The Night Shift | The Bottom 50% Own 2.5% of the Wealth of the Country

Moths circle the streetlights in the mostly empty lot. Blacktop. White parking lines. Road noise. Pickup doors slam shut.

They’re supposed to park at the back of the lot. Nobody who would care is here at eleven, and they’ll be gone before Beth gets in.

She’s at the door, counting heads. Everyone calls her Lou.

“I need you to go get Charlie,” she says. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

No problem.

Charlie lives in a trailer park pretty close. Tires on gravel. Sideways glances. He bangs on the dark trailer door and waits. Quiet inside. Does it again. After a couple minutes Charlie opens the door, eyes bloodshot, smelling like too much of something.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

The kid leaves. When he gets back she’s still at the door.

“He’ll be here,” she says. “He always comes.”

Trucks back up to the dock. Boxes come down the rollers. Cardboard stacks up faster than anyone breaks it down. Most of the crew is new. Maybe they’ll last the week.

Charlie comes in at midnight and works the line like a man paying something off. Nobody says anything.

At the first break she’s smoking and eating a sandwich. Lettuce packed separate. Bread spread thin with dressing.

John sleeps in the corner of the break room. Loud snores. He jerks awake, then nods off again.

Above the time clock there’s a board with the stock price on it. Employee ownership plan. Somebody on day shift writes the new number in every day.

“That’s not much mayonnaise,” the kid says.

“Miracle Whip. If I could afford mayonnaise, I would spread it thick,” she says.

He looks at his own sandwich. Eats the rest of it slower.

At seven the doors open onto full daylight. The crew walks out squinting. Engines start across the lot, one after another. They pull out and head toward town and bed.

He turns west, towards Midway, the sun in his mirrors. His shift at the dairy starts at seven thirty.

Act I. Keys

Lou’s ring of keys opens nearly every lock in the store. A key to the high valuables cage, the office, the cardboard compactor lockout. She carries them on a metal clip hung over her belt. When she walks the floor, you hear her coming.

She keeps a copy of the schedule on a sheet folded in her back pocket. Not her schedule, because she has that one memorized. Everyone’s schedule. Her handwriting, all capitals, pencil.

She schedules break times, teaches new workers how to unload trucks and run pallet jacks, moves people around based on who calls in.

The store stays open until ten. Night shift starts at eleven. She arrived by nine, through the auto-open doors in pale jeans, shirt tucked in. She walked with highkneed purpose, denim falling straight to white sneakers. Pencil ready. The evening crew has their aisles faced and the dock swept before she comes through.

Just before eleven o’clock, she’s at the door to let everyone in. Five tonight. Charlie, John, the kid, a new guy, and a woman who started Tuesday. The truck’s already backed in.

She takes the paperwork from the driver and signs it on her leg.

The night is orderly. Trailer, then the rollers, then her first Virginia Slim. Pallets to the floor, everyone split aisle by aisle, freight on the shelves, cardboard broken down flat and baled. Then the orders.

She’s quick to jump in and fix a jam or rebuild a corner of a pallet herself so a new guy can watch. Then she hands him the next box.

She explains to him, “A new truck every night. Nothing to stay in the stockroom, no back inventory. Six hundred boxes in, six hundred boxes onto shelves, cardboard baled, empty dock by seven, and another truck tomorrow.”

This summer the kid is new to nights. He’s been with the store for a couple of years on evening shift, and he picked up a second job on the university dairy for the summer. When he got moved to nights she asked him about his schedule. Night shift, off at seven, dairy until five, sleep until ten, five days a week.

“That’s not much sleep,” she says. She looks at him like he’s missing something obvious.

Once every couple weeks the kid isn’t there at eleven. If the truck is full and the crew is short, she’ll call. If the truck is light she’ll let him sleep until one before she calls.

When a truck pulls away she might sneak a puff outside the cone of the dock light. The moths shoot across the light in a streak.

Around four the night gets long. Whoever’s dragging worst finds her coming down their aisle with a mini candy bar. She doesn’t say anything about it.

The woman who started Tuesday asks her how long she’s been here.

Nineteen years, she says. Nights for sixteen.

A few nights later the woman asks about her hours.

Lou takes the sheet out of her back pocket and looks at it.

Thirty-two this week, she says. Forty next week.

She folds it back up.

Get a thousand hours in the year and you qualify for the profit sharing, she says. You still have to be here at the end of the year.

The woman says okay and goes back to her aisle.

One night she’s showing the kid how the order system works. He asks her why she doesn’t switch to days. Assistant manager, an office with a door and a chair.

That job takes a degree, she says. She scans the barcode in front of an empty shelf to place an order.

I’m fifty.

Act II. The Crew

Charlie arrives just after Lou most nights. He clocks in and heads straight to the dock to check out what the truck has brought him that night. He jokes with the college kids who are going home.

The kid only has to go to his trailer once. Nobody brings it up.

He works the west side of the store, toys and tools and home goods. He’s fast. Somewhere in the middle of the night he’ll say something the kid thinks about on the drive to Midway. One night, breaking down boxes: why would you worry about something that hasn’t happened yet? Then he tilts the bale of flattened cardboard on a pallet and gets the jack.

Nights suit me, he says.

John falls asleep whenever he sits down. Lou gives him jobs that keep him on his feet and moving. Clean and polish the floors, move pallets. When break time is up, they wake him up and tell him it’s time to go.

That’s just John.

Then one night in July, he’s different. Awake. Smiling when he comes through the door, talking during break. He tells everybody he got a machine that helps him breathe when he sleeps. Says he slept eight hours and can’t remember the last time he felt this good.

He looks ten years younger. He eats his whole lunch without falling asleep.

Along with Lou, they’re the regulars.

The day shift is the lifers, evening for the college kids, nights for those caught in between. The crew turns over all summer. A guy who wanted a job with air conditioning. A lady who needed a paycheck, then she was headed to Springfield. They’re friendly and they work hard. Then Lou crosses their name off the schedule.

The woman who started that first Tuesday lasts six weeks. One night she just stops coming in.

She didn’t quit because she hated anybody. Nights are hard on your body. You work while you’re supposed to be sleeping and you sleep while you’re supposed to be working, and most people’s bodies can’t take it.

Every so often a new person will ask: how long does it take your body to adjust? Opinions all around. Two weeks. A month. Six.

The answer for some of them? Never.

At three in the morning the store hums with noise from the fluorescent ballasts, John running the floor polisher, scrub pads turning circles on the tile, Charlie making the cardboard baler groan in the backroom. The whole town is dark, moths shooting across the parking lot lights, and they’re moving boxes in this lit-up one-hundred-thousand-square-foot metal box. Freight moving from a trailer to a shelf so a woman can buy diapers for her baby at seven a.m.

One night a new guy asks about the sign by the time clock. Employee ownership. What’s the dollar sign written in marker?

Lou explains. You sign up to buy company stock, they take money out of your check. For every dollar of stock you buy the company puts an extra fifteen cents into your account.

Charlie says he thought about it, but he can’t eat stock.

John says he signed up once and a doctor’s bill changed his mind.

Nobody asks the kid.

Lou puts her cigarette out and they go back to work. The stock price on the sign goes up just a little every week, all summer.

By August, Lou, John, and Charlie are the only people who have been there longer than the kid.

Act III. The Bobcat

The sun is low on the horizon. Morning near Midway.

He steps on the back of the bucket and into the cab. Safety restraint down, key on, and the diesel engine putters to life. Bucket up, tilt down to check the pins, everything checks out.

Most of the day is in this Bobcat. Mixing feed in the auger, evening out the corn silage row, unloading alfalfa bales off semis, cleaning the freestall barn.

Almost everyone who works on the dairy is a college kid, except for the manager and the guy who can fix everything.

Throughout the day, the college kids talk.

Did you hear Sean got a sweet job up in Minnesota?

Then the milk parlor, clean the udders, mastitis check, milk machine, clean again. The Holsteins give more milk, the Jerseys more milk fat. The Food Science majors who work in the ice cream parlor on campus will use it to make Tiger Stripe, golden French vanilla with a dark Dutch chocolate ribbon. Gold and black.

What do you think of the fall study abroad program in the Netherlands?

In the afternoon somebody asks what he’s doing next year. After you graduate?

I’m going to be a senior, but I’m not sure yet. I might go back to working with beef cattle. Or I might apply to vet school.

Somebody says that’s cool. The talk moves back to Sean’s job.

They hose and scrub the milk parlor down when they’re done milking. He drives east toward town, sleeps from five thirty to ten.

At eleven, Lou is at the door, counting heads.

Act IV. August

Two weeks left in the summer. Classes start soon, and the store trades the college kids of summer for the kids of fall.

David asks to see him one morning after the shift. White button-down collared shirt, dark pants, black shoes. Assistant manager. They meet near the high valuables cage.

“How have you been doing?” he starts.

Good.

No, really. Beth told me about the dairy. Nights here, days there. We think it’s too much.

The kid says he’s been getting along.

A flash of concern on David’s face. Classes start in a couple weeks, right? Take those weeks off. Your job will be here when you get back. You’ll go back to evenings.

The kid jokes the first thing he’s going to do is sleep for days. Then he asks who fills in on Lou’s crew.

Don’t worry about Lou. We’ll make sure she’s good. She knows what’s going on.

There is no last night. The shift before the meeting was it. Nobody knew except for Lou.

He sees her again in the evenings, at nine o’clock, passing. He walks the store, checking the facing before they turn the shift over to her and John and Charlie. She never says anything about the summer.

That year, evening shift helps nights unload the first truck before they leave.

Postscript

Thanks for joining me for The Night Shift. I’m Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.

Every bit of this story is true. That summer I was nineteen. The store was the Walmart in Columbia, Missouri, on Nifong Boulevard. The building is a Hy-Vee Grocer now. The dairy is the University of Missouri’s ‘Foremost Dairy.’ The only place you can buy Tiger Stripe ice cream is Buck’s in Eckles Hall. They have very limited hours.

The night crew is real. I changed most of the names. The mayonnaise exchange is near word for word.

When summer ended I worked there another year. When I graduated, the district manager offered me a spot in the assistant manager training program. Assistant manager, then store manager, then maybe district. The job that takes a degree. I was twenty and I had one, and I had to turn him down. I already had an Officer Training School slot in the Air Force.

The rules said they couldn’t make the same offer to Lou.

On my way out the store manager told me if I stayed on the books a couple more weeks, I’d vest in something called profit sharing. I couldn’t stay. I believe she kept me on the books anyway. That June a check came for five hundred and seventy-five dollars, and I didn’t know what it was.

Employee ownership was different. You could choose to buy stock out of your paycheck and the store kept the stock price on the sign next to the time clock. For every dollar of stock you bought, Walmart added fifteen cents to the same account. A fifteen percent match. Unheard of for 401Ks today. No degree or credit check or anything. You just had to choose to do it, and that probably meant you needed money left over at the end of the week.

About one in four Walmart associates buys stock. Charlie told you why. You can’t eat stock.

Now the philosophy.

Dennis Kelleher said on a podcast that the bottom 50 percent of Americans, about 165 million people, hold 2.5 percent of the wealth of the country. It’s the Federal Reserve’s own quarterly data.

Let’s think about the statistic first. The bottom half’s wealth has gone up, not down, for the last thirty years. Many of those are the youngest Americans who haven’t had time to own much.

If we judge across history, Americans are extraordinarily prosperous.

Owning wealth is different. Many Americans pay rent for shelter. Their health insurance is tied to a job. Their Social Security keeps them alive, but they can’t sell it or leave it to their kids.

Security is important, but it isn’t the freedom of choice that comes with ownership. A paid-off truck means you can take another job. Home equity means you can move. Savings mean you can tell a boss no. A retirement account means more of your future is yours.

Just like Lou explaining the store. Boxes come in, night shift puts the goods on the shelves. Nothing in the back room, no inventory. Another truck tomorrow.

We designed economic security the same way. Benefits arrive just in time, are consumed, nothing remains.

Then we act surprised the ownership column reads 2.5 percent.

So. Instead of using it as ammunition for political theater, should we try to change it?

Justice. One of our six national goals. Setting conditions so a kid born in a trailer can love their work and eat and drink with the people they love.

Food on the table. Heat in the house. In turn, a house to put the table in.

Is that enough? Should we make Americans buy stock? When bills are tight and a man picks up a second job, would we order him to buy equities with money he needs to pay a doctor’s note?

That would violate another national goal: liberty.

Lou never chose to be an owner. Sam Walton enrolled her automatically into profit sharing. The rule did it for her.

Let’s recognize it’s not just the choice. It’s tough to pass judgment on someone who can’t afford to buy mayonnaise.

But if we are serious, there are three principles that would move more Americans into the ownership half. None of them orders anyone to do anything. They are either automatic or a choice.

One. Make ownership easier.

Two. Make saving the default. Automatic.

Three. Stop government rules that punish people for saving money.

Three examples to go with them. An offer for first-time homebuyers: a three percent interest rate on a HUD loan, three and a half percent down, one time, owner-occupiers only, investors excluded. Combine this with building and zoning incentives.

Auto-enrollment retirement accounts that you have to opt out of. Congress has proposed these accounts many times through bipartisan efforts.

Raise the SSI asset limit and index it, so people can actually save money to buy something.

To move more Americans into the ownership half, we have to break the chain of just-in-time benefits.

I don’t know what happened to Lou. She’d be about seventy-seven now. I hope more than twenty years of profit sharing went home with her.

I hope she’s sitting down to supper with people she loves. Mayonnaise spread thick.

Eat your bread with joy.Drink your wine with a merry heart.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive,The Almighty takes pleasure in your pleasure.

Sources

Bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent of U.S. wealth: Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED series WFRBSB50215, Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Bottom 50%

Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets: bettermarkets.org. Podcast episode here.

Wealth by age of family head: Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances

Associate Stock Purchase Plan. 15% match on the first $1,800, more than 400,000 participants, plan offered “for almost 30 years,” Sam Walton on share accessibility: Walmart, “Walmart Announces 3-for-1 Stock Split,” Jan. 30, 2024

U.S. associate workforce (approx. 1.6 million): Walmart, About

Walmart Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plan annual reports: SEC EDGAR, Walmart Inc. Form 11-K filings

SSI resource limits. $2,000 individual / $3,000 couple, unchanged since 1989: Social Security Administration, “Understanding SSI — Resources”

SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act: S. 1234, 119th Congress; H.R. 2540, 119th Congress

Auto-enrollment retirement accounts: S. 1526, Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2025, 119th Congress

FHA loans, 3.5 percent down: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Let FHA Loans Help You”

Buck’s Ice Cream, Eckles Hall, Tiger Stripe (French vanilla with Dutch chocolate ribbon): University of Missouri CAFNR, Buck’s Ice Cream

Foremost Dairy Research Center: Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, Foremost Dairy

Ecclesiastes 9, New King James, paraphrased.

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