This holiday season, I’m working in sales at a store in a giant luxury mall, just outside Philadelphia and near one of the richest Zip Codes in the United States. Major employers in the area include defense contractors and pharmacy conglomerates. Every day, I park my run-down car among BMWs and hybrids. The mall’s interior is decked out for Christmas: light-studded garlands are strung in the eaves; colossal reindeer grace the entrances like sphinxes; security officers zoom by on Segways. The mall rats who hover around the doors smoking cigarettes wear brands of designer jeans I’ve only ever heard about in songs. Some of the stores resemble modern-art exhibits, and I’m still not entirely sure what they sell because I’m too afraid to approach the willowy, elegant salespeople to ask.

My work, truthfully, is not bad, nor are the customers. This is not going to be an essay excoriating the behavior of the rich, who have been, at their best, perfectly friendly, and, at their utmost worst, uninterested in my presence. But there is something shocking about working in a place like this, especially around the holidays. It is the presence of money—lots of it, more than I have ever seen in one place before—and the ease with which it moves around me.

Every day, I serve a parade of affluent customers: a perfectly coiffed eleven-year-old girl, carrying half a dozen shopping bags, who launched into a deeply nuanced assessment of her own skin, for which she ended up purchasing fifty dollars’ worth of high-end creams; a man in his late twenties, no older than I am, wearing a pair of shoes that cost more than my monthly rent. Then there was the kindly middle-aged woman who stopped by on a whim and picked up everything I suggested without a moment’s hesitation. She checked out, having spent hundreds of dollars, thanked me, and was gone. Hours later, this last interaction in particular was still hovering around me like smoke as I drove home through the too-early dark. When I entered my apartment, I was still trying to figure out why it had made me feel so strange. As I recounted the day’s events to my partner, I put my finger on it. “She had just walked in,” I said, “just because. And she didn’t look at the price of anything, not for a second. It just looked so easy.”

I once dated someone from money, and it felt confusing and alien in the same way: she kept what my roommate called “banker’s son’s hours” (courtesy of Alice Cooper’s “Generation Landslide”), threw elaborate parties where she never asked guests to chip in, and spent money as reflexively as she breathed. I am not, and have never been, in poverty, but I have been varying shades of poor: tiny-nonprofit-salary-in-an-expensive-urban-area poor, graduate-student poor, can’t-find-a-job-out-of-school-during-a-recession poor. In the mall, the mingling of my financial status and my customers’ abundant wealth results in a kind of daily culture shock to which I have yet to adapt. And on top of exhaustion and stress, I find myself feeling oddly antisocial. When I come home at the end of each day, it’s difficult to talk, to interact. I have always loved the aesthetic of Christmas, but this year I find myself utterly immune to all of it. I simply don’t care. I experience a varying mixture of depression, anxiety about the cost of gas and food and my student loans and other necessary expenses, and a kind of overwhelming disassociation that makes everything difficult—and, at times, impossible.

I’m not alone. In July, Stephen Gandel, of Fortune, wrote about how economic growth for budget retailers—places like Target and Walmart—has stagnated, while luxury shopping continues to rise. A chart accompanying the piece showed sales from the first quarter of 2013 rising more than nine per cent for high-end retailers, and zero per cent for discount stores. This confirms what we already know: the wealthy have reaped far more of the benefits of the economic recovery than the poor and middle-class.

And now, just after Black Friday, I’m able to see this all in action. Much has been written about those who participate in Black Friday on the buying end. Less attention has been paid to those on the other side of the register. Retail workers earned a median wage of just over ten dollars per hour in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and during the holiday season they must contend with particularly frenzied customers. But the tough work and low pay distract from a larger question: Even if the crowds were large but orderly, even if we paid all retail workers a living wage and didn’t make them work on Thanksgiving, what does it mean to them—what does it do to them—to see so much money moving in such unbelievable quantities?

As it turns out, it may do quite a bit. Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, has done extensive studies on how the presence of money affects the brain. In her study “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” published in Science in 2006, she found that “money-priming”—that is, exposing people to money, or representations of money, or even words having to do with money—is enough to temporarily reduce a person’s ability to perceive physical and emotional sensations and to make them “disinterested” in others. To deduce this, she exposed people to money in various forms—essays about wealth, word scrambles containing phrases like “a high-paying salary,” even Monopoly bills. She then asked them to do various tasks: helping a stranger pick up spilled pencils, donating to a charity, pulling out a chair, or assisting someone asking for aid. She found that money-primed people may be less inclined to help others, and likelier to eschew social intimacy. The study hypothesized, and then confirmed, that “when reminded of money, people would want to be free from dependency and would also prefer that others not depend on them.”

In other words, the study suggests that constant exposure to money, even if it’s not your own, can desensitize you to the needs of others. And what is a mall but a giant box of money? What’s more, selling high-end products during a high-volume shopping season seems to make a difference. Vohs explained to me that while any amount or representation of money will trip off this tendency toward disinterest, the effect is amplified when you use larger quantities of money and raise the frequency of the monetary interactions. So retail workers ringing up hundreds or even thousands of dollars of purchases would be more “primed,” and thus more likely to experience this involuntary tendency toward self-isolation. Everyone is exposed to money in some capacity or another on a daily basis, but the life of a retail worker, in this regard, is unique.

On top of that, constant exposure to wealth in conjunction with one’s own financial struggles may affect people’s happiness. For a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2011, researchers looked at data gathered from 1972 to 2008 by the General Social Survey, a poll of people randomly chosen from the U.S. population. They examined respondents’ incomes alongside over-all levels of U.S. income equality over time; they also studied how people rated their happiness and judged how fair and trustworthy they felt other Americans were. For the richest twenty per cent, levels of income equality did not affect their happiness, or their sense of others’ fairness and trustworthiness. But for the rest, inequality was correlated with, in general, “a diminished sense of well-being” and a sense that other people were less fair and trustworthy.

Those of us who work in retail during the holiday season have plenty to worry about: managing unruly holiday crowds, anticipating potential unemployment in January, and buying gifts of our own when we’re being paid ten dollars an hour. Treating workers better and paying them more is the first step toward addressing our woes, but this would solve only part of the problem, absent a societal shift in how we value money and the things it buys.

As I found out at 3 A.M. on Black Friday, the light in the mall looks the same in the middle of the night as it does at twilight, or noon. I stood across from a teen-age girl who had come into my store with her family. I was bleary-eyed and exhausted; she looked just as worn out. She asked me a question. I answered. “I’m tired,” she told me, as if she were confessing some secret. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m tired, too.”

Photograph by Tobias Schwarz/Reuters.