“I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t have any left in stock,” Gabriela Gil Carrillo tentatively told a customer through her surgical mask.
She recounted anxiously awaiting their response – unsure if it would be one of frustration or understanding.
After the customer walked away uttering nothing more than an exasperated sigh, Carrillo reapplied hand sanitizer for what felt like the hundredth time that shift.
She moved on to restocking the barren shelves, wiping down every surface she encountered along the way.
Weaving from aisle to aisle, she enters this strange dance with customers every week. Some scramble away to maintain as much distance as possible, while others chase her down with questions.
This routine has become the new normal for Carrillo.
Carrillo, a third-year climate science and environmental engineering student, works 25 to 27 hours per week at Target’s Westwood Village location.
Although her schedule varies, her most common workdays are from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays and 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. Sometimes she finds herself clocking in as early as 4 a.m. and ending at 9 a.m. before attending her civil environmental engineering lecture and discussion.
Carrillo was offered her position as a Target general merchandiser March 27. She applied for the job during finals week of winter quarter, after losing her on-campus job at the UCLA Lab School on March 10 – just a few days before she learned that she was also losing her spring quarter on campus.
At the UCLA Lab School, Carrillo helped supervise students after class. But once they switched to online learning, Carrillo’s services were no longer needed.
As a result, Carrillo joined the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the New York Times, more than 40 million workers have filed jobless claims.
The nation’s real unemployment rate now exceeds 23.9% - its highest peak since the Great Depression in 1933. The Los Angeles County unemployment rate sits not far behind at 20.3% and rising. In February, the national unemployment rate had dipped down to only 3.5%, a record low in 50 years.
As Carrillo was studying for her finals, she said her heart dropped when a notification from the UCLA Lab School popped up. Although she was already anticipating the news, she panicked as she realized she didn’t have the money to pay her $800 rent due that month, she said.
“I really didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going to get the money,” she said.
She immediately called her friend who was also working at the UCLA Lab School, and they tried to plan how they were going to afford food, rent and tuition.
At the time, Carrillo was unsure of how to access the $600 weekly stimulus offered to unemployed Californians. Because her parents had never been able to file for unemployment before, Carrillo never considered it an option.
She needed to find a job.
During her hunt, Carrillo said she directly felt the ramifications of the increase in the unemployment pool.
“It was stressful because there were a lot of people trying to get work after losing their jobs at places considered nonessential,” she said.
Carrillo applied as soon as possible to try to get ahead of the surplus of others applying. She believes she barely made the cut, as her friend who applied just a week later didn’t even get an interview. Throughout the process, she was worried any little mistake in her responses would result in her not being hired.
About a week after applying, Carrillo landed the job and didn’t need to move back home.
Although Carrillo is originally from southeast Los Angeles, she decided to stay in Westwood in order to take online classes in an environment more conducive to learning.
“Back home, I live in a pretty small apartment, and my whole family is there,” she said. “And since I’m first gen, my parents don’t really understand how much work goes into college classes.”
Because her parents had no exposure to higher education, receiving only up to an eighth-grade education in Mexico, it’s difficult for them to understand the seriousness of her classes, she said.
“Throughout my life, my dad has always asked us why we have so much homework,” she said.
“You’re kids,” he would constantly remind her. “You’re supposed to have fun.”
Her father wants to prioritize her well-being, she said, but sometimes he might not understand that education comes first on days when she had to stay up until 3 a.m. to finish an essay.
It can get hectic living with her parents and 17-year-old sister, Carrillo said. In a cluster of closely packed apartments, she recounted how the sound of loud music or screaming kids on the street constantly filled the compact apartment. Additionally, her unreliable home Wi-Fi would have made online schooling a challenge.
When she visited home during Mother’s Day weekend, she recalled the panic she felt as she watched her test upload to Gradescope at an unbearably slow rate. It ended up taking 15 minutes to simply submit her test – she emailed her professor to apologize profusely for turning it in late.
Carrillo knew she needed to stay in Westwood for the remainder of the school year. Although LA County has announced plans to subsidize rent and expand tenant protection using emergency funding in the next round of the federal CARES Act, Carrillo said she has not been informed of any reduced rent prices thus far. She decided to move out of her previous apartment and move in with a friend. She now pays $500 monthly.
After Carrillo shared her Google calendar with me, I opened up the Safari tab, greeted by an array of multicolored blocks stacked upon each other for the rest of the week. Some of her days began at 9 a.m. and ended at 11 p.m., with hours allotted to chemistry, engineering and working at Target.
When I asked her how she manages her time between her job and academics, she admitted that she has been struggling, especially with the added stress of having to adapt to online formats.
She had even added an extra class to her study list with the mindset that online classes would be easier, but in hindsight, she underestimated their difficulty.
After a taxing eight hour shift at Target, she said she finds it extremely difficult to resist the temptation of pushing her lecture videos to the next day, which sometimes leads to a pileup of unfinished work. Her eyes strain from staring at a screen all day, further incentivizing her to shut the computer, she said.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she attempts to dedicate most of her days to schoolwork, catching up on lectures and assignments from morning until night.
During a particularly stressful week during midterm season, she took a couple days off work to dedicate her time to studying. She described how nerve-wracking it was to ultimately make this decision as she was scared to upset her boss or be fired.
But because of the virus, her work has been understaffed from workers quitting or not showing up – and Carrillo’s job has become indispensable.
When I asked her how working now compares to what it was like before the coronavirus, she hesitated and chuckled before answering.
“Customers’ attitudes are split between those who are very understanding of the situation and those who are very frustrated,” she said. “And honestly, I see why. It is a very frustrating time but some of them do take it out on the workers.”
Carrillo shared that the hardest part of her job is being blamed for items, such as toilet paper, not being in stock, even though it is completely out of her control.
“We can’t do anything,” she said. “We can’t go into the back room and pull it out because we have nothing left.”
She then laughed as she recounted an encounter from the day before when someone walked in 10 minutes before closing and yelled at Carrillo for not being able to provide her with a thermometer.
Carrillo said she tried to retain her composure and apologize for the item being out of stock, but the customer’s anger and frustration continued to grow as she yelled at Carrillo for wasting her time.
But at the end of the day, it’s the risk of contracting the virus that worries Carrillo and her parents the most.
Target has many precautions in place to limit the spread of disease including enforcing social distancing between staff and customers. Employees are constantly wiping down surfaces, speaking through plexiglass partitions, applying hand sanitizer and checking their temperatures – but Carrillo still experiences anxiety with every shift, she said.
Though she has not yet experienced any symptoms of the virus, Carrillo said she gets apprehensive whenever she visits her family. Her mom has diabetes and is immunosuppressed, amplifying an already stressful situation.
Outside of her taxing life as a full-time student and a part-time worker, Carrillo struggles to make time for herself. Carrillo explained how her work has taken a toll on her social life as she simply does not have enough time in the day to participate in normalizing activities like group FaceTimes with her friends. She said she finds a balance in spending time with her roommate, who is also her closest friend.
After Carrillo spends all day practicing social distancing, she said she looks forward to retreating to the safe haven of her apartment where she is free to enjoy her roommate’s company – even if it’s to do something as trivial as watching TikToks together. Their favorite activity is recreating recipes from the app, like banana bread or other desserts, whenever they both happen to have free time.
“It sounds so childish, but it’s our way of having fun,” Carrillo said as she laughed.