Supermarket Women Cashiers Closing Social Distancing Gaps: The Artificial World of Affective Labour?

This chapter focuses on the interactions between supermarket cashiers and customers in a coastal town of South Africa in 2020. At this time, Covid-19 restrictions were in place which required ‘socially distant’ interactions. Using qualitative in-depth telephone interviews, the research explored the experiences and perspectives of women cashiers working during the coronavirus lockdown. To unpack the often-contradictory aspects of workplace experiences, the theoretical insights of Simmel and Hughes (1949)are brought into conversation with contemporary authors towards a multi-faceted understanding of frontline service work during Covid-19. We argued that sociability – even though marked by race, age, and gender – was sought by retail customers and provided by women cashiers. Cashiers worked in near proximity to countless people – throughout the nationwide Stage 5 lockdown – as an unavoidable component of their work, while physical distance between persons was needed to mitigate Covid-19 cross-infection. Cashiers were not only vulnerable to the contagion but were recipients of the varying ways in which customers chose to engage with them at their checkout stations. The findings suggest that women cashiers engaged in emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) and affective labour (Hardt & Negri 2001) to mediate their interactions with customers. Furthermore, interactions between cashiers and certain customers took on the quality of ‘sociability’ (Simmel & Hughes 1949), as cashiers and customers shared in playful, but intense, interactions with one another, despite the social distancing associated with Covid-19.