Digital Technologies’ Transformation of US Store-Based Retail Work: Semi-structured Interviews with Workers and Managers, 2022-2023

This dataset consists of interview notes on 63 semi-structured, one-hour interviews of store-based retail employees (frontline workers and managers) in various locations in the USA (with the exception of two in Canada), conducted August 2022 through August 2023. The interviews focus on technological change and how it is affecting the labor process. However, they also inquire about the respondents’ career trajectories, pay history, and aspirations for future mobility; the details of their job functions and how those functions are organized; how labor in the store is supervised; any forms of worker collective action; the respondent’s subjective experience of work and supervision; and significant changes in any of these aspects of work. Respondents were recruited via a commercial online interviewee recruitment platform, User Interviews https://www.userinterviews.com/ . The resulting sample is by no means a representative sample of US store-based retail workers. But we believe it is qualitatively representative of more senior employees at larger-unit grocery and general merchandise stores in the US, with a sprinkling of respondents from other types of stores that offer some limited comparisons.