‘Shaun of the Dead’ is About the Horrors of Customer Service

And a lot of the zombies are, themselves, people who work in customer service. It’s likely no coincidence that the first zombie Shaun and Ed encounter is Mary, the grocery store clerk we saw briefly in the opening credits. Not unlike Shaun, she too is still wearing her uniform and name tag.

It’s not just Mary, there’s also the bartender and Nelson, the convenience store clerk. The movie repeatedly goes out of its way to show us that the transition from customer service to zombism is a somewhat lateral move, not just with the opening credits, but even when the zombie outbreak is in full swing, Shaun doesn’t notice that anything has changed.

Then, at the very end of the film, we learn that the zombies’ continued motor skills and lack of brain function make them “ideal recruitment for the service industry.” We even see that Noel, Shaun’s phone-loving 17-year-old co-worker, is now one of the zombies being exploited by corporate interests, and is “working” as a grocery store attendant, complete with a blue smock and, of course, a name tag. While obviously funny, this quick joke also makes the film’s theme very explicit: Shaun escaping the zombie horde also meant Shaun escaping the service industry.