter, we saw how the automated heart impacted the labor process, speeding up work, removing customer service, and causing employees stress and anxiety. Here, I began to see how digitization impacted another piece of the puzzle: widespread surveillance, made possible by an array of digital tools, masqueraded as convenience and entertainment, allowing retailers to build trust with workers while tracking them in new ways. In the early twentieth century, employers hired spies from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to monitor worker behavior and prevent labor organizing. As Harcourt says, and as my new employee orientation began to reveal, today there’s little need for such dramatic human intervention. In the twenty-first century, employers leverage the help of digital pinkertons to keep workers in line.