Consuming Work: Youth Labor in America By Yasemin Besen-Cassino Temple University Press. 2014. 202 pp. $25.95 paper

Abstract

Consuming Work: Youth Labor in America by Yasemin Besen-Cassino is a promising yet vexing book. Foremost, it is promising in its detailed examination of the intersection of work, consumption, and leisure for middle- and upper-class (mostly white) college students who work in “cool” but low-wage retail jobs. These students take such jobs not for the paycheck, Besen-Cassino finds, but for the chance to socialize and become associated with the brand, while also taking advantage of employee discounts. Thus, for these particular workers at least, Besen-Cassino argues, work itself becomes “a branded experience to be consumed by young people” (17). The data for this study are drawn primarily from an ethnography of “Coffee Bean,” an upscale coffee shop located in an affluent suburb which, according to one of its supervisors, seeks to hire “cool people” with the “right vibe” (31), who also happen to be almost exclusively white and affluent. In 2001 Besen-Cassino observed workers at two branches of the coffee shop and conducted interviews with forty workers between the ages of 18–21, all but two of whom were white and all middle- or upper-class. Besen-Cassino supplemented her ethnographic data with survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and the World Values Study, which allows her to situate youth labor in the United States among other industrialized countries. She also conducted two later waves of interviews with more racially and socioeconomically diverse student workers in another state, yet she does not seem to draw heavily from these interviews in the book. With the exception of one chapter based on survey data, Besen-Cassino’s ethnography of “Coffee Bean” is the foundation of the book.