Amid The Flowers
A Year at Minimum Wage
Buy the Book: AmazonRelease Date: March 19, 2016
Pages: 143
Overview
In 2012, taking a break from her journalism career to help elderly parents, Anne Saker got a job as a $7.35-an-hour clerk in the floral department of a Kroger grocery in Mason, Ohio. In the first week, Saker realized she was witnessing something remarkable: the ancient language of flowers translated through 21st-century American retail commerce. In her Kroger blue top and black pants, Saker helped people choose and buy flowers for proms and funerals, Valentine’s Day and birthdays, hellos, good-byes, and apologies. In these little dramas, Saker found storytelling gold: what a bouquet from the world’s largest florist says about the human heart. She wrote about her job on Facebook as “The Kroger Chronicles,” and collected the essays with additional material into AMID THE FLOWERS: A Year at Minimum Wage.
Praise
"Called home to help with aging parents, Anne Saker left behind a good journalism job in Portland, Oregon, and took a job in an Ohio supermarket floral department. In "Amid the Flowers: A Year at Minimum Wage," Saker captures the mundanities of everyday retail life... Saker puts a human face on the millions of Americans who work for minimum wage. She has written a page-turning chronicle of their lives -- and hers, for a year. Heartily recommended."
–Amazon Review
"Author Anne Saker has delivered an extraordinary memoir about life in the floral department of a successful grocery in Ohio -- but this is no soft bouquet of memories... You will never buy flowers the same way again. "Amid the Flowers" is the reason you learned to read."
–Amazon Review
"This is such a slice of southwest Ohio aka the upper south - it's just a beautiful read. Even though it takes place in a wealthy exurb, the Krogerfolk are real as are their customers... Yes, it made me cry and it made me laugh. And it made me neglect every other thing in life till I completed it."
–Amazon Review
Excerpt
Amid the Flowers: A Year at Minimum Wage
Once a week, at a minimum, a dad or a mom arrived at the floral department, eyes burning with that blue flame of fear: kid’s birthday party for twelve in an hour, got the cake, candles, gift bags, but no balloons, can’t have a party without balloons, been searching everywhere, Party City, Party Town, Party Subdivision, no luck, and so, (please, o merciful god), “Do you have any helium?”
Only by working at Kroger for minimum wage did I learn that the world was suffering from a commercial shortage of the second-most abundant element in the observable universe.