I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, June 25th.

So if you've gone shopping recently, you may have noticed unbearably long lines and fewer workers in stores than before the pandemic,

not so much grocery stores, but other kinds of shopping.

But while most of us would attribute the disruptions to social distance requirements causing the lines

and other COVID safety precautions, according to shocking new statistics, a record number of workers in retail are actually

fleeing the retail sector for, well, just about anything else.

And our next guest alleges that this is actually a good thing.

So joining us now to break down this trend is Anna North, senior correspondent at Vox,

an author of the bestselling book Outlawed, which was released earlier this year. Her newest article

is called The Big Job Exodus Might Not Be All It's Cracked Up to Be. Hi Anna, thanks for coming on and

joining us today. Thanks for having me. According to Washington Post, nearly 650,000 workers in the retail sector quit their jobs in April alone, the biggest number in over 20 years.

Why do you think that is?

Yeah, so we've got kind of a lot of factors at play here.

You know, I mean, one thing we should start out with is that even before the pandemic, retail jobs often were not super good jobs.

These were jobs that had very low pay, you know, typically $13 an hour or less, sometimes minimum wage,

even lower than that in some states.

There are also jobs that, you know, required a lot of wrangling with difficult customers,

something that's gotten sort of more difficult over the years as, you know, as more customers

have been packed into stores and the whole experience has kind of been streamlined.

And then we take the pandemic where suddenly these jobs,

in addition to being low paid, potentially annoying and difficult,

also became suddenly super dangerous in a way that retail workers never could have

...