A Visit With the Folks Who Pay for Your Bargains : Working: It’s people at the bottom of the labor ladder who fill discount stores with cheap goods they can’t even afford.

They were a misbegotten crew, dumbstruck with bad luck and debts and green in the ways of the middle class, and they were halfway to nothing when they landed these jobs in the warehouse of Pic ‘N’ Save. They were, some of them, the people no one else would hire--hung over or late or slow-moving when they showed at all. But this is Retail, a field not overly concerned with character references.

They work in Housewares, in Gifts, in Soft Goods (these, the tawdry clothes sewn in Third World sweatshops), they work in Foods or in Toys, and a 10-minute break twice a night is not long enough for them to unravel the story of their lives, to testify as to what it was that landed them here to stoop and bend and carry these boxes for the minimum wage. The world surely has done them wrong, they feel, to give them this: this 11-to-7 grind when all the world’s asleep and they’re alone with themselves, stacking and pricing and waiting for the dawn to show through the windows and bring the arrival of the daytime crew.

Goods and more goods, Himalayas of crates to be opened and shelved, and there is more, much more, after this. The landscape is full of the trinkets and gewgaws of the discount/close-out trade, and it is well to remember that these goods did not get here by themselves; somewhere, there is an even bigger warehouse, where other gritty protagonists of Retail stack and carry and load through the night.

From this forest of pallets will come the seasonal gross, the monthly gross, the figures, the tallies of profit and loss; it is this to which Management glues their hard eyes and hearts’ ambition. The numbers are the thing, the end, the prize, the reason these men and women labor around the clock to fill the hours with figurines and dish towels and toys, with gimcracks made of wicker or plastic or cork.

The capitalist’s dream--to have these brimful shelves, this flow of goods to fill every empty space. What matter if they’re irregular or discontinued or last year’s style, what matter if they break between the cash register and the parking lot? The soul of Retail is in the selling, so the shelves are sagging with wares that are meant to catch your eye. “When They’re Gone, They’re Gone!” the signs will say--but don’t believe it for a minute; their like is on its way.

And the workers? What of them--these $4.25-an-hour laborers who filled out applications by the dozens to get hired, only to be gone next month, next week, fired for sleeping, caught with dope or merchandise or a bottle in their pocket, for being too surly or too slow. They come, they’ll go, but others will replace them, these people at the bottom, settling for that four-and-a-quarter to work among goods they can’t afford to buy, and if you find them rude at times--well, who can fathom their despair, who among you could make do on four-twenty-five?

“Now, is this the month I buy shampoo or toilet paper?” one girl asked of the room at large on break.

But even their rueful humor, like everything else, doesn’t stretch very far.

And who is here who doesn’t know that Management might cut to nothing the wages of those already living on nothing at all? They’ll cut the hours by five, by 10; only “layoff” or “on call” could be worse. Could it be it’s run like this by some plan, this withholding from those who make so little? Is this the soul of Retail, to be so small and cheap, so tatty like its goods? Then who could plan a future here, to stay a year or two or 10? It’s not work to build a future on, not work to soothe the soul. But there are those who will try to stick it out, to survive the swamp of salary and the boss’ cutting tongue, to try to figure out on break what fuels her roiling ire, why “cordial” is a skill she hasn’t ever mastered.

Remember this as you shop for bargains: that they were brought to you by those whose labor can’t pay the rent, that your “bargains” come at cost to someone else, and that someone else is these, the stockers and warehouse people whose day begins when yours has ended.

In the flat still center of a week when the food doesn’t stretch, the employers’ creed, “Pay as little as you can,” takes on a different hue. The princes of this business, the corporation guys, have a motto, too, for the minions in their employ: “Load up the stores and have fun!” Fun, of course, is relative on $4.25, even $5, but perhaps it’s all in how you approach life, happiness being all in the head.

They call this “making a living,” but saying doesn’t make it so.