Shopgirls
Page 14
But in other respects, much had changed for shopgirls since Bondfield had scribbled her first secret reports by candlelight, under the bedcovers in the 1890s. Thanks to her daring exposés, and the efforts of ground-breaking unions and co-operative and women’s movements, as well as the support of more enlightened shopkeepers, the harshness of shoplife was beginning to soften. This was a time when shopgirls – as young workers and young women – began to demand more for themselves. But it was also a time when shopkeepers and customers began, in turn, to demand more from the shopgirls as Britain’s consumer culture became ever more sophisticated.
Selfridges shopgirls stand on duty in front of the store’s modern lift system, 11 December 1922.
CHAPTER 5
THOROUGHLY MODERN MANAGEMENT
On 10 January 1906 the ocean liner Carmania pulled away from the Liverpool quayside with 3,244 people on board. The third-class berths were full of emigrants dreaming of a new life in America – Russians, Poles and East European Jews fleeing persecution. The first-class cabins were occupied by Englishmen and -women, Americans and Canadians – and a Welshman and his nephew. Owen Owen of Montgomeryshire was sixty-one, founder of one of the most successful Liverpool drapery stores, a significant investor in London property and other large stores, friend of David Lloyd George (now president of the Board of Trade) and chairman of the Twenty Club, a dining club of influential national retailers. He had money and investments, he was generous to his extensive family and staff, and he contributed regularly to his local Unitarian chapel.
It was a far cry from the insecurity he had experienced as a child. His father, Owen Owen senior, had been a tenant farmer near Machynlleth, moving farms often as his fortunes waned and his family grew. Owen the younger left Wales when he was still a boy and became an apprentice at his uncle’s drapery business in Bath. He was in effect following in the footsteps of the tens of thousands of young men and women from the remoter parts of Wales who set off in search of steady work in England – particularly in London, Manchester and just across the Welsh border in Liverpool.
‘Who can tell what I am now laying the foundation of?’ Owen Owen wrote in his notebook the night he first arrived in Liverpool in 1868, aged twenty. He continued in a rather Shakespearean vein: ‘Is this the time and tide that leads to fortune, or is it a ship sailing on the world-wide ocean, without a compass to guide?’1 It was indeed the former, for Liverpool was where many of Britain’s raw materials were handled and the gateway through which the products of its large hinterland were exported overseas.
Shortly after he arrived in Liverpool, Owen Owen set about establishing his own eponymous draper’s store on 121 London Road, a noisy, busy neighbourhood with lots of pubs and lots of customers. His strategy was to sell goods cheap, survive on minimal profit margins and maintain a rapid turnover. The plan obviously worked: just five years later, in 1873, an advertisement for Owen Owen in a guidebook for north Wales stated that the business employed over 120 people, and that Owen Owen himself had ‘the reputation of being the Proprietor of the Cheapest Shop in Liverpool’.2 Over the next two decades, the store grew and grew, as Owen bought up neighbouring properties and built two staff hostels, watched over by two Welsh housekeepers. In 1899 Owen Owen, like many other retailers, ceased being a family partnership and became a limited company. Lloyd George bought one thousand shares, while local people from Liverpool and north Wales flocked to buy smaller bundles, Miss Elizabeth Morgan of Machynlleth buying a grand total of twenty-four.
Now he had set sail again. Writing to his wife Ellen while off the Irish Coast, he said, ‘I never could have believed it possible to travel at sea in such luxury. How graceful this wonder ship glides through.’ Owen had considerable investments in sixteen North American railways, including Erie Railroad, Pennsylvania Railway and Illinois Central Railway. He was going to inspect them; but above all he was on his way to inspect the manner in which American and Canadian shops went about their business.
If Paris had been the capital of nineteenth-century retail, New York had all the makings of becoming the shopping capital of the twentieth. Around the elite shopping district nicknamed ‘Ladies’ Mile’, famous department stores were swiftly gathering and making their names: Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor and the gigantic Arnold Constable & Co. among them. Owen was impressed with these vast enterprises, which employed thousands; he understood that ‘the Americans worship size’. North of Ladies’ Mile was Macy’s, which had over one million square feet of floor space and more than three thousand employees, and this was the store that Owen studied in detail. He was fascinated by its physical workings, by the building’s structure, the layout of departments, the refreshments on offer. He was concerned that these emporia had expanded too quickly and were at risk of fire or collapse but marvelled at the modern engineering he found inside: ‘Electric Band elevators are common for 1, 2 or 3 floors and Macy’s have revolving stairs. The revolving stairs are more used than lifts.’
Writing to Ellen from the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Owen confessed, ‘It has been a revelation to me the way business is done on this side: many of the ideas are those I have nearly all my life been trying to put into force.’ For it was not just the new mechanics that struck him but also the ‘Elaborate Methods of Attracting Business’ – so read the headline in The Drapers Record, reporting on Owen’s fact-finding trip. Owen was impressed by the American stores’ radically different attitude towards the customer, who was regarded as someone who had to be lured and tempted into buying, with shopping treated not so much as a functional necessity but as a luxury, albeit an everyday one. The stores he visited in New York, Buffalo, Montreal and Toronto spent significantly more on advertising than any comparable store in Britain; they each had an in-house advertising man and Owen felt that their advertisements were ‘singularly convincing. You read – and believe. And then a purchase cannot be far off.’
The aspect of American shopwork that struck Owen most forcibly was ‘System! System! System!’ He explained: ‘No deviation is allowed from it. Next to the dollar, it is their fetish.’3 Every aspect of store organisation was managed through elaborate and fixed methodology, from regular stock-taking to prompt payment of credit. This was part of the wider efficiency craze sweeping American industry, based on the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. With a stopwatch in hand, Taylor had instituted studies in factories, subdividing manual tasks into different stages and timing each stage. His aim was to increase workers’ efficiency and productivity by finding the ‘one best way’ of performing each task.
This systems management was also applied to American shopgirls. Owen noted how, in the spirit of Taylorist efficiency, the girls’ individual weekly sales were recorded and tabulated by the counting house. If a shopgirl had a slack week, she might be in danger of dismissal, but more often, her buyer would be admonished by the in-house ‘system man’ for not doing his job properly. It was the buyer’s responsibility to lay out the stock in such a way that each shopgirl had a fair chance of achieving good sales.
Out of hours, American shopgirls were managed differently too. There was little pretence of paternalism, of proprietors and family-firm members as benevolent employers, supposedly looking after the well-being of their employees. In fact, there was no living-in system and thus no sense that the shop employers were taking on a parental role. American shop assistants were treated as grown-ups in their time off, not as errant teenagers to be reined in.
In some ways, American shopgirls were similar to their British counterparts. They too were largely working class – some were recent immigrants, with Italian, Jewish or Russian backgrounds. And they too were saddled with a poor reputation, being labelled blowsy and coarse. But attempts by their proprietors to make them more genteel and more deferential – particularly in the huge department stores – seemed less successful in the States than in Britain. Many shared with millions of American workers a spiritedness: they wished to work but not to serve. Some shopgirls rebelled against internal
hierarchies, disobeying house rules and segregation within the stores. Saleswomen at Filene’s were forbidden to use certain elevators; they rode them anyway. Moreover, what made their behaviour worse from the management’s point of view was that the women were boisterous in front of customers.4
Forthrightness and familiarity with middle-class customers was the hallmark of many American shopgirls. Customers often saw this as over-familiarity, as one observer explained, ‘The salespeople have become so forward as to call customers “Dearie.” The use of such terms is a liberty which the woman of finer sensibilities quickly resents.’5 Owen too noted the difference in manners when being served. ‘The civility that is expected by customers in England is not expected there. That is why one hardly ever hears the simple phrase, “Thank you!” One often hears the laconic remark, “That is your parcel.”’ Still, he recognised that this abrupt tone worked well, contributing to the sense of the American shopping experience where ‘business always seems to be at high pressure. Everything is hustle! Hustle! Hustle!’ In summing up all he had learnt in the States, Owen concluded rather mournfully in his letter to his wife that ‘these ideas have come too late and sometimes I wish that I had not come to America at all’.6
American visitors to Britain agreed with Owen that the British shopping experience was fundamentally different; in fact, some American tourists complained that it was actually rather backward. ‘Oh, the Despair of Shopping in London!’ was the title of international shopper Elizabeth Huber Clark’s article in an American magazine – and it wasn’t tongue-in-cheek. She couldn’t bear what Owen had termed British ‘civility’, complaining that customers were never left alone to walk around a British store and browse; instead they were immediately accosted by floorwalkers and shop assistants. She claimed that British shopworkers didn’t simply offer to help; they were trained to sell hard, forcing customers to buy items that they didn’t really want. She said that the senior floorwalkers pressurised junior shopgirls into selling, and if a girl failed to seal a sale then her floorwalker would scold her with the rebuke that ‘any fool can sell them what they want; you are here to make them buy what we have’.7
Elizabeth Huber Clark landed a punch. Her article was taken up by The Drapers Record in Britain, and the trade paper conceded that she was right in some respects: there had indeed been complaints about overbearing shopworkers in British emporia. But the Record didn’t give in that easily, hitting back patriotically with the claim that British customers were more refined than Americans. On entering a shop, an English lady expected attention and it was the duty of the shop assistants to fulfil her needs, they claimed. The magazine then launched an assault on American lady shoppers, insulting their femininity – stating that they were ‘more masculine in temperament’ – and implying that as a consequence they felt patronised by British male civilities (for which read floorwalker attention). Englishwomen apparently had no such hang-ups. It all got rather ludicrous.
As soon as American stores started opening on British soil, the debate about the merits of British versus American values turned into all-out war. Issues of national pride were at stake, it seemed, as well as questions of tradition and modernity, and a woman’s place in Edwardian society. The trade press was no longer the right medium for such heated discourse; the conflict was upgraded to the national newspapers.
Harry Gordon Selfridge and G.K. Chesterton were the two opponents squaring off in what became known as the ‘Big Shop Controversy’. Having opened Selfridges on Oxford Street in 1909, the American retailer presented himself as the crusading, dynamic moderniser with a mission to kick British retailing out of the Victorian era and into a shiny cosmopolitan future. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, on the other hand – prolific man of letters and acerbic public speaker – held extremely firm views on his own particular brand of patriotic Englishness. He was an anti-moderniser, set against big business, big cities and government bureaucracy. He was for the ‘ordinary little man’, the shopkeeper, producer and tradesman working in small country towns, whose livelihoods he felt were being swept away by the Industrial Revolution. There was little room for women in his vision of the ‘English tradition’, other than in the home.8
Chesterton was tapping into a deep-rooted national concern about the demise of small shops on the local high street. Termed the ‘Passing of the Grocer’ debate, there was a nostalgic harking back to a supposed golden age of shopkeeping. Owen Owen had noted how, in each town he visited in North America, business was concentrated in the hands of a few large firms, cutting out the medium-sized and small shops. ‘The small man, in so far as he exists, keeps a general store in an outlying district, and even then he has to compete with the big mail order house.’9 The concern was that Britain was moving in a similar direction.
It was true that bankruptcy figures in Britain were high in the early 1900s and many local grocers and other shopkeepers were losing out to competition from larger retail groups, particularly in the industrial cities. Over the next decade, co-operatives and multiples grew to account for a huge 30 per cent of the national market.10 Department stores made up a mere 2 per cent, despite the amount of public attention they generated.11 However, the vast majority of the retail market – nearly 70 per cent – still comprised traditional smaller shops, many of them family run. The picture in Britain was still significantly different from that in North America: despite the concerns of Chesterton and his fellow traditionalists, the doors of the town grocers remained open.
While many other parts of the retail trade were undergoing momentous upheavals in the early 1900s, working life inside small shops had not changed much over the previous half-century. Certainly, both grocers and their customers were now overwhelmed with a huge range of pre-processed, packaged and branded goods – 360 different types of biscuit were available from firms like Carr’s, Huntley & Palmers and McVitie’s; a wide variety of jams came from Hartley’s and Crosse & Blackwell; and Sunlight soap, Bovril, and Cadbury’s cocoa essence were all making an appearance. Yet ‘shops in the little country town I inhabit’, as Chesterton wrote with warmth, still operated in the highly skilled, professional manner established decades earlier. Every grocer still mixed his own blend of tea, sometimes warning the customer that it might taste strange out of the local area, due to the difference in water quality. The grocer and his assistants monitored maturing Dutch cheeses, carefully ripened bananas in back rooms with adjustable gas jet heating, mixed snuff and brewed their own beer. Little was wasted: at Albert Headey’s grocery in Tonbridge, Kent, his son remembered how broken biscuit was sold off cheap on a Saturday night and any salt left on the floor after the great salt blocks from the wholesalers were broken up was swept together and sold to big country houses for use on asparagus beds.12
The relationship between the favoured grocer and a country house was an important one. Grocers or their assistants would travel around the outlying villages to pick up orders. Mr Headey himself used to pay regular visits to the big house nearby, wearing his top hat and morning coat. With his pencil behind his ear, he would accompany the housekeeper on a tour through each storeroom and service area of the house, from the kitchen and butler’s pantry to the coachman’s stores, taking stock of the sugar and tapioca provisions, tapping the rice and semolina drums and checking the tins of Brasso. ‘That one’s down a bit. Seven pounds of that,’ he would say. But it wasn’t the housekeeper who settled the bill. The day the lady of the house came to town in her carriage to pay her grocery bill was an important one. She would enter the shop and be invited up to the office, sitting down with a little glass of sherry. She would pay by cheque or in gold sovereigns. ‘Quite a ceremony it was,’ remembered Headey’s son.
This world of grocery – let alone the highly skilled trades of butchery, ironmongery and smithing – was still male-dominated. Although in cities and in the bigger stores young women were increasingly being employed, so that by the turn of the century the ratio of shopgirls to shopmen was roughly equal, in market towns and small
er shops this simply wasn’t the case.13 Mr Headey once hired a certain Miss Owen to work on accounts in the office, the only woman alongside twelve male assistants, but he quickly replaced her with a man. The woman most likely to be found in a small family-run shop was still the shopkeeper’s wife or widow. Guest’s draper’s in Shrewsbury was probably run by the wife of the proprietor – a photo of the shopfront captures her as a young woman on the steps in a black dress and white apron, her three children standing next to her.14 It is likely that Mrs Guest also managed an ironmongery and agricultural machinery warehouse further up the street, but she was in the minority.15
Back in the capital, in late January 1912, G.K. Chesterton stoked the fires of the ‘Big Shop Controversy’. The Daily News published his regular column under the headline ‘The Big Shop’. In his article, Chesterton dreamt of hell, and hell was a large modern store, ‘the awful interminable emporia, which have room after room, department after department’. First he questioned the masculinity of shopwalkers, who dominated this vision, ‘surely the most unmanly of all the trades of men’. He then vented his spleen on shopgirls, claiming that they were poorly trained and looked identical to the headless wooden mannequins standing next to them, the only difference being that shopgirls still had their heads. In the most extraordinarily vitriolic flight of fancy, Chesterton imagined decapitating the shopgirls too: ‘When you look at the dress-model you think that some shop-girl has had her head cut off; when you look back at the real shop-girl you feel inclined to do the same to her.’16