Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  Another horror story involved Reinhart’s daughter-in-law, who also worked in customer service at the store. “[One] lady was so mad at her, she took her daughter’s wet panties off and threw them at my daughter-in-law,” Reinhart said. Her eyes welled up as she recalled her daughter-in-law’s scream when the wet underwear hit her.

  Retail might have given her a thick skin, and she might have prided herself on her ability to manage difficult people, but these memories clearly still stung. “That is another thing with retail. If you are good at a job—no matter how crappy that job is—they won’t take you out of it,” she said. “Some days you go home feeling depleted.” And the worst part was that after customers behaved horribly, management would often give in to keep them happy. “Not only are you insulted and berated by customers, you felt it double for your store manager to come out and give that customer what they wanted anyway.”

  The idea that retail was not a “real job” was echoed constantly by her customers. “The word ‘stupid’ comes out so much that I truly believe they think we are all uneducated,” Reinhart continued. “I went to college. Half my cashiers are all in college right now. How dare you?” But in the changing economy, she pointed out, retail work was far from just a job for teenagers. For her, it had been a career that paid her as much as the factory jobs that had built the American middle class—though with no union and with that modern innovation, a 401(k), rather than a pension. “Most of the people my age—I am sixty—grew up with stay-at-home moms,” she said. Now, women make up most of the workforce in retail and service, and many of them are moms like her, supporting a family.

  After nearly ten years at the big Toys “R” Us store in Huntington, Long Island, Reinhart transferred to a new Babies “R” Us store. The holidays were calmer, without the mad rush every year at the toy store, and she was able to spend more time with her kids. “I came home and my house was decorated right after Thanksgiving. All those years, I didn’t get to enjoy the holidays. My kids were like eight, nine, ten years old, and they appreciated it more, too.”

  As her sons grew up, Reinhart and her husband began to consider moving south, following her sister and brother, who were already in North Carolina. She once again questioned whether she wanted to stay at Toys “R” Us, but since the company had nearly eight hundred stores, she could move and have a job already lined up—and keep the salary she was making in New York. She also had noticed that in her years at Toys “R” Us, retail had begun to change: all the ads she saw were for part-time jobs with no benefits. So she moved to Durham, North Carolina, and became store supervisor at a Babies “R” Us by the Southpoint Mall. The baby registries, in particular, made the job worth it—she enjoyed sitting down with new parents and helping them pick things out. Years later, at a different job, she ran into a former customer, who remembered her immediately. “She says, ‘You did my whole registry with me. You sold me my furniture.’” It was moments like that that made her actually like the work.

  It was sometime around her move that Reinhart first heard mention of Bain Capital’s involvement with Toys “R” Us, though, as it was explained to the employees, Bain was investing money in the company to help it expand the baby stores into superstores. She didn’t think too much of it at first. As a human resources representative, she said, she used to go to job fairs and talk up the company. “I would say things like, ‘It is a financially stable company. Toys “R” Us has been around forever.’”

  Those words haunt her now. In 2005, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and Vornado Realty Trust took over the company, and things began to change. Slowly at first—slowly enough that Reinhart was shocked when she was told her store was being closed. It was shuttered in April 2018, and the company was liquidated shortly thereafter. Private equity buys up firms that are wobbly through leveraged buyouts that put the debt used to buy them back on the company’s balance sheets; if any more trouble hits a company, whether it be increased competition, in the case of Toys “R” Us, or, more recently, the global pandemic, things can unravel quickly. Once iconic brands like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus have fallen into bankruptcy in this way.1

  What that meant for Reinhart was the loss of a job she’d had for twenty-nine years, with no severance. “It was almost my entire adult life,” she said, shaking her head. “What was I thinking?” But the time she’d put in taught her to advocate for herself and for her colleagues, from those moments on the customer service desk to arguing, as HR, for higher wages. “I am most proud, probably, of my work then,” she said.

  “It did prepare me to fight the company.”

  IN 1892, THE WORKERS AT THE HOMESTEAD STEEL PLANT IN WESTERN Pennsylvania challenged their employers’ demand for massive wage cuts. They were locked out, the lockout became a strike, and the employer called in the union-busting Pinkerton detectives. In the resulting battle, seven of those workers were killed. Today, the smokestacks that burned over those deaths still stand, but the rest of the plant is now a shopping mall, with the tagline, “Where tradition meets trend.” Those factory grounds, where workers fought and died to uphold labor standards, now house retail jobs—the wages low, the turnover high, as if those old battles never happened.2

  Retail salesclerk is the single largest job category in the United States and also a common occupation in much of Europe. Even with the rise of Internet sales, a pandemic, and headlines in recent years proclaiming a “retail apocalypse,” retail remains a cornerstone of the economy and a way that millions of people put food on the table. Yet those jobs, in so many cases, are “bad” jobs, with low security, few benefits, erratic schedules, and virtually no opportunity for upward mobility.3

  Retail jobs are not new, of course, and they have long retained many of the characteristics we still associate with them—they are dominated by women and part-timers, and they are taxing not just physically but mentally and emotionally, as workers often feel trapped between customers and managers. But as the economy shifted from a manufacturing focus to a focus on consumption, the manufacturing jobs—gendered masculine and built on a full-time schedule—were cut back. Retail rose to dominance in manufacturing’s stead, and as it did, so did those feminine-gendered labor patterns. But the real difference between the retail jobs and the manufacturing jobs that were fading was the requirement of that “service with a smile.” Retail workers, unlike manufacturing workers, have to appear to love their work.4

  Retail was long considered a sideline, an add-on to the “real” economy, its workers less important or serious than those in factories. For a long time, retail stores were small businesses; up until the Great Depression in the United States, independently owned stores constituted 89 percent of retail establishments and did 70 percent of retail sales. “Mom-and-pop” stores were just that: family establishments that had maybe one or two outside employees. Mostly, the family did what was necessary, even the children.5

  But capitalist production led to capitalist retail—the massive department store or the sprawling chain that replicated across the country, promising a familiar array of goods wherever the shopper went. And capitalist retail, with centralized management, meant salesclerk jobs. In the United States, non-owner retail jobs exploded between 1880, when there were about 32,000 clerks, and 1930, when there were 2.3 million. The work varied with the stores—high-end clothing retail involved high-end personal service, with saleswomen patiently outfitting the shopper from head to toe. By contrast, “five-and-dime” stores served the growing working class, providing groceries, dry goods, and the occasional treat, with perhaps just a passing grin from the clerk. The jobs tended to be similar, though, in that they stretched over long hours for low pay.6

  As retail stores expanded, the job of the clerk did, too. Hand-selling required a range of skills, from product knowledge to physical stamina (fifteen-hour workdays were not uncommon). It also called for the kind of patience and “people skills” needed to read a customer’s mood as well as her budget, in order to suggest products that wou
ld appeal and upsell extras. Yet such skills were not considered as important as the ones that men in the factory or on the farm might have; the service economy, historian Bethany Moreton wrote, “capitalized on this broad social agreement that women weren’t really workers, their skills not really skills.” In other words, they capitalized on the same logic that applied to women’s work in the home, paid or unpaid, as well as to child care and teaching.7

  Shopping was also women’s work, an extension of housework. Retail stores therefore were designed to appeal to women’s sensibilities, whether they were upscale or downmarket. Retail employers staffed up with women workers, who the employers assumed innately had those sensibilities, and would be good at making the store feel homelike. Women, after all, were presumed to be naturally caring and sensitive to the needs and desires of others—and that made them better at selling to other women without overstepping boundaries.

  Department stores, in particular, made skilled selling central to their business model. But they had to balance the need to develop the skills of their employees with the desire to keep labor costs down, profits high, and prices affordable. Hiring women, particularly young women, who were presumed to be pliant, helped. That those young women would presumably depart in relatively short order to get married and have families of their own had the benefit for the bosses of keeping turnover relatively high, so that workers never got too expensive or too demanding. And part-time scheduling went hand in hand with low wages: younger women were assumed to be dependent on parents, while married women, if they managed to hold on to a job at all in an era of intense prejudice against married women working, were assumed to be working for “pin money.” Their real job was supposed to be homemaking.8

  Sales jobs were, despite the relatively low pay, respectable work for young women who aspired to class mobility. The department store clerk was expected to model the merchandise she sold, and store discounts encouraged her to shop. This expectation of respectability also meant that sales jobs were largely for white women. Black women—and even Jewish women and immigrants—did not give off the impression of middle-classness needed for sales work. Yet the saleswoman also had to give a convincing performance of deference to her clients, even when they irritated her or reported her to management. Skilled salesclerks found innovative ways to carve out space where they, not the imposing (and usually male) managers or imperious shoppers, were the boss. They maintained their own coded language for talking about customers in front of them; they collaborated to help one another meet sales quotas; and they revenged themselves on coworkers who did not follow the rules. The workers also could make occasional alliances with shoppers who, particularly in the Progressive Era (before World War I and the Depression), took an interest in social reform.9

  The work it takes to suppress one’s true feelings, to maintain a calm smile and the appearance of enjoyment, in order to maintain the customer’s mood is familiar to anyone who works with people. This work—which sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild famously dubbed “emotional labor”—remains a major component of the retail salesperson’s job and a key difference between it and factory work. If you’re standing behind an automobile assembly line, it doesn’t matter if you smile or frown, but your failure to emanate a pleasant mood on the sales floor can ruin your workday (particularly if you rely on commissions or tips). “Seeming to ‘love the job’ becomes part of the job,” Hochschild wrote, “and actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in this effort.”10

  Such labor is deeply gendered: women are made responsible for others’ emotions off the clock, and that emotion management has become part of the job while punched in. Yet this distribution of emotional labor reflects the inequalities of the broader society. To manage your feelings in order to avoid imposing them on others is to place yourself in a subordinate position; to have to massage others’ feelings all day long is to get used to swallowing your own emotions and needs. Skill in this field is a skill learned from a life without power; it should not be surprising, then, that such a skill is rarely seen as a skill by the powerful, who expect deference as their natural right.11

  Even as women’s emotional skills were undervalued, by paying women a wage at all, retail bosses provided some recognition that they contributed something important. The introduction of training programs and even vocational education in the early twentieth century upheld the idea that sales work was skilled work, yet the workers were also undermined by consistent low pay. Saleswomen earned between 42 and 63 percent of what men did in sales jobs—one shoe saleswoman complained to a labor investigator, “I don’t get the salary the men clerks do, although this day I am six hundred sales ahead! Call this justice? But I have to grin and bear it, because I am so unfortunate as to be a woman.” Unions, too, accepted the framework of what researchers Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman called “industrial breadwinner masculinity”—the breadwinner’s job was what mattered, and it was those jobs that should be prioritized, while “women’s work” was less important and less worthy of the unions’ attention. The same ideology that promoted the family wage therefore undermined the wages of women. It contributed to the sense that retail work was dead-end, short-term work—and easy.12

  Despite sometimes having to convince unions that they were worth the effort, retail workers fought for shorter hours, higher wages, and looser dress codes, but most of all for recognition that their jobs counted, that their work was also work. Inspired by the sit-down strikers at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, Detroit Woolworth Five and Dime clerks—all of them young women—sat in and occupied their store for seven days in 1937 before winning nearly all their demands. The Woolworth’s was a four-story brick building, a shopping palace, historian Dana Frank wrote, “built for working-class people.” The saleswomen at Woolworth’s dished out candy and served food and sold a variety of low-priced goods for purchase by people who were slowly winning themselves disposable income and spare time in which to spend it. The saleswomen wanted these same things for themselves. They demanded union recognition, an eight-hour workday, overtime pay, discount lunches, free uniforms, seniority rights, hiring of new workers through the union, and a ten-cent raise per hour on their twenty-five-cent-an-hour wages.13

  Striking Woolworth’s was a shot across retail’s bow; it was, Frank wrote, “like striking Walmart, the Gap, and McDonald’s all at the same time.” And the women did it with flair. They knew that the same charm that had gotten them hired in the first place would play well with reporters, and they performed for the cameras that turned up as well as for one another. They sang songs and danced and did one another’s makeup and hair. Their working-class clientele supported them, as did other unions in the city; the musicians’ union turned up to play for them. Strikers at a second Detroit store joined them days in; the Waiters and Waitresses Union threatened to take the strike national. Kresge’s, a competing chain, gave its workers an immediate five-cent raise, and then on the seventh day Woolworth’s gave in. Seeing the success in Detroit, retail workers around the country duplicated their efforts.14

  Thus the period of rapid growth of chain stores was also a brief period of rapid victories for chain-store workers. The remaining opposition to chain stores—a hangover of the mom-and-pop days and a kind of littler-is-better populism that we still hear echoes of today in politicians’ paeans to “small business”—ensured that there wasn’t much sympathy in the Depression-era press for the titans of the retail industry. Particularly in the South, there was a belief that “socialism, atheism, chain stores, and companionate marriage” were linked in spelling doom for American culture, yet activists couldn’t stop their growth. By the late 1940s, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) had ninety thousand members, and the Retail Clerks International Association (RCIA) nearly two hundred thousand. Yet even at their peak, retail unions only represented one in ten employees in the industry, and retail workers were left out of early minimum-wage laws.15

  Th
e anti-chain-store movement, somewhat perversely, helped one of the twentieth century’s largest chains find early success. Walmart benefited from the down-home image cultivated by Sam Walton, its baseball-capped founder. Walton spun that image into a lasting perception that Walmart was a “family” company with local roots long after it had expanded beyond any possible family bounds. In the 2010s, longtime Walmart workers were still telling me fond stories of Sam. But the family, as we’ve discussed, is itself a style of work, and Walton understood how to capitalize on it. In order to appeal to the rural housewife as a customer, as well as to appropriate her labor as she moved into the waged workforce for the first time, Walmart had to feel like the family.16

  Walmart was born in the rural Ozarks, in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, and there the company maintains its base to this day. From there, it grew, until, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote, it controlled a swath of global trade roughly equal to that of the eighteenth-century Dutch East India Company. And in the time of its growth, the global economy was shifting from one driven by manufacturers to one driven by retailers. Woolworth’s and the early mail-order houses—Sears and others—were able to use their size to exert some power over the manufacturers from whom they acquired goods to sell, but Walmart epitomized a larger change in the way the world did business.17

  Though Walmart’s major innovation was in distribution, its success in this particular corner of America, largely rural and scarred by Depression-era evictions, relied heavily on the women who worked in its early discount stores. Those women taught Walton what mattered to them: a sense of Christian service and a feeling that they were helping their community, which animated them more than their (low) wages did. Christian family values were infused into the company by its employees and trickled upward to influence the folksy identity that Walton was building into his brand. While part of the anti-chain-store panic was inflected with a gendered fear that “a nation of clerks” would be unmanly, Walmart’s familial hierarchy restored order, with women doing the selling for the smiling male founder at the top.18