My Life As A Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, And Cheap - Joseph Williams - The Atlantic

The Ugly Truth About Retail Work
A customer tries out a Wilson Sporting Goods Co. baseball glove at an E-Mart Co. store, a subsidiary of Shinsegae Co., in Incheon, South Korea, on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013. Consumer prices climbed 0.9 percent in November from a year earlier after a 0.7 percent increase in October that was the smallest gain since July 1999. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A customer tries out a Wilson Sporting Goods Co. baseball glove at an E-Mart Co. store, a subsidiary of Shinsegae Co., in Incheon, South Korea, on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013. Consumer prices climbed 0.9 percent in November from a year earlier after a 0.7 percent increase in October that was the smallest gain since July 1999. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

My plunge into poverty happened in an instant. I never saw it coming.

Then again, there was no reason to feel particularly vulnerable. Two years ago, I was a political reporter at Politico, and I spent my days covering the back-and-forth of presidential politics. I had access to the White House because of my reporting beat, and I was a regular commentator on MSNBC. My career had been on an upward trajectory for 30 years, and at age 50 I still anticipated a long career.

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