Close your cash!
Storytelling is a weapon to fight numbers, to give back flesh to words and people. But what do we want to focus on ? Through variations of meaning, by evoking emotions, narration exerts a reflexive force on thought : an interpretative feature, a particular insight, a social posture. Its sensitive quality embodies a communicable modality : an atmosphere at work, noises and echoes on the “bosses”, feelings of fear, flashes on relations of subjugation. This is the price of public sociology : to transmit meaning that is accessible to all. In the following narrative, I have followed the stories of three young women interns working in a northern Paris supermarket. How can one “get in” ? If we speak in the first person singular, “I”, as if we were inside, we offend the customers, their baskets ; shopping carts, their purchase items ; domestic work, cleaning ; the landau of mothers, the strolls in the aisles. In the wings, without a word or a gaze, the cashiers are resting and watch over each other. Irritation, fatigue, insults, panic, while the terrifying voice of the boss is already screaming, “Go back to work.”