On April 11, over 31,000 workers at 240 Stop & Shop locations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island went on strike. Represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, workers were protesting proposals from management that included increased health care costs, and reduced pension contributions for many part-time workers. Stop & Shop’s parent company Ahold Delhaize claimed the cuts were in order to stay competitive, though they made $2 billion in profits last year, so few bought the argument.

It should be obvious that better conditions for workers means better conditions for customers, but the through line isn’t always clear. If your waiter has the flu, your dining experience is going to be worse (even without the risk of spreading germs). If your Uber driver has been driving for 18 hours because that’s the only way he can make rent, he’s going to be a worse driver. But if you’re shopping at bigger, chain grocery stores, chances are you can do it with minimal employee interaction. Your meat is pre-packaged, your produce stacked, and sometimes your checkout is self-service. The toll bad conditions take on grocery employees is less obvious.

But looking at the things unions and employees are protesting reads like a page out of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s Guide to Management. Stop & Shop proposed eliminating premium pay on national holidays and eliminating raises. At Walmart, one pregnant employee had to continue heavy lifting or risk being put on unpaid leave. And organizing group Whole Worker says the store’s “order to shelf” inventory management system (the inter-store system that lets workers track what’s being bought and what needs to be replaced) is so punitive it regularly makes employees cry from stress.

Grocery workers, like workers in many industries, have reached a breaking point. Working conditions have deteriorated since the ’90s, taking a total nosedive after the recession of 2008. “The ’90s were really a period of transition for a lot of industries, and we saw a lot of consolidation in the grocery industry,” says Stephanie Luce, Chair and Professor of Labor Studies at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Between 1996 and 1999 there were 385 grocery mergers, according to one USDA report. Bigger companies began crushing unions, and traditional grocers now had to compete with mega-corporations like Walmart for customers. In order to keep operating within such tight margins, grocers cut costs in labor by cutting benefits and shifting full-time jobs to part-time ones.

The shift led to a lot of employee dissatisfaction, and organizing, especially in the last few years. Unions and union-backed groups, as well as other organizations like United For Respect, and Whole Worker are fighting back against diminishing wages and benefits, and “involuntary” part-time work. And it appears to be working. During the 10-day Stop & Shop strike, the longest in the history of the company, visits to the store went down by 75 percent the first weekend, meaning that a majority of shoppers were willing to stand with employees, sacrificing their convenient shopping to join the fight for better working conditions.

Union-busting management often relies on the assumption that these sorts of disputes are internal matters that, short of a strike, won’t affect how customers shop or perceive the store. But complaints from customers prove that’s not true. When certain Key Foods locations were striking, shoppers have noted that the new employees who crossed the picket line to run the meat department weren’t as good as the regular employees. “The meat is no good,” said one local of the replacement workers at the Sunset Park Key Foods. “They leave it out too long.” On top of the reasonable opinion that people deserve to be paid fairly and treated well at work, a lack of those things directly affects customer experience.

At Whole Foods, even customers have noted a decline in quality of life for employees since the company was bought by Amazon, though the store has always had a bad reputation with labor activists. Not only have the products gotten worse, but employees appear harried, and stores are in states of disarray. “Now the employees are overworked as shifts are understaffed, and the morale plummeted as the customers get less satisfied with products and service,” writes one customer on Consumer Affairs. “But, does anyone at the top care?” Whole Foods employees are also attempting to unionize, despite Amazon being notorious for union-busting.

Among the most guilty of exploiting workers is Walmart. Antonia (last name withheld) worked in the grocery department for a decade, in stores in Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas. In 2007, they paid less than what she had earned elsewhere, but “by that time, I didn’t have another option. I have three kids, and I have to take whatever I have,” she said. In 2014, she moved to Texas, and noticed conditions were worsening. “Mostly everybody, if they pay the rent, they don’t have no money to buy groceries. If they have car problems, they have to borrow money from everybody.”

According to Antonia, these conditions directly affected how she and her associates could do their jobs. In South Sioux City, Nebraska, she said there were at least three people working the produce department at any given time. But soon, the store started cutting workers, sometimes leaving her to unload 11 pallets of produce by herself, at wages she could barely support her family on.

”I think when the associates don’t feel comfortable, they don’t feel happy, I think that that reflects in the customer, because they don’t take care of the customer very well either,” she said. “How I can smile to somebody when your kid doesn’t have enough food in the house? When you are so behind on the rent?” When she was finally invited to a OUR/United For Respect meeting, an organization that has worked to raise wages and improve parental leave policy at Walmart, she said she felt a sense of relief. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I am not the only one. We are so many, and it’s not just at this store, it’s everywhere.’”

Though grocers unions have pressured management and gone on strike over the years, the recent push in the past few months has gained more attention, partially because of political campaigning. Four presidential candidates commented on the Stop & Shop strike: Elizabeth Warren showed up to a picket line with doughnuts, saying she would fight for the “dignity of working people;” Joe Biden joined a rally and told striking workers they are “fighting for what all New Englanders want — affordable health care, a better wage, and to be treated right by the company they made successful;” both Pete Buttigeig and Amy Klobuchar visited rallies, and Bernie Sanders picketed with striking McDonald’s employees. (Republicans are seemingly avoiding photo ops at the picket lines.)

That four Democratic candidates chose to stand with striking workers confirms that public opinion about labor organizing, at least on the left, is changing for the positive, and that it’s a big enough issue on voters’ minds for politicians to comment on it. According to Luce, the uptick in organizing among grocers is part of a larger trend. “I think there’s been a lot of unhappiness for a while, a lot of frustration,” she said. “But now we’re at a moment where… people are willing to take risks that maybe they weren’t willing to take.”