Digital Transformation of Retail Work: The Rise of Chaotic Rationalization

In this paper, we will contribute to debates about the impact of new digital technologies are reshaping work by examining how such technologies are transforming labor processes in frontline jobs (cashier, stocker, salesperson) in US store-based retail. Retail is a large employment sector across middle- and high-income economies. Though retail labor is often viewed as “unskilled”, it incorporates a significant share of non-routine tasks. Moreover, globally and in the US in particular the retail sector, long a technological laggard except in the field of logistics, has recently made large investments in new digital technologies, including AI. We note that the USA marks something of a polar case among wealthy countries, given extremely low retail union density, relatively weak and decentralized collective bargaining and a generally liberal and decentralized regulatory environment. We focus on large national chains of food and general merchandise retailers.

There is minimal evidence of technology-enhanced job enrichment. The diffusion of self-checkout has led to significant job loss among cashiers, but other technological shifts have led to growth in other jobs, notably order-picker jobs. Retailers have used digital technologies to heighten Taylorization, speedup, and surveillance in some frontline jobs. However, interviews point to multiple sources of chaos in the frontline jobs, including unpredictable customer behavior, a combination of lean staffing and high turnover that makes it hard for retail workers to be able to count on coworkers for help, and digital technologies that are themselves flawed. Thus we summarize the current impact of digital technology adoption on US store-based retail work as “chaotic rationalization”—retail employers try to use technology to rationalize work, but the result diverges from Taylorism because of the chaotic elements in the store and industry context.