The punctuation of mundane jobs with extreme work: Christmas at the supermarket deli counter

Abstract

This article argues that the characterization of ‘extreme jobs’ as being defined by the constancy of ‘extreme work’ obscures the significance of temporary episodes of ‘extreme work’ for a wider range of jobs and notes that even ‘mundane jobs’ are punctuated by extreme work in a variety of cases. Drawing on a study at a supermarket deli counter during the Christmas trading season, it is proposed that work in this context becomes extreme, in relative terms, in three ways. First, the expansion of the scope of work entails an increase in working hours, an increase in demands for multi-tasking and product knowledge, and an expansion of discretion. Second, an increased mobilization of soft skills is necessitated by intensified work both front stage and backstage. Finally, the Christmas period also entails an extension of ‘inclusive’ management practices over a group of workers who are not typically the focus of such efforts. Four key insights are offered in conclusion: First, ‘extreme jobs’ and ‘extreme work’ are conceptually distinct, and the latter is a relative and relational term that varies with the normalized nature of different jobs; second, the temporality of ‘extreme work’ is variable, as it occurs in different rhythms on different jobs; third, the subjective experience of punctuations of mundane jobs with extreme work can be highly positive; and finally, Christmas deserves further attention in discussions of recurrent and temporary intensification of work, particularly in understanding retail employment.

In their term-defining article, Hewlett and Luce (2006) captured the nature of ‘extreme jobs’ through the vivid examples they offered of ‘high-earning professionals whose work has become all consuming’, and who ‘labor longer, take on more responsibility, and earn more extravagantly than ever before’ (p. 50). Accordingly, ‘the outrageous hours’ these high-flying corporate professionals put into their careers were ‘matched only by the over-the-top rewards they receive’ (Hewlett and Luce, 2006: 50). More categorically, in their empirical studies, the authors delineated the elements of extremity that define extreme jobs as working 60 hours or more per week, being high earners, and holding positions with at least five of the following characteristics: unpredictable flow of work, fast-paced work under tight deadlines, inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job, work-related events outside regular work hours, availability to clients 24/7, responsibility for profit and loss, responsibility for mentoring and recruiting, large amount of travel, large number of direct reports, and physical presence in the workplace at least 10 hours a day (Hewlett and Luce, 2006: 51). ‘Extreme jobs’ are thereby defined by the constancy of extreme working, with work spilling over a range of temporal, spatial and social boundaries, refusing containment, as evidenced in the growth of corporate overwork cultures (e.g. Ehrenreich, 2006; Hochschild, 1997). Various configurations of the different dimensions of extremity are ‘normalized’ on jobs held by a small and ‘elite’ group of workers. Their ‘incumbents feel exalted more than exploited’ (Feldman, 2002; Golden, 2009: 221) while the distinction between their passion for versus addiction to work get blurred (Burke and Fiksenbaum, 2009). The managers and professionals in these ‘extreme jobs’ report ‘high levels of satisfaction, excitement and commitment’ (Burke, 2009: 169).

Simultaneously, a far greater number of jobs have become ‘extreme’ in quite the opposite sense, far removed from the high effort/high stakes/high rewards end of the labour market spectrum. The key imperative of flexibility that underlies advanced capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2006; Harvey, 1989; Kalleberg, 2001; Sennett, 2000) is implicated in extreme outcomes, including the progressive polarization in the world of paid employment (Goos and Manning, 2007; Oesch and Menes, 2011). ‘New’ forms of employment have for some decades been based on a ‘combined and uneven flexibility’ and entailed the growth of opportunities ‘differentially distributed’ across different groups of workers (Smith, 1997). The proliferation in particular of non-standard employment arrangements (Kalleberg, 2000) such as part-time, contract, and temporary employment is intertwined with a polarization in types of work and the experiences of workers. Arguably, the very same processes that provide the momentum of growth in jobs with intense demands and rewards, on their flip side fuel the increase in the number of jobs that demand little and offer little in return (Kalleberg, 2011). As ‘normal’ work in the middle ground dwindles, much of new job creation involves part-time and other non-standard arrangements with minimal skills requirements at entry and little training or opportunity for career development. Typically requiring the performance of thoroughly Taylorized tasks in tightly controlled workplaces, many new jobs are increasingly precarious (Kalleberg, 2009) and poorly rewarded. A rapidly growing number of jobs are progressively impoverished, both substantively and subjectively, in extreme ways, for example as is recently seen in the very notion and proliferation of zero-hour contracts (CIPD, 2013; GOV.UK, 2014).

While a downwardly expanding range of managerial/professional jobs now entail ‘normalized intensity’ (Hassard et al., 2009; McCann et al., 2008), what are bluntly referred to as ‘bad’ (Acemoğlu, 2001; Keep and James, 2012; McGovern et al., 2004) or even ‘lousy’ jobs (Goos and Manning, 2007) have become irredeemably ‘mundane’. Mundane embodies the meanings of ‘routine’ and ‘everyday’, for example when Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) contrast the purported essence of leadership with the real work of managers, but also connotes the sense of tedium, stasis and even regress of jobs that lack complexity, variety, purpose and meaning.

Extreme jobs as defined by Hewlett and Luce and mundane jobs as proposed here could both entail extreme work. Yet because their normalized conditions are so strikingly different, what constitutes an instance of extreme work for workers on these very different types of jobs remains relative and variable. For example, one reaction by ‘overemployed workers’ is to ‘eventually adapt upward their number of preferred hours’ of work (Golden, 2009: 223). Correspondingly, although overwork is also observed in a range of low-waged forms of employment (Bunting, 2011; Schor, 2008) for part-time, temporary and other non-standard job holders, arrangements similar to a full-time, permanent job offer extreme experiences of work. Indeed, a very wide range of jobs, extreme, normal and mundane, are defined by punctuations of their normalized pace and routine intensity by sudden or predictable periods of extremization, such as the work of teachers and lecturers at examination periods, of accountants and financial administrators at ends of financial years, or of hospitality and transport workers during school holidays, to suggest only a few. Discussions of extreme work would therefore likely benefit from the relative distinction of extreme work from extreme jobs, in that the two raise related but different issues for inquiry.

This article raises two questions about the temporal punctuation of mundane jobs with extreme work: How does stripped down, highly rationalized, tightly controlled work become extreme, and what is the significance of such temporary transformations for the nature of the mundane job? It attempts to address these questions drawing on an empirical study of what would widely be seen as quintessentially mundane jobs, that is, hourly paid, part-time employment in a large corporate supermarket chain. In particular, the study looks at work at a superstore deli counter, during the most reliably recurrent instance of extremization for retail employment in historically Christian advanced capitalist economies, the Christmas trading period. As well as identifying the dimensions of relative extremization, including but not limited to increased working hours, the article proposes that bouts of extreme work are integral to mundane jobs and that such temporary ‘elevation’ of work has meanings beyond mere intensification.

Supermarket jobs and the extreme work of Christmas

Retail and especially supermarket jobs are typically a convenient if abused shorthand for the disadvantaged end of what labour markets have to offer in advanced service economies (Bozkurt and Grugulis, 2011), the paradigmatic mundane jobs in contemporary Britain and the Western capitalist world (Van Klaveren and Voss-Dahm, 2011). With a total of 3 million workers, around 11% of the total workforce, retailing is the largest private sector employer in the United Kingdom (British Retail Consortium, 2013a). As much as 49% of this retail workforce comprises of low-paid workers, 26% of all low-paid employment in the country (Mason and Osborne, 2008). Not infrequently, ‘supermarket staff live in poverty’ (Cassidy, 2012).

As central operations have grown in sophistication and prowess, especially through the use of advanced retailing technologies, retailing has increasingly relied on a ‘bifurcated, polarized workforce’ (Penn, 1995: 240). A growing emphasis on the recruitment of a highly skilled workforce at head offices (Huddleston, 2011: 122) has corresponded to technological advances continuously carving out the skills content of retail jobs in stores, especially in supermarkets (Price, 2011). Supermarkets appear to have matched, if not taken the mantle from, fast-food retailers in workplace rationalization (Leidner, 1993; Ritzer, 1993). While they last, supermarket jobs are famously boring, rendering them interesting is a challenge for HR departments (Esbjerg et al., 2010).

Beyond the adoption of technology, supermarket retailing has long been the vanguard in the flexible use of labour. In the study that informed Atkinson and Meager’s (1986) theory of the flexible firm, retailers were the most advanced in employing labour flexibly. The rise of part-time jobs in the UK economy have in large part resulted from the commonplace use of nearly 80% part-timers in retail stores since as early as the 1980s (Atkinson and Meager, 1986; Curson, 1986; Penn, 1995: 231). Matching staffing levels with fluctuations in customer demand has also been a defining capability of retailing for over 30 years (Deery and Mahony, 1994; Penn and Wirth, 1993; Sparks, 1983). As a result of the intersection of employer and employee flexibility imperatives both, supermarket jobs are temporally fragmented and transitory (Freathy and Sparks, 2000). Of the total retail workforce, 55% are part-timers (British Retail Consortium, 2013a), with the proportion of part-timers employed by large corporate retailers much higher. High labour turnover in the sector is endemic and seemingly unavoidable (Booth and Hamer, 2006).

Although the matching of staffing levels to demand in stores is a fine-grained exercise that relies on past and anticipated demand data on time periods as discrete as specific days of the week and hours of the day, for particular departments or products, the Christmas retailing period surpasses all other timeframes for the volume and extent of increase of labour use. As the ‘festive period’ has expanded and deepened, soliciting consumption and consumerism (Edensor and Millington, 2009; Hancock and Rehn, 2011: 741), the use of additional labour in retail has become more accentuated. Corresponding to the ‘festive labour process’ (Brewis and Warren, 2011: 748) undertaken by consumers, and in particular women (Brewis and Warren, 2011; Fischer and Arnold, 1990; Vachhani and Pullen, 2011; Wright-St Clair et al., 2005), Christmas also demands intensified work by retailers and therefore retail workers. Christmas retailing draws on a wide range of strategic research for sales optimization (e.g. Basker, 2005; Spangenberg et al., 2005; Swilley and Goldsmith, 2012), and as much as 50% of business cycles have been found to be explained by the rise and fall in consumption around this trading period (Wen, 2002). Up to half of the annual turnover of retailers is generated during the ‘holiday season’. Consequently, despite the growth of online retailing, for brick-and-mortar retailers and certainly supermarkets, the Christmas trading period still requires significant labour adjustments in stores. This is an exceptional if not unique time in the retail employment calendar where fully ‘peripheral’ employees (Penn, 1995: 236) in the form of seasonal contract holders are brought into the stores, while an increased number of hours are also covered by the permanent workforce. In 2013, one survey found 72% of UK retailers intending to increase staffing levels in the run-up to Christmas, as well as increase full-time contracts (British Retail Consortium, 2013b).

In other words, during Christmas, there is both an increase in new, temporary supermarket jobs in the form of seasonal contracts and a significant rise in the work covered by the existing, predominantly part-time staff. As will be discussed in the empirical section below, Christmas hours double or triple many supermarket workers’ regular time at work. The business of Christmas is therefore ‘extreme’ for retailers and, in relation to the routine arrangements of employment, the work at Christmas is ‘extreme’ for the vast majority of retail workers. As such, this proves an appropriate context, both theoretically and empirically, for the study of the recurrent punctuation of the mundane by the extreme at work.

Research context and methodology

The empirical material discussed in this article is based on research carried out for a larger study on skills and employment in British supermarkets. The study was conducted in two of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains, which between them ran over 1100 retail outlets in various formats and employed over 300,000 workers. Both firms continue to be among the largest employers in the United Kingdom nationally, in terms of both geographical coverage and numbers of staff. Their superstore format outlets are typically among the largest workplaces locally in many British towns. In addition to an extensive review of public and firm documents, research included in-depth interviews with top functional executives at the two head offices, and at two stores of each chain in different parts of the country, with (general) store managers, the secondary tier of 3–5 senior managers, and the managers of the 12–15 different departments such as produce, customer service or bakery, as well as a number of shop-floor workers. In total, 80 interviews were carried out with organizational insiders.

While the broader study provided a rich account of the business models and employment practices dominating contemporary supermarket retailing in the United Kingdom, this article draws on data collected through participant observation at the deli counter in one of the store sites. This ethnographic segment was carried out with a view to gaining a more direct and subtle understanding of the experience of work on the supermarket shop floor. It was preceded by non-participant observation of a range of organizational events at head office, such as the induction of new graduate scheme participants. The participant observation took place at a town-centre superstore in the North of England. The store had around 400 staff members, with around 20 managers at departmental or store-level roles. All the managerial employees were salaried, with no overtime pay for beyond their regularly expected 38 hours a week, while the shop-floor workers were on hourly wages. The author was introduced in full capacity to the store management from head office, as well as to the shop-floor workers by store management as a researcher from the local university. Access was granted to all areas of the store back offices, including office spaces, meeting rooms, the staff canteen, changing rooms and toilets, the warehouse, and the smoking room. Observations in these areas involved both routine, informal activity, such as meal and smoking breaks, and also formal, structured activities such as recruitment interviews and induction sessions.

The author took up a position as an unpaid, temporary staff member on the deli counter, which comprised stations for delicatessen meats and cheeses, rotisserie chicken and meats, in-store pizza preparation, ready-meals, and fish and seafood. The deli department was selected after discussion with the store management as best suited for the observation of skills use and training provision, as it involved the widest range of tasks among the departments along with the in-store bakery, but unlike the latter did not require credentials. It was also seen by management to be where the author would be most ‘helpful’, as the fieldwork was carried out between mid-November and mid-February and coincided with the Christmas trading period. She was introduced to department staff on her first shift as a ‘researcher studying supermarket employment’ and provided this as her reason for being there, but on numerous occasions she was identified as being on ‘work placement’ by some staff members introducing her to others.

She worked shifts for a total of around 60 hours during fieldwork, wore the same uniform as the rest of the department staff and received the regular training for new staff by the department trainer. A disproportionate amount of the observation, aligned with the shift rotas of the staff in general, clustered in the four weeks leading up to Christmas Day. The deli counter was a focal point for the seasonally adjusted supermarket ‘retail theatre’ (Baron et al., 2001). In this sense, it was highly appropriate for gaining an understanding of the transformation of retail jobs during the Christmas trading season, although this was an emergent finding in the field, rather than the predefined purpose of the timing of fieldwork. Relatedly, this micro site was also an exception to the rule of self-service retailing which in the past several decades ‘has reduced the bulk of the tasks within larger stores to shelf-filling or till operation’ (Sparks, 1983: 63). Since the author worked as a regular worker, only brief notes were taken during shifts, but recollections were recorded in as much detail as possible immediately after each shift. The data and excerpts presented in this article are all from the research diary kept by the researcher. The notes in the diary were read through twice, before the beginning of an iterative coding process during which Christmas first emerged as a salient theme. After the recognition of Christmas as a significant theme, notes were coded in relation to the transformation of work around it. This categorization yielded the thematically grouped empirical sections below. Where notes refer to conversations with workers, they are used as they have been recorded in the diary. All individuals referenced in the text have been given pseudonyms.

The punctuation of mundane jobs with extreme work

Narratives about the Christmas labour needs of supermarkets are widely circulated artefacts of corporate discourse, large British chains routinely highlighting their increased seasonal demand for workers, as well as the intensive nature of the work involved, on the recruitment pages of their websites. In one example, Asda (2013), one of the ‘big four’ supermarkets (and part of the ‘Walmart family’), describes the need for those who will supply them with the numerical flexibility required at this time in the following way:

In some of our stores, we often need a few extra pairs of hands at our very busy times, like during Christmas for example. Working with us on a temporary basis, you’ll be someone we can count on to be there when we need you the most. It’s at these busiest times when there’s a real excitement and buzz in the store. It’s hectic stuff and you’ll be on your feet taking care of customers and making sure they have exactly what they need. Don’t worry, we’ll give you all the Asda training you need so you’ll feel right at home. Fit in with us and you could be asked back again and again and again!

The framing of Christmas employment as being infused with ‘real excitement and buzz’, beyond being discursive window-dressing for tightly calculated labour use, captures part of the way in which work on the shop floor is temporarily transformed at this time of the year. The next section outlines three key ways in which work on the deli counter became ‘extreme’ over the holidays: the first two pertaining to how the work performed itself changed, namely through an expansion of the scope of work on the one hand, and the intensification of demands for soft skills, on the other. The third way whereby work became extreme for the deli counter workers involved a blurring of the work–home boundary and an increased appeal by the employer on their sentiments, in the manner much more commonly observed in high-commitment workplaces with systemic and persistent organizational demands on workers and attempts at the regulation of their identities (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002).

Expansion of the scope of work

The majority of the elements of extremity defining extreme jobs in the Hewlett and Luce categorization have to do with the scope of work involved. Correspondingly, the scope of the mundane jobs on the supermarket shop floor was highly delimited in terms of time, skills and discretion. At Christmas retailing season, the demands across all these dimensions substantially increased on the deli counter. Formal requirements of work intensified both in terms of the tasks to be undertaken and the time over which these were to be carried out. This could be described therefore as an expansion of the scope of the formal employment contract, and comprised changes in the intertwined elements of longer working time, greater task and skills variety and higher levels of discretion, all in relative terms, as below.

Working hours

The deli counter had around 15 workers, all part-timers, with the three relatively senior workers putting in around the upper limit of 35 hours of work per week. Four temporary staff members were hired for the anticipated labour needs for Christmas, although at least two of these corresponded to recent staff departures. In other words, although seasonal workers partially covered the increased Christmas staffing requirements, the far greater number of additional hours were delivered through the uptake of more shifts by existing part-timers. Across the store all non-managerial staff except for a very small number of bakery workers were part-timers, employed for a minimum of 10 hours and typically around 20 hours per week. To match expected trading volumes, calculated centrally by the analysis of year-on-year, week-on-week and global trends data, all stores and individual departments were allocated additional ‘wage hours’. Jane, the department manager of the deli counter, received a memo from store management with the departmental labour hours allocated for Christmas trading and discussed it with the author:

On the second sheet […] is the breakdown of the same figures (sales day-on-year and week-on-year) for the different products at Counters: Fish, meats, pizzas, curries, chicken, cheeses. The clearest message is that the overall figures are down for all of these except for fish on both counts, and meat, which is up on a week-on-year basis. I mention this to Jane and she says ‘Well the way people shop has changed. People are like you and me, they work, they are in a hurry, they need to get their shopping done, so they want pre-packaged stuff’. I am not sure if this is purely her experience/observation or what she keeps hearing from the top. She says when she was working at the counters (as a regular colleague) they had much more turnover, but that that has disappeared over time. She says they used to get 750 hours (of labour allocated, per week) and now this week, because she got extra hours for Christmas stuff, she has about 640 or so, but after Christmas in January this is going to fall to mid-400s.

Despite the substantial reduction of total hours allocated to the deli counter staff, purportedly due to falling trade at this particular station, there was over 200 additional hours to be covered on the deli, among the two additional seasonal hires, both students, and around 15 members of staff. The figure subsequently went up further as Christmas approached. Jane then went around in person, asking how many hours each worker could cover and when, not strictly assigning any particular shifts or hours but encouraging everyone to cover however much they could. The uptake varied, depending on individual circumstances:

How are people getting ready for Christmas? Jane had been saying all along that people would be doing overtime. Cheryl for one is sticking to 20 hours, because her three-year-old goes to school […] and they are on Christmas break so she can’t really leave her anywhere else. Lucy says that she has been doing many more hours—university won’t be back in session for another five weeks or so, so she has time. She says she is doing a short shift today, just five hours, but she did 10 the day before and will do 10 again the next few days. She says that’s a good thing because if she is not at work, she finds herself spending money! Sarah is putting in many more hours than usual: on Christmas presents she has spent about 100 pounds this year, 30 each for her parents, 10 for her brother, 10 for two good friends, and five each for some aunts.

The consumption demands of Christmas felt by the workers made the additional work highly desirable for many of them, yet there was no observed instance of shortage of additional hours to be picked up. A number of workers doubled or even tripled their hours in a given week, taking up a very different workload from their routine. Significantly, staff did not typically express a desire for taking on more hours on their regular shifts outside of the holiday season, that is, the demand for more work also appeared to be a seasonal thing. For some like Diane, in a semi-supervisory role due to her long tenure, the Christmas workload nearly reached a full-time load. The working hours nevertheless remained part-time, certainly well below the 60 hours criteria for extreme jobs. ‘Overtime’ Jane talked about was overtime only in comparison with the regular part-timers’ hours, rather than ‘real’ overtime accruing higher hourly wages. Nevertheless, for most of these workers, the time spent at work around Christmas, and consequently the income generated from their employment, was markedly higher.

Increase in demands for multi-tasking and product knowledge

Work on the deli counter became extreme over the holiday season, in relative terms, also in what needed doing by each worker on each shift. Jane had explained away the reduction of the additional hours allocated for Christmas trading over the years as a result of falling sales at the counter, but interviews elsewhere in the larger study suggested that there was constant recalculation and significant reduction of wage spend allocated to given volumes of sales. The cost-reduction very likely had made work more intensive on Christmas shifts in the first place, but also the covering of shifts outside of regular or semi-regular rotas meant that many of the informal routines workers had established among themselves got thrown into the flexibility mix of the holidays.

In principle, all new deli staff were trained in all the stations, typically by shadowing more experienced staff and being asked by Jane to work on a particular station on a particular shift. Even though everyone therefore technically knew how to do everything, and could be called on to staff any station, workers just gravitated towards the tasks they preferred. For example, the fish and seafood stall was in general very unpopular among most of the staff, who did their best to avoid it, but very happily and almost proudly claimed by two male workers. Likewise, there were staff members who almost always covered the rotisserie station or prepared pizzas whenever they had their shifts. This often tacit division of labour had to be renegotiated at Christmas, when the changing rotas, increased volumes of customers, and the arrival of special seasonal products coincided. Workers who would normally directly go to their self-designated station were throughout the holidays needing to step in elsewhere, either covering an entire shift at a different station or, more commonly, helping out across multiple stations on each shift. They had to try their hand at things they were not entirely familiar with, often getting a very quick crash course on how to use certain equipment or learning about products they did not routinely deal with, like the author’s experience on a shift some weeks into fieldwork:

Going down to the counter I saw that … Michelle, Carolyn, Sarah, Matt, Robert, Emma, the other Sarah and Sheila are there. Emma (one of the seasonal hires) is alone serving (the ready meals), so I see a male customer waiting and ask if I can help. He wants a slice of bacon and something quiche, which is a seasonal specialty which I haven’t seen before. The quiche is still in the pan and has not been cut up at all. I take it out and take it to the board which is immediately to the right of the counters, and try to cut a slice but I am not doing this right because the crust around the rim begins to crumble. I try to pull the aluminum back and it won’t budge. In a hurry I realize that I cannot turn to Emma for help and go in the backroom and find Michelle, and tell her I will owe her one if she can come and help out. She comes out and shows me that you need to turn the pie over and it slides out of the foil, and she also tells me that I am using the wrong knife. There are two knives on this board, one for the pies (with meat) and one for the quiche, the latter one has ridges on the blade.

In one instance, a young female worker ended up serving fish for the first time, something she had been wary to do because she struggled with the idea of touching fish skin, and this was ‘celebrated’ by ‘high fives’ once the customer was satisfied and walked away with their purchase. In another instance, the author and a young female worker quickly figured out how to use the meat slicer and, in yet another, helped the young male worker who was routinely in charge of the rotisserie station which he could normally handle on his own. While such tasks may appear simple and the required product knowledge not particularly deep, relative to the regular experience of the ‘mundane’ work on the deli counter, these demands for multi-tasking and knowledgeability were exceptional. While, as noted about functional flexibility elsewhere, ‘whether this involved job enrichment or an intensification of work remained open to interpretation’ (Penn, 1995: 238), concentrated especially during the busiest shopping hours of the day, these demands rendered the work on the counter suddenly feel extreme. Furthermore, in line with the observation that ‘increased flexibility and multitasking’ may ‘foster forms of micro-emancipation’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 624), there was very frequently a response of laughter, even exuberance at the end of particularly taxing shifts.

Expansion of discretion

In a somewhat paradoxical manner, there was an expansion of discretion on the deli counter, as the flexibility demands on labour at once widened and loosened in-store supervisory control by requiring all departmental managers to work in matrix fashion. Managers were now briefed to ‘keep an eye on things’ across all departments as they moved about in the store. These salaried workers with no overtime pay put in upwards of 50 hours a week, and considerably more as Christmas Day approached. Managerial supervision consequently became fragmented and distracted.

As the momentum of trading increased, there appeared opportunities for regular workers to use far more than the extremely circumscribed amounts of discretion normally allowed for on their jobs. Especially the more experienced staff found themselves making more frequent decisions about which products to bring out more of, how to put together the mix of product offers, whom to ask to help at which station, and, in a symbolically meaningful way, when to do price reductions and by how much. The latter was an extremely centralized affair, with ‘price guns’ linking up directly with the corporate data network and downloading the centrally calculated reduced prices, and workers only finding the tiny amount of discretion to manually override these after two or three rounds of reductions. Even then, their thunder was often stolen by store or department managers taking over the decision. As managers got pulled away into other duties in the lead up to Christmas, discretion over seemingly small areas such as this were frequently transferred over to the shop-floor workers. With the more extensive time-sensitive product range for the holidays doing reductions became a bigger task, not nearly as closely overseen as usual:

They had things laid out right behind the cheese counter, on a trolley. Seeing them doing reductions and stuff constantly getting added to the trolley, customers began to cluster in front of the counter, and even sort of going inside through the gap between the fish counter and the cheese counter. I could somehow sense that Carolyn liked this sense of authority etc. I asked her how I could help and she said I could take the items she has reduced to the shop floor reductions area, and then on she has been ‘Yes those’, ‘No, not those’, ‘All the 50 p ones’ etc. in a quite bossy manner. Not annoying, but you can feel that she is doing something ‘important’ and she ‘likes it’.

Being needed to cover more hours, having to know more and handle a wider range of tasks, and using greater discretion, especially as experienced within the span of one shift, was not typical of the routine nature of the mundane job. Although on the one hand inconvenient, taxing and disorienting, this form of work around Christmas also provided the workers with ‘badges of ability’ (Collinson, 2003: 531).

Increased mobilization of soft skills

Christmas also placed extraordinary demands on the workers for the mobilization of soft skills, as during this period ‘customer expectations continue to rise’ (Gallagher, 2013: 12) on the ‘front stage’ of the ‘retail theatre’. Due to the rearrangement of teams and tasks, the ‘backstage’ also became far more demanding of emotion work and impression management at this time. Mundane jobs do often require the use of soft skills, but the demand for this became distinctively heightened both because of the cultural inscription of the ‘festive season’ encounter on the customer interface and because of the greater intensity and variability in the backstage.

Extreme work on the front stage

The service interface and customer interaction is the major ‘value added’ of the deli counter, since almost all items on sale here are also available pre-packaged for self-service. Ready-to-go pizzas with the same ingredients as those ‘made to order’ by counter staff and ‘meal deals’ of the same combinations put together at the counter on request are on offer merely yards away on the shop floor. Pre-Christmas, items available for purchase exclusively from the counter increased, but still the main attraction of shopping at the counter was either the personal service or the accompanying social interaction, or a combination thereof (Harris et al., 2001). Over the holidays, customer interaction greatly intensified as many customers seemed to engage in it as a ‘festive season’ indulgence in and of itself. There was also a piqued curiosity about novelty seasonal items and hence more queries about products, especially immediately before Christmas Day. Customers seeking interaction became far more diverse in comparison with the usual shoppers who were disproportionately older, very often pensioners. Far more interaction took place, with a broadly more emotive clientele. The props were in place, with many of the deli counter staff wearing seasonal pieces such as red velvety hats or antler ears, which solicited comments and conversation. There was also more ‘banter’ around the food, for example, customers telling deli staff about their plans for a specific type of cold cut meat, or reminiscing about what they used to get in previous years.

Beyond a generally heightened sociability with a wider range of customers, the work at the front stage of the deli counter became extreme in two specific ways. First, aligned with the greater range of products and higher likelihood of staffing an unfamiliar station, responding to questions calmly and politely while appearing knowledgeable, together with the festive cheer expectations of customers, required near-constant impression management and emotion work. More effort was needed to save face with the customers while quickly figuring out the answers:

Customers are asking a lot of questions—if you happen to walk on the shop floor (which we don’t often do) somebody grabs you and asks you—where are the sauces, do you have this etc.? I know we’re supposed to walk them to the item but we have no idea where it is.

Second, the customers themselves were increasingly less concerned by impression management, as they appeared increasingly rushed and often impatient, especially on Christmas Eve:

Carrying the reductions to the shop floor has also been interesting. First of all, customers have been following me- sometimes you step out on the shop floor and people want to grab whatever you are carrying, so you actually give stuff away before even getting to the reductions fridge. Or when you arrive at the fridge, you need to quite loudly excuse yourself and open up some space to go through and put the reduced items on the shelf, but then people are crowding you and/or asking you what you’re putting on the shelf, or trying to get to it. Some customers are patient and hang around […] But sometimes customers can get pushy, especially around these reductions. I had a chat actually with somebody later and they complained about the customers; said that they don’t say ‘hi’ or ‘thanks’, but just point at the stuff and say ‘that one’ etc.

Extreme work on the backstage

The temporary changes in the division of labour and the aforementioned suspension and rearrangement of routines also extremized the normally relatively sedate ‘work’ of the backstage, of working with other team and department members. Intensified further by the increased customer demands and the lack of familiarity with products for the range of reasons also discussed above, there was far greater support-seeking among team members, for example like this:

Another thing two customers asked today has to do with heating (reheating things). I actually did not know what to say, especially since I don’t own a microwave oven. Michelle gave an elaborate answer about what would happen if they put the item in the oven vs. in the microwave, and how long they should keep things there. On the second occasion (about prawn toast) somebody wanted to buy a big amount and probably offer it at a party. I didn’t know how or how well they would reheat, so I called the closest person, Jack, who actually didn’t know either. First he went and asked, came back saying that yes he can reheat, but then the customer wanted to know how and how long, and Jack had to go and ask again.

The backstage work at Christmas also involved frustration, annoyance, surprise, impatience, fatigue, overreliance, or even anger, requiring emotion work to suppress, re-channel and present thoughts and feelings in a manner acceptable to the working relationship. These were not by any means the only emotions in the team engendered by the intensified work of Christmas, which also included many positive ones such as closeness, gratitude, respect, liking or even solidarity. Although the negotiation of relationships with co-workers was obviously part of the routine of the job, a wide range of fluctuating feelings and the need to manage them in the appropriate way were key to the transformed nature of work at Christmas.

The extension of ‘inclusive’ management practices

While permanent part-time workers constitute the main body of the retailing workforce, they are typically treated as ‘peripheral’ rather than ‘core’ members of organizations in terms of the attempts to control their identities and commitment (Kunda, 1992). Even though employers always use a mixture of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Human Resource Management (HRM) in practice (Truss et al., 2003), a part-time, transient workforce receives a very diluted version of the latter, if any. The ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett, 2000) entailed in the mundane retail jobsis severe, and ensuring ‘dignity at work’ (Sayer, 2007; Hodson, 2001) on these jobs highly challenging. When ‘work went cultural’ (Fleming, 2013: 476), these workers seem to have been safe to leave behind.

However, during the Christmas trading season, there was an abruptly sharper emphasis on ‘inclusive’ management practices, as well as more ‘play’ at (or related to) work (Sørensen and Spoelstra, 2012) in the store under study. As the music track piped in store switched to seasonal favourites to help whet shoppers’ appetite for themed consumption, the routine department briefs at the beginning of shifts became more like pep talks, with jokes about customers’ Christmas shopping habits and repeated appeals to ‘pull together’ and engage in the collective ‘effort’ of Christmas retailing.

In the deli counter backroom, where paperwork for rotas was kept and dirty equipment piled, a plastic box appeared for all staff to use for exchanging Christmas cards. Even workers who normally did not spend much time in the backroom now frequently checked the box to see if they had received any new cards. Jane switched to distributing pay stubs by calling out names and going to the different stations to find each worker, instead of leaving them in the backroom to be picked, saying she ‘want(ed) to make sure people have gotten them’. On at least two separate occasions, including on 23 December, boxes of high-end chocolate were placed in the backroom for staff to help themselves. Special Christmas-wear, bright-coloured sweatshirts and vests, were on sale exclusively for staff at a heavy discount and several members of the deli team wore theirs from previous years throughout the holidays. Special Christmas-themed decoration adorned the staff changing rooms, canteen and smoking room from early December. At staff reception, 1 pound tickets were sold for a raffle, the prize a large Christmas hamper of food, snacks and drinks, on display at the staff canteen.

There was also a temporary blurring of work and non-work boundaries, highly characteristic of extreme jobs, through a series of social events. Some events were at least partially funded by the supermarket, such as a ‘family funfare’, and a ‘family day out’, advertised in posters in the staff canteen. There were at least three ‘Christmas Do’s’, though not paid for by the employer, initiated and arranged through work networks. One of these was exclusive to the counter staff and held at a very popular local pub, mostly reserved for the group alone. The dinner was very well attended, with everyone that the author had met in person taking part. Staff from all the different age groups attended, with partners, friends and family members, as did the managers of some other departments. The atmosphere was genuinely fun and friendly, rather than forced or awkward, with many having dressed up for the occasion. Money was secretly collected to purchase a present for Jane, and gossip was exchanged about some of the other department and store managers. Jane and Sarah, one of the more senior workers at the deli, both shrugged off an argument they had had in front of a number of others, saying it was ‘normal’ and that ‘it happens in every workplace every now and then’. As such, the evening expanded the ‘boundaries of fun’ (Bolton and Houlihan, 2009) and helped blur the distinctions between work-selves and non-work selves.

Considering that many workers did not even normally overlap at work, the Christmas season entailed extreme levels of incursions of work life into social life. Such blurring of the boundaries of work and non-work was unusual on supermarket jobs since, unlike in the case of high-commitment organizations, the employer did not typically make attempts to blur the boundary ‘from outside to inside’ by demanding workers to ‘evoke non-work feelings and identities within the sphere of production’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2004: 83) or ‘to transfer workplace activities into the home and the private sphere’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2004: 85). The two spheres were certainly intertwined through family and friendship ties (Pettinger, 2005) but rarely through deliberate organizational planning and effort of the kind observed during the holidays.

In one sense, these social events can be seen in the manner of ‘distractions’ Fleming and Sturdy (2011) discuss in their account of an employer’s attempts at a call centre to solicit worker participation, but in another sense, they also acted as confirmations of hard work. Invitations, written and oral, entailed a theme of ‘relief’ from the ‘hard slog’, ‘well earned’ for the extra push and the ‘madness’ of Christmas. The unique larger cultural context of Christmas furthermore made ‘cynicism’ as a ‘tactic of transgression’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2003: 159) far less appealing and likely. For this brief period, the holders of mundane jobs had a far more vivid presence of their work, employer and colleagues in their lives.

Discussion and conclusion

The detailed account provided above of the organization and experience of work on the supermarket deli counter at Christmas illustrates how extreme work can punctuate (even the most) mundane jobs in contemporary workplaces. As such, it has addressed the question of how (even) stripped down, highly rationalized, tightly controlled work can temporarily become extreme. Such an effort is intended to contribute to our understanding of both the distinction between extreme jobs and extreme work, and the significance of extreme work for non-extreme jobs. As a result of the prevalent flexible uses of labour, punctuations of normal or even mundane jobs by bouts of extreme work is commonplace. Discussions of extreme work would therefore likely benefit from considering this theme in a more sustained manner.

What about the significance of such temporary transformations for the nature of the mundane job? After the extreme work of Christmas at the deli counter reached its zenith on Christmas Eve, it was followed by the well-known retailing lull of January, when shop-floor workers were widely encouraged and more than gently nudged to take their annual days off, to conveniently correspond with the lack of demand for their labour. This rather quick return to the business as usual of mundane jobs, with all the previously discussed constraints, limitations and shortcomings they entail, could be interpreted to indicate that the temporary extremization of work over the holidays is inconsequential. However, it is also possible to argue that, recurrent punctuations of mundane jobs with extreme work are in fact an integral part of the former, in terms of both the material and subjective experiences of these jobs. By temporarily incorporating relatively extreme forms of work into their rhythms, mundane jobs are also temporarily ‘elevated’ to a sphere resembling that of the ‘normal’.

Two shortcomings of the empirical material discussed here need to be acknowledged prior to further summative points. First, although supermarket employment is both quantitatively and qualitatively appropriate for the investigation of the relationship of mundane jobs and extreme work, the specific context of the deli counter is as exceptional within this context as it is informative. Not only is this particular enclave of retail employment far more variable in terms of the skills and tasks involved, it also entails far more extensive customer interaction than most other supermarket employment. Second, for claims about recurrent incursions of extreme work into mundane jobs, findings from one episode are admittedly not ideal. Despite these limitations, four key observations can be proposed based on the empirical material discussed, as follows.

First, while the ongoing scholarly debate on the appropriate definition and categorization of extreme jobs and extreme work is important and worthwhile in capturing an essential feature of employment under contemporary capitalism, extreme work can also be treated as a variable concept that only makes sense in relation to a normalized baseline. Given the normalized mundanity of many jobs, including retail jobs, there may be highly different ways in which work becomes extreme on different types of jobs, not remotely resembling the experiences of the managerial/professional workers depicted by Hewlett and Luce. On the deli counter, the scope of work, the demand on soft skills and the extent of inclusive management practices clearly remain very limited in comparison with those entailed in managerial/professional jobs. However, the empirical material also demonstrates that in relative terms, through seemingly small gestures, in seemingly small ways, mundane jobs become extreme by their own standards. As in the case of small, everyday acts of resistance potentially constituting micro-emancipation from cultural management (Fleming, 2013: 484–485), similar acts and changes can constitute extremization, or even ‘micro extremization’ of work.

Second, the particular context of the study during the Christmas retailing period helps highlight the significance of time and temporality for discussions of extreme work. Of course, the widely if loosely adopted working definitions of extreme work and extreme jobs typically do inherently reference time as a key element, particularly through the emphasis on working hours and work intensity. Likewise, many other indicators of intensity, for example that of travel, skills, tasks, interaction partners and so on, are ultimately about how many of these are having to be dealt with by the ‘extreme worker’ in a given amount of time. However, this study illustrates that some types of work are extreme, some of the time. This insight may be helpful in linking the flexible use of labour at the firm level to the experience of rhythmic or arrhythmic intensities of work on different jobs, by different groups of workers. Uneven experiences of intensity may be just as integral to the contemporary organization of work for some workers as ‘normalized intensity’ (McCann et al., 2008) is for others.

Third, the subjective experience of the punctuation of mundane jobs with extreme work may have somewhat counterintuitive contours. Instead of unknowing exploitation or knowing cynical distancing (Fleming and Spicer, 2003), the intensification of work may be seen as a relative elevation of an impoverished form of employment, opening up possibilities for the restoration of pride and meaning. Such brief but reliably recurrent episodes may in fact be highly pertinent to answering questions such as that posed by Collinson:

If respect and dignity in so-called meritocratic societies are to be conferred only on those who do middle class ‘mental work’, how do those who are trapped in low status manual jobs construct a positive meaning for their lives? (Collinson, 2003: 531)

As in the case of airline stewardesses who experienced less-than-extensive demands on their emotional selves in the low-cost airline service as a degradation of their professionalism and the status and pride that accompanied it (Curley and Royle, 2013), the extreme work of Christmas was, while difficult, frustrating, and at odds with other seasonal obligations, greeted largely with enthusiasm by the deli counter workers, like a temporary upgrading of the significance of their jobs. Emotional work often accrues professional dignity to workers (Bolton and Boyd, 2003), and extreme work may become a perk of the job despite entailing the intensification of work. When one of the days shortly before Christmas proved to be much slower than the supermarket staff had been repeatedly warned to brace themselves for, there was a palpable sense of ennui, even disappointment, rather than relief among the ranks. Notoriously meaningless work had become more meaningful in the time leading up to Christmas, as it entangled workers with their colleagues, supervisors, store managers and customers in a transformed, intensified fashion. The Christmas rush, when it did happen as anticipated, did away with one of the biggest problems of the mundane routine of the deli counter, of infrequent customer interaction, predictable requests and standing idle, handling small orders. The temporary experience of extreme work even appeared in some ways to resuscitate the connection between work and identity, however fleetingly. Temporally discrete episodes of extreme work therefore demand further exploration, potentially as a critical ritual in the consolidation and reinforcement of the collective consciousness around work.

Finally, the empirical discussion offered here underscores the significance of Christmas itself as a domain in which it is worthwhile to investigate the contemporary organization and experience of work, especially in retailing. Beyond its ‘organizational significance’ (Hancock and Rehn, 2011), Christmas is also eminently interesting in the potent cultural narrative it offers for the extremization of work, certainly for jobs that entail a service interface and customer interaction. Psycho-socially, Christmas is the most universal and routine anticipated period of work intensity for retail employment in the Western capitalist economic context, and indeed increasingly also globally as its solicitation of themed consumption breaks away from its historic ties to Christianity. Christmas retailing could be recognized as a privileged instance of ‘managing continuity, including typical or familiar levels of emotional arousal’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 626), the ‘festive spirit’ scripts and dramaturgy often brought to the workplace by workers voluntarily. The effort for ‘explaining the make-up and drivers of value-based discourses in otherwise tightly controlled environments’ (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011) could benefit from a closer look at Christmas, whose cultural construction provides a powerful and highly effective helping hand to the extreme work of the ‘holidays’.