Shopgirls (19 page)

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 smaller 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

On one level, the article was flippant and absurd. On another, Chesterton was clearly articulating his fears and prejudices in a very personal, visceral manner. Selfridge, though not named, took the attack on modern stores to heart. He responded in print four days later, accusing the ‘ignorant’ Chesterton of having a ‘suburban and narrow knowledge of the present-day department store’.
¹⁷
Unwilling to be silenced, Selfridges’ female staff also took up the cudgels in self-defence. ‘Angry London Shopgirls Reply to an Attack by Mr. G.K. Chesterton: “Entirely Ignorant”’ read the headline in the rival
Daily Express
.
¹⁸
They had held a meeting and composed a letter, signed by 180 of them, rebutting Chesterton’s condescending and belittling views, his ‘stigma of contempt’. They described themselves as ‘business women associated with the House of Selfridge’ and wrote, ‘We are proud to say that we feel as women workers we have in our ranks some of the brightest intelligences associated with commerce.’ The letter also outlined the responsibilities they were called upon to undertake, describing the ‘intelligent democratic administration’, the ‘modern business methods’, the educational programme they attended, including a ‘business refresher’, and praised the ‘Staff Parliament or Council where free speech, free thought and general initiative is expected to be shown on all occasions’. They signed themselves: ‘Women Workers, 100, Oxford Street, W1., Feb 1st, 1912’.
¹⁹

They certainly didn’t sound like poorly trained, dumb, headless mannequins. But Chesterton’s response? A resounding silence. While he did reply to Harry Gordon Selfridge in print, sardonically linking him to vulgarity and pomposity and suggesting that Selfridge did not understand business, he did not deign to reply to the Women Workers of 100 Oxford Street W1, Feb 1st, 1912.

Their boss Harry Gordon Selfridge had pitched up on British shores in the early years of the new century with a conviction that the shop world should be female. As part of his pre-launch publicity he had taken out full-page newspaper advertisements and plastered the walls of the Underground and London buses with his signs; in an era of discreet column advertising, this was written off by many as vulgar and brash. But the ads certainly made his stance clear from the off. One read: ‘This House is dedicated to Women’s Service first of all’, clear testimony to his belief in the influence and economic power of his female customers.