Service With A (Proper To Her Station) Smile

I've been reading Jan Whitaker's 2006 Service and Style: how the American department stores fashioned the middle class. It covers a lot of commercial and social history, from the nineteenth century to the stores' heyday in the Depression. Department stores expanded after World War II, but were soon forced to move from selling unique store brands to carrying the nationally advertised brands consumers demanded. National brands sold themselves through their marketing, so that stores no longer needed to provide a high level of service and were now forced to compete with discount retailers selling exactly the same brands. Ultimately, the customer exodus to the suburbs led to the demise of many stores; others survived mainly in malls, not city centers.

As it happens, pre-Labor Day I had just finished a chapter on stores' personnel, including founders and the masses of hired staff.

Women sales clerks made up most of the workforce by the 1890s, when most major stores had evolved from dry goods businesses staffed by men. Clerks' pay was poor, and hours abusively long—

... Sixty hours a week was commonplace even in better stores. Overtime pay was unheard of, and clerks were often expected to work Sundays and holidays to prepare for sales. If they were late, they could face fines for every minute of absence. Humiliation was routine. A guard searched them for stolen merchandise each day as they left the store.

Even worse, the public suspected clerks of accepting money for sexual favors from "mashers" who hung around their counters and employee entrances. According to popular lore, saleswomen were audacious flirts who used glances and smiles to sell goods—and who knew what else?—to male customers.

... In retrospect, the issue of sales clerk morality looks like a case of middle-class vexation over the invasion of public space by large numbers of working-class young women, many of whom refused to display the degree of deference and maidenly timidity demanded by polite society.

More sympathetic women believed that if young clerks sometimes went wrong, it was mainly because pay was too low for them to support themselves. Many middle-class women undertook reform efforts, working for stronger labor laws and threatening store boycotts. Especially decrying the long hours and lack of overtime pay before Christmas, reformers asked stores to reduce night hours, and the public to "shop early." Stores did respond by ordering merchandise early and moving the start of the shopping season to early December.

By the early 'teens, says Whitaker, pay increased (but very slightly), and "leading stores" began organizing clubs and leisure activities for employees, along with calling them "associates"—a euphemism I had assumed was quite recent.

Whitaker has interesting material on how stores worked to bridge the gap between middle-class patrons and poorly educated clerks with instruction in middle-class behavior and esthetic standards. She reproduces a lesson on proper speech, including such "Wrong–Right" contrasts as—

Lady, is this your package? – Madam/Mrs. Brown, is this your package?

The party who... – The person/woman who...

I have this in four sizes. – We have this in four sizes.

This is swell/grand/nifty. – This is smart.

Stores established

Dress codes, speech correction, and "lifestyle" training… The ideal clerk was efficient, knowledgeable, helpful, and pleasantly mannered, and she could answer questions and provide assistance without inserting her "self" into the transaction. She was supposed to maintain social distance. To the status-conscious customer, nothing could kill a sale faster than hearing the clerk say, "I wear that kind myself."
...

Emotional labor was at the heart of the sales clerk's role. She was supposed to avoid showing impatience or giving offense, since customers remembered affronts and avoided stores that had offended them in the smallest way. But she was also supposed to flatter the customer and create a pleasant association with the store. Flattery required a clerk to "read" the customer, to listen with minute attentiveness, and to recall her name and preferences on later occasions.

Though, Whitaker notes, class friction could work in many ways. Clerks had to address everyone as "madame'—

including washerwomen and immigrants speaking broken English. The low-status customer could be the most demanding, almost provoking a clerk to lose her temper. Frances Donovan, a sociologist who conducted research by working in department stores in the 1920s, noticed that customers employed as servants sometimes played out a role-reversal game, treating clerks as their servants. Interestingly, as a middle-class woman, Donovan could not bring herself to call them madame.

Employers' preferred "reforms" were to provide activities for workers. There were companies that provided summer camps, organized concerts by employee choirs and orchestras, summer camps, and published regular newsletters. I enjoyed the January 1925 Hess Brothers (Allentown, PA) newsletter, which was full of positive thinking exhortations to the store's "Co-Workers," along with this—

Co-Workers and Mr. Chas. Hess Exchange New Year Greetings.

On New Year's Eve, Wednesday, 31st, 1924, the following cablegram was sent to Mr. Charles Hess who from last reports was visiting Monte Carlo, France.

Continued Good Health for 1925

Co-Workers

On Friday, January 2nd, 1925, the co-workers received the following cablegram from Mr. Charles Hess, which was dated January 1, 2 p. m.

Wishing Everybody a Happy New Year.

Charles Hess

Stores often had a cult of The Founder, which was useful for advertising and "branding" purposes. Many stores also remained for generations under family control, but Whitaker says things changed when—

Scientific management entered department stores in the 1920s and transformed them from one-man shows and rule-of-thumb operations into businesses like all others.... With the adoption of modern methods, records were kept and statisticians hired to pore over anything that could be quantified. In the 1920s, the comptroller became the most influential person in a store. Executives were hired from outside the store, while family members had to prove their worth. Founders' sons had to take business courses just like anyone else aspiring to management. Buyers [a position that had become a means of advancement for women] lost their power as personnel departments took over hiring and merchandise managers supervised budgets and buying decisions. Each department was rated on its productivity, balancing its sales volume against the square footage it occupied and the number of clerks it employed. Many store functions were contracted to outside agencies....

It wasn't until the New Deal that minimum wage laws increased worker pay, and hours became restricted to a 40-hour 5-day week. Strikes intensified in the '30s, particularly by Teamsters. Employer reaction was predictable: lockouts, along with such PR efforts as the San Francisco Retailers Council advertising in 1938 for public support against "the attempt of arrogant union leaders to Sovietize our business." Union activity united retailers into city-wide groups to oppose it. Delivery driver strikes led stores to use common delivery services, a move that boosted the fortunes of United Parcel Service.

For all the controlling paternalism of stores toward employees, it's startling how Miss Kunesh of the alterations and tailoring department could not only retire, but be given "a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe." Maybe she managed the department, or maybe not; this store was considered a luxury goods dealer that may have been extra-generous.

Retirement party for Halle's employee, 1968.
"Off to Europe-- For completing 50 years of service with Halles, Miss Anna Kulesh, 7510 Pearl Rd., was honored with a reception at the downtown store yesterday and presented a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe. Miss Kunesh is in the alterations and tailoring department." -- photo verso. Text on verso contains two different spellings of honoree's last name. The presenter is Walter Halle.

Nearly another fifty years on, the still-employed—for a paycheck and little else—are mostly service workers, thanks to The Owners' successful arrangements. Those still serving do so under the demand for a never-ending process of outdoing oneself—without ever, ever exposing any of that troublesome self.