My mother, who lives in the Midwest, spends a good deal of time during her visits to New York in shopping around for bargains. Through the years she has managed to find an impressive number of those places where, “they say,” you can pick up all sorts of special buys in hats, shoes, bags, linens, and what-not. With her it is mostly a matter of sport: her home town, which is not small, can offer her everything she might possibly need or want in the way of stores and goods, but the formality and stodginess of its business traditions leave unsatisfied her basically Arab instincts. And then all the hustle and bustle that gives her so much fun also serves to feed her Midwestern patriotic sense of superiority over life in New York. She never actually buys very much, but she always has a story to tell.
Just recently she was regaling the family with an account of what happened that day at a dress sale in one of our notoriously typical stores. She had taken from a rack one dress she liked very much, which was being sold at a great reduction in price. Only, a couple of the buttons were missing. She approached the salesgirl about it, but the salesgirl was indifferent to her problem. So she asked to see the manager. The manager was a young man in shirtsleeves. He said they hadn’t any extra buttons. My mother said in that case how about giving her something additional off the price.
“Lady,” she mimicked him in her own special version of a New York accent, “we’re giving away the dress now. Look at the ticket. It’s marked ‘As Is.’”
“But I’d like to buy that dress very much.”
“Lady, you’re an intelligent woman.”
“But those buttons are half the dress—they make the whole effect. How can I wear it without them? And it would cost me a fortune to replace a button like that!”
“And what do you think he said to me then?” she asked.
“He said,” I answered quite without thinking, “‘Darling, do what you want. But I’ll tell you one thing. You’ll leave the store right now and you’ll take a walk over to the Ritz Plaza, and that dress will get there before you—without the buttons.’”
“No,” she said, “Waldorf. Not Ritz Plaza. He said the Waldorf. But how did you know?”
“I would have said Ritz Plaza myself. But then, times do change,” I told her. “You’ve forgotten that I’m an old pro.”
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I had almost forgotten myself, but her mention of the young man in shirtsleeves brought back all at once the time four years ago when I took a job as sales clerk in the Queens branch of Jays Department Store (main headquarters Brooklyn). It was in November, some time before Thanksgiving, and the stores were all hiring temporary people to help out in the Christmas rush. I happened to pick Jays because the store was walking distance from my home. I might have made more money than the barely minimal 85 cents an hour Jays offered by getting on some bus and riding to Jamaica, say, or Hempstead. As it was, I simply walked over to the store one Friday morning, presented my credentials (which were, by the going standards of Christmas sales help, considerable: several years of after-school clerking in my father’s ready-to-wear) to the personnel department, and walked home again with instructions to appear the following Monday, a round lapel-button with my name stamped on it, and a key which entitled me to half the space of a coat locker in the basement.
Jays is one of those serve-yourself ladies’-wear stores—whose progenitor, I guess, is S. Klein—that specialize in manufacturers’ closeouts, special buys, “name” merchandise with torn-out labels, cheap copies of expensive or high-style items, and assorted leavings and giblets from the cutting-tables. It is well known among inveterate lady shoppers that at Jays or Mays or Klein’s or Ohrbach’s you can, but with a little patience and perseverance, buy everything at from three to fifty dollars cheaper than in the Fifth Avenue stores—a piece of common knowledge sturdily reinforced by the merchandising technique that crushes hundreds of unlike things together on small racks or piles them shoulder-high on counters, provides almost no salespeople and absolutely no salesmanship, and permits the preying instinct of shopping women its full scope.
I had heard much about Jays from friends and neighbors—though I had never had the occasion to shop there myself—but I did not stop to connect the nature of the store with the nature of my future employment. I simply assumed that all clerking was like that I knew so well from my father’s small store, where every good sale was a personal accomplishment and where such things as good will and service were essential to a business reputation. I told the personnel manager of my vast experience with coats and suits (which was a lie) and expected that Jays would exploit my talents to the fullest. I was assigned, however, not to the Fireside Room with its reputed $200 models for $89.50, but to Budget Slips, main floor.
Jays Queens, after the fashion of all suburban branches of big department stores, was a rather new two-story structure with a bus route before and a gigantic parking lot behind. Budget Slips was a square-shaped counter on the aisle directly in line with the back doors. Our merchandise was laid out on counter tops around the four sides, with shelf space for extra stock below the counters and inside the display case that stood in the middle. We sold full-slips, half-slips, some nightgowns, and (then in the first flush of a long-term vogue) crinolines.
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Monday was a great day at Jays. The store was open until nine o’clock at night, and teemed with bargains. Almost every department put out Monday “leaders” that served to keep hordes of women milling through the place from the opening bell to the closing. There were nylon stockings at three pairs for $1, cashmere sweaters for $7.95, hand-finished all-silk blouses for $2.99, and countless other standard specials. Our own contribution to the fracas was $1 slips. These slips were thrown out hurriedly before opening on the counter end that faced the rear entrance and parking lot. So that when the doors finally gave way beneath the weight and force of the at least five hundred early-comers, we were the first department to be swooped down upon. The ladies used literally to tear through the intervening Menswear (a small and unimportant department, a bone, really, thrown to Jays’ claim of being a family store) in order to get first choice on our sizes and colors. Those Monday mornings are like a dream to me. I can hardly remember anything about them except the pure physical sensation of stooping, squatting, tearing open boxes, and handing up tons and tons of rayon acetate into grasping outstretched hands. I very quickly learned how to crouch below the counter where the cartons of reserves were kept and yell “Call your sizes!” throwing up the goods in the direction I thought I heard the requests come from. It was easier this way, for me and the customers, than trying to find the needed 44-pink or 38-blue in the chaos of the counter. I cannot imagine that those poor, fragile rags ever made it in one piece to the cashier’s counter, but then anyway they could never have survived their first wearing. The ladies knew this about them, too—they would joke about it as they reached for their second or third slip—but nothing mattered: the Monday fever was upon us all. We at Jays took our eminently successful stand on the principle that “for a dollar you can’t go wrong.”
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On by first morning, then, I was directed to my station, introduced to Pearl and Hazel, my counter mates, and hurled straightaway into my Monday dream. There hadn’t even been time to give me some orientation in practices and procedures. All that could come later (though by the time it did, it was no longer necessary). The first thing I realized was that as a sales clerk it was not my function to complete any transaction. Jays was organized, as are all such stores, like a supermarket. The customer walked around taking whatever she wanted and carried it to a cashier, who took her money and wrapped up her purchase. Obviously in such a system the problem of theft is enormous, but so far as I ever knew it was handled at Jays with brilliant success. You could roam about as much as you pleased and pick up as much as you pleased before buying, but you could not go from one floor to another with unwrapped merchandise, and no cashier could complete a sale on anything that was not properly ticketed. Any item that came to a cashier without a price ticket or with the ticket pinned loosely or looking in any way suspicious (where there might be the possibility of its having been “switched,” that is, taken off something cheap and fastened onto something much more expensive) was taken immediately to the floor manager—the clerks were never permitted to touch a ticket and would have been fired on the spot for doing so—and correctly priced for sale. After the day’s sales had been totalled up for the entire store, the ticket stubs removed by the cashier and deposited in the register were sorted and returned to the departments from which the merchandise had been taken. These tiny tickets contained in code a precise description of the items they priced, so that without any duplicate sales slips whatsoever, each department knew exactly how many of what had been sold the day before.
My job was merely to direct the customer to what she wanted, provide the correct size (or talk her into buying the available size-too-small) and, if I had time, try to interest her in buying the stuff we had a hard time getting rid of. The prices in Budget Slips ranged, with one or two exceptions, from $1 (on Mondays) or $1.99 (on all other days) all the way up to $3.69, so there was generally very little any of us had to do but keep a mechanical watch on our stock, maintain some kind of order, and hop around continuously, handing things to people. Pearl was as new to the store as I. She had previously worked in a small dress shop in Forest Hills, but had had to quit, she confided to me, because the sudden death of her husband had left her too shocked and too “nervous” for all that responsibility. “You call this retailing?” she grumbled to me when there was a moment of quiet (always to be utilized for folding and piling). “Why, my boss used to go to Florida for a month every winter and leave me with his store. Why, he used to come to me every other day with some horror of a dress he had bought and say ‘Pearl, what am I going to do with this dog? Pearl, you’re the only one who can make this dog walk!’” Pearl always wore a long, freshly sharpened pencil stuck through her chignon as an announcement of her former superior dignity. Hazel, a quiet-spoken spinster who had been working in the store for two years, was bitter, too, but from the other side. Hazel was a careful and conscientious woman, clearly intended to be one of the producers, not distributors, of this world. Her complaints went to the very heart of the enterprise, the necessity for having customers at all. “They’re a bunch of animals,” she told me. “For two years now I have been straightening around this place, putting sizes together and styles together, stacking things diagonally with the tickets all showing, so you’d think they could find exactly what they want and just take it. But no, they have to flip through everything, pull it apart, and change their minds a thousand times. And wait till you see that Manny!” she finally exploded. “He’s the buyer. He has no manners at all!”
We were given half an hour for lunch and half an hour in reliefs, fifteen minutes in the morning, fifteen in the afternoon: all duly recorded by timeclock and card. The rule was you could not leave your counter without having in your possession a little white slip stating your destination and time of leaving the floor, signed by your section manager (a young girl whose sole function, it appeared, was to keep tabs in this way on the personal urges and habits of the help). I was reluctant to leave the counter that first day. For one thing, in putting my coat away when I arrived, I had cast my eye over the lounging facilities provided for our relief time: two wooden benches subtly placed beneath the timeclock; and I had also caught a whiff from the other side of the locker-room wall of the cafeteria vegetable chowder and creamed canned corn and stewed tomatoes being prepared for lunch. But my inability to survive for three hours without a smoke finally drove me downstairs. (Later on, when I was feeling quite at home in Jays, I learned several techniques for sneaking a puff or two in the stockroom—at a fearful hazard to life and goods.) There I took my place on one of the benches with several weary-looking women and listened to lurid tales about customers’ abuses, the main source of sociable conversation among Jays’ employees. One of the women, who worked in Childrenswear, sat rubbing a bruised shin. The children, she said, monster offspring of those monstrous mothers, all kicked her.
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“That Manny,” about whom Hazel had so passionately warned me, was our buyer. His domain was lingerie: Budget Slips, Better Slips (our modest, self-effacing sisters across the way), Robes (a couple of standing racks near the front door) and Panties (a big open table three aisles over). Manny appeared after a couple of days. He had been away “at the market.” The first thing he did was run his hand through the open slips and bellow “Too thin. Too thin. Fill out this goods. Get the stuff out here on the counter. Let ’em see it, let ’em have it. Pull out those crinolines there. Give ’em sizes, give ’em colors.” He was a big man and heavy, put together with a peculiar combination of obesity and athletic hardness. His face was rather coarse, but not mannish coarse, girlish coarse: too much lips, too soft; too large eyes; too pink cheeks, too soft again. He spoke with the heavy dentalization of East Brooklyn, and had a voice commensurate. There were several customers at the counter. I saw Hazel flinch and then caught the cold stare, from over by the escalator, of Miss Hardman, the floor manager, the Forces of Law and Order.
To say that Manny was a buyer and had been at the market might be misleading these words tend to conjure up images set by ordinary retailing, images of a carpeted office, of four-times-a-year attendance at merchandising shows, of expense accounts and tickets to My Fair Lady. The buying for Jays was a week by week affair (sometimes, when the rush got heavy, it was day by day). Since a store of this sort depended entirely on the goods that were immediately at hand when the hands were there to snatch them, and on the grandiose claims that could be made for them, the buyers in fact ran the business, you might say, were the business. They had to know at every minute what was being bought, and why, even what was being said by the customers that might augur something for the future—and the future at Jays was tomorrow, not next season. Every woman who walked away from a counter not having found something to please her was accounted a sale lost for all time, and represented the buyer’s personal failure to provide. Though the table of organization at Jays might have looked very much like that of Macy’s or Airman’s—it boasted clerks, section managers, floor managers, a display department, and so on—there was a crucial difference of weight: the buyers were in effect tenant-proprietors. Manny’s office, not to be too romantic about it, was a packing-case in the stockroom with a telephone and a clip-board holding the data sheets on yesterday’s sales. Most of his time was actually spent on the floor, rushing around from one of his wards to the other filling in the dwindling stock and seeing that the girls handled it right, often stopping to help out with the customers.
It took about five minutes to see and understand the nature of Manny’s irascibility with the girls, part of what Hazel called his bad manners (the other part was simply his intensely personal interest in the business, something startling in a place that pretends to be a respectably systematic world of employees). He wanted them to love his slips, to love his business, to be unhappy, not relieved as they were, when things got slow, and above all to keep him accurately informed about what they needed in the way of stock. He wanted them, in short, to be retailers. The first thing he said when we were introduced was “Ask me questions—for Chrissakes, keep on asking questions!”
His name was Emanuel Lisitsky; and we were, in a compromise gesture toward the awkwardness and time-consuming nature of “Lisitsky,” to call him Mr. L. We never managed to. Hazel coldly and scrupulously used his full name, Pearl and I slipped into “Manny.”
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From that very first moment on, Manny’s presence involved us in a special kind of battle on main floor. Do not get the impression, from the descriptions of cashiers’ counters and crowded racks, that the store was an honest and forthright “shlak” enterprise. It wasn’t. The fittings and arrangements and displays, while not elegant, were sufficient to give the illusion that this was a department store like all others. The building was new and bright; our floors shone and our mannequins all had freshly curled hair. And the managerial forces, so efficiently impersonated by Miss Hardman and her platoon of hangers-on, persisted, against both the frank behavior of the customers and the pressuring tactics of the buyers, to uphold Jays’ dignity. Four times a day Miss Hard-man came and instructed us to clean up the counter that had just been thrown into a tousled intimacy by Manny, or to tape up the boxes he had just ripped open. “Your stock will get soiled!” she would glower in Fifth Avenue consternation. She was capable of talking about our bits and pieces with crooked seams, mismatched fronts and backs, and sewed-up rips with the hauteur of a Ceil Chapman, and I had to admire her for it. Instinct told me, though—the customers themselves told me, who regarded soilage as only additional psychological reassurance in their game of getting something for nothing—that she, and the poor frenzied Hazel, represented the wrong principle. But instinct or no, she was one of the bosses. We had no choice but to shuttle back and forth between Manny’s sincerity and Eleanor Hardman’s pretensions, throwing stock out and putting it back: Pearl moving around with firm deliberation, brandishing her useless pencil, and Hazel bursting into tears at least once a day. A certain shortness of temper always underlay relations at Jays—from bosses to clerks to customers and back again; this split personality of ours accounted for a good part of it.
As Christmas came closer and closer, things reached an unbelievable pitch of intensity. We were open every night and busy every single minute. Still more help was taken on for the afternoons, mostly school kids. We tripped over one another in our confined quarters, now rendered even more confined by the presence of piles of boxes in our little back-of-the-counter corridor; and new shipments were arriving every day. Our stock and our custom changed composition slightly: we were doing a huge business in the size-range from 42-48, and in such formerly dead items as long-sleeved flannel nightshirts, camisoles, and wide-strapped cotton slips—Christmas gifts for old grandmothers and cleaning women. For the imminent approach of New Year’s Eve, our crinoline section was mobbed from morning till night. Through it all the public address system, ordinarily used to announce the store’s closing in ten minutes, was piping music, Christmas carols and currently popular recordings.
And Manny was blooming. Shirt sleeves rolled up, face flushed, mountains of boxes balanced on his shoulders, he literally danced from counter to counter, yelling at the salesgirls in great good humor and urging on the customers. Christmas was clearly Manny’s great season. We were doing a fantastic business in our little corner (he once told me the average daily figures; they meant nothing to me as I had no standard to judge by, but my father, when I repeated them to him, clapped both hands to his cheeks) and that was supposed to mean a great big bonus. But money was not the main thing with Manny. When, the week before Christmas, the Queens buyers were informed by Jays’ owner, Mr. Jay Goldstein, that there were to be no bonuses distributed that year—in Queens we were flourishing, but the Brooklyn store had had a bad year and there was no money in the till for extras—the boys were all thrown into a terrible funk. For days they walked around quiet and petulant, or stood around on the floor in groups of two or three whispering angrily. All, that is, but Manny. He continued his waltz through main floor, commenting only “I do all right, I do all right. Uncle Jay’ll take care of me some day. He’ll be good for it.”
Success in the organization did not immediately matter, either. You had but to see him in the lunchroom sitting with the smartly dressed, pale counterparts of himself (the buyers always ate together at a special table) to understand that Manny had nothing to worry about and that he knew it: eating fast, talking expansively—I can still see him at that table, shouting about something and gesticulating with a fork from which there always dangled a floppy uncut lettuce leaf. He understood, and just looking at him you understood, that everybody else in the whole crazy world of retailing could be dispensed with and Manny would go on standing by a slips counter or some other counter, any kind, somewhere, chanting “Here they are, girls, right here. Call it out and we got it. They’re fabulous! Fabulous!”
That Christmas rush was for him its own meaning. He was a man whose business was to do business, and he was doing it. “Look at ’em, Dex-tuh,” he would coo every morning before opening time, pointing to the huge crowd already pushing against the doors. “They’re all ours. A sure thing, sure as the roses in May, sure as a pregnant woman at a shorty nightgown coun-tuh.” Or he would come by later in the day and say, “Listen, Dex-tuh baby, my own true love, I’m getting sick of that line of rayon tricot we carry. Let’s clear it out of here by tonight. To hell with nylon this afternoon, and let’s push the tricot, huh. Will you do that for me, baby?” “Take my hand,” some crooner was pleading through the loudspeaker, and Manny chimed in with a surprisingly sweet voice, “I’m a stranger in paradise”—all the while spattering the corals and aquas of the rayon tricots up and down the length of the counter. He was in paradise, all right, but to this particular selling-man’s dream of a paradise no one could be a stranger for long. Even Hazel got infected. She stayed close to the crinolines, laughing at the sight of herself covered with the sparkly stuff that was supposed to decorate the net under-skirts but that long before lay in little piles over everything, or recounting in mock horror case after case of some 250-pound woman who insisted on buying one of the stiff petticoats to give herself that “bouffant look.”
Pushing the rayon tricot was easy. (We never did sell it out, of course; because the minute he saw that it was moving well, Manny hurried into the stockroom and telephoned the manufacturer for more.) Pushing anything was easy during those days, but anyway I had been taking lessons from the champion. I could never bring myself to begin shouting at the passers-by, as I had seen him do so often, things like “Right over here, girls!” I had tried it once or twice and had been defeated by the sickly, uncertain sound of my voice. But hawking wasn’t really a necessary part of Manny’s system, just something that happened to suit his style. The secret was conviction. Bargain-hunters are a breed of people in search for conviction; this fact is the very meaning of a store like Jays. A woman who intends to buy a black dress, size 16, will walk into any dress department, go to the rack marked “16,” and choose a black dress if she finds one to her liking. But a woman who is “out shopping”—even if she has the pretext of some specific quest—will naturally gravitate to the kind of store whose goods are all lying out in readiness and shrieking for her recognition. Because what the “shopper,” as distinct from the mere statistical “consumer,” is really looking for is—anything at all that will relieve the terrible pressure on her to take possession of some of this world’s goods and pass others by.
It is hard to describe concretely how a sales clerk communicates the conviction needed to draw customers to her wares (at Jays you only had to pull three or four customers together; that was enough to create the ensuing mob). She need not, as I said, actually call to them. But there is a way of suddenly beginning to put forward an item, to fold and unfold, shake it out, to be busy and intent over it, and there is a way of looking—knowing, superior, as if one has just discovered the importance of something neglected—that no free-floating buyer can resist. The women would begin to squeal at me, “Oh, is it really a bargain?” and I knew I had them. “Oh, honey, please give me one from the bottom!”
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Pushing dead stock at Christmas-time was easy, all right; it was being pushed by the living that got to be a nightmare. I tried to avoid the crinolines as much as possible. Because the women weren’t taking those petticoats (stiff ones to flare at the waist or tight ones to flare at the knees or soft ones with ribbons and spangles to provide “a tantalizing glimpse of color beneath the lifted skirt”) from us; they were killing us to get their hands on them: kids in bobby sox, elegant ladies in Fireside Room finery, and Hazel’s pets, the 200-pounders, elbow to elbow. The crinolines were kept in large deep cartons, standing up so as not to lose their shape, and once I was actually tumbled head first into a carton, my feet waving in the air.
“Attagirl, Dex-tuh,” roared Manny, slap ping my thigh in pure fraternal enthusiasm. “She really goes after the stuff. But I mean.”
“That happens to be one stuff you couldn’t get me after even for the Baltimore Cotillion!” I came up with a mouthful of spangles and paste.
“Now, now,” Manny suddenly stopped smiling. “That happens to be a good piece of goods.”
I shut up immediately. One kept forgetting about the irrepressible Manny that with him the joke always had a fixed limit, just at the point of his buying. He didn’t care about the slips themselves—they could have been hardware—but he was dead humorless about his claims for them. In Jays we had three classifications for our merchandise: ordinary stock was “fabulous”—fabulous was routine, nobody much minded about fabulous; something that turned out to be a pretty good buy was “mad”—for mad you had to have at least a modicum of respect; but a feat of buying, one of those real triumphs which by themselves alone could have justified our reputation, choked us into inarticulateness. “A good piece of goods,” Manny had said. That was the highest. A cowed silence was the only acceptable response.
I do not mean to be laughing now, either. Manny was right: it was a good piece of goods. The thing may have crumbled to pieces in one’s hands, it may have disappeared completely in the first strong wind, but that would not have altered its value for us in the least. When you stand behind a counter, you have to have your own true and your own beautiful that have nothing to do with any other systems of judgment. Something sells, therefore it is beautiful, and sells at a proper per cent of mark-up, therefore it is valuable. You have to have them, not only in a flamboyant enterprise like Jays, but in order to sell anything anywhere. Personal preference is a matter for the customers out there—and not even for them, poor beset creatures, because they end up buying just what is mostly being bought. Retailing, however subsidiary and dependent its function in the national economy, is an absolutely closed system: what is selling is what is good is what is selling.
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The day of Christmas Eve, at about four in the afternoon, a peaceful silence suddenly descended on Jays. The orgy was spent. We knew the quiet would extend through the next few weeks; even our Monday-morning regulars would have neither the cash nor the energy to face us for a while. I received a box of Loft’s chocolates, and in my pay envelope was enclosed a mimeographed letter that said: Dear Temporary Employee, It has been a pleasure having you with us. Won’t you please stay on to help us with our gift exchanges, which will bring your term of employment to January 15th. Thank you for your help. Think of us next year, etc.
Manny wished me luck and said, “We’ll be seeing you around here in the mob, Dex-tuh. I’m gonna get you into one of those petticoats yet.”
“Oh, no,” I was shaking my head, “once I step out from behind this counter, I’m not coming back. I can’t afford to shop in a place like this. Too poor. You guys would do me in.”
I meant it, and I have never since set foot in the place.
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