HAZEL: The less important or average-intellectual customer is the one that tries to humiliate you more. Where she can suddenly go to the hairdresser weekly. These kind of people try to depress your importance. She’ll ask for something that you may not have heard that term. So she’ll say, “Oh, you don’t know!” But people who have been around, if they don’t like what you do, they go to another place. It’s the average-intellectual individual who’s apt to come in and show her importance and try to decrease yours. I’m very good at putting them in their place.
EDWARD: There was some humiliation when I was newer. I didn’t rub hard enough. “Oh, just don’t bother any more! Just have Hazel do it.” The beginning hairdresser could be very embarrassed by a customer. The customer says, “Oh, just leave my hair alone! Comb this out for me, get this idiot away from me!” Because the person was green. There are times when the woman will take the comb and say, “Give me that thing!” This is an insult. When she says, “This is good enough!” and you’re not happy with it. Some hairdressers will blow their fuse and throw the comb on the floor and say, “I wouldn’t touch you with a fourteen-foot pole.” Verlaine was like that. He threw customers out of the door with wet hair. He was eccentric that way.
But I still feel we are servants. A servant to the public, like a doctor. Not a servant that does housework. I didn’t mean in that class. Just because you’re a great hair stylist, win prizes—anybody can buy a trophy and put it in his window. But he becomes a star, arrogant. Some people say, “I won’t take this crap any more.” If they give you a hard time, all you say, “Look lady, I’m sorry, this is the way I think it should be. If I can’t please you, you’ll have to find someone else.” But you don’t argue and throw brushes around like some of these guys. You may see ads in papers for hairdressers: No stars, please.
We hired this one guy, he was going to hair coloring school. He was using our place to practice with his hair colors. One day he took a very prominent customer of ours. He colored her hair red. She’s out in the car crying. She says, “I can’t go home like this. My husband’ll kill me.” I said, “I thought you wanted to be a redhead.” She says, “All I asked for was a rinse.” I brought her back. By this time he was packing his bag. I didn’t have to fire him. He just simply walked out. He took a woman and being another genius, he’s gonna make something of her. You don’t take it upon yourself.
You have to put in a thousand hours in beauty school to get your license. The average hair stylist, dresser, beauty operator has an equal amount of schooling as a practical nurse. You have to know blood, you have to know diseases. You have to know everything that pertains to the human body so you can understand why hair grows.
Styles are basically the same since the bob. What can you do with hair? It’s like cooking chop suey. By adding more mushrooms or less. Styles repeat themselves over and over again, like women’s clothes. You always go back to something.
We used to get fifty dollars for a permanent. Like silver-blonding. Years ago, a wife wouldn’t think of going to a grocery store with blond hair. ‘Cause what is she? A show girl? Light hair only went with strippers, prostitutes, and society women. In order to silver-blond in those days, you would use a lot of ammonias and bleaches and the woman would have to come back two or three times before it got light enough to be a silver blonde. This cost fifty, sixty dollars a treatment. So the average
hausfrau
and her husband, he’d say “What are you workin’ as a cigarette girl or something? You’re a mother, you got four kids, you’re insulting me in church, you look like a hoozy.” But today all girls look like hoozies.
HAZEL: They have commercialized it and came out with all these gadgets, and put work that should be done in a shop into home. You can buy a comb that cuts hair. You can buy a permanent. They should have strictly remained professional. The manufacturers got greedy and they commercialized hairdressing, whereas they make it so easy it can be done at home. So you can’t command the prices you did a number of years ago. Today they sell these kits, and if you can read you can do it. It has hurt the poorer sections mostly. More wealthier neighborhoods, it hasn’t hurt them bad. Most of these women, they don’t want to take the time.
Once in a while a hairdo will disturb me because I feel I didn’t do it quite right. I’ll brood over it for a little while. I like to feel I’ve done the best on each one every day. Once in a while I’ll flunk. (Laughs.)
EDWARD: You feel like a doctor who has a patient who died on the operating table. You’re concerned. What went wrong? Why didn’t I get that right? A beauty operator wouldn’t care. I enjoy the work. I’d do it again even if I made less money.
We have lost young people in the beauty shop. The average person we work on is over twenty-five. The olden-time mother would never stand to see her daughter with that straight gappy look. She looks like a witch on Halloween night. Today it’s the style for young people.
I have a girl come in the shop: how can I straighten her hair? There was one time, a woman with hair like that, she was something on a broom. Even her mother would say, “Why the hell don’t you go to the beauty shop and get the hair out of your mouth?” Today you can’t tell a child . . .
In my opinion, the men are getting more feminine and the women are getting more masculine. If a boy and a girl walk down the street together and his hair is as straight as hers, he’ll get a permanent at home. The one with the straight hair is usually the girl and the one with the wavy hair is the guy.
It’s due to our permissive society. There was a time once, September rolled around, they were forced to go to the barber shop or beauty parlor and get it clipped for school. Otherwise, the teacher sent them home. Today you have a whole society where a young man can go on the street, raise a beard, wear crazy clothes, he can wear one shoe off and one shoe on, and no one bothers to look at him.
HAZEL: It has regressed.
Do you disagree with customers on occasion?
EDWARD: I often disagree with customers—depends on who she is and what authority she has. I lost a customer once because she was from Germany and this other customer happened to be from a very, very pronounced Jewish family. She said she wouldn’t buy a Volkswagen because of what they did to our people. And the woman said, “What did I do? I was a child.” Next thing you know, she called her a Nazi. So here I’m bound to lose one customer. The one I favored, the one I hoped I didn’t lose, was the one that paid the most money and had the most service. But I felt sorry for the other girl. I took sides only for monetary reasons.
JEAN STANLEY
She sells cosmetics and perfumes in a department store. It is a suburban Connecticut branch of the city’s most fashionable establishment. The patrons are, for the most part, upper middle class.
Though it has been her five-day-a-week job for the last seven years, she had been at it, on and off, for thirty years. “I was home for about twenty years. I went back to work when the children were in high school.”
Her husband is a buyer in textile. Though he has an excellent record and reputation, his position is tenuous, due to the industry’s impersonal drive for young executives. They have three children, all of whom have gone to college.
I sell cosmetics to women who are trying to look young. They are spending more on treatment creams than they did years ago. I can remember when lipstick at two dollars was tops. Now they have lipsticks that sell for five. Appearance. Many times I think, thirty dollars for this little jar of cream. I know it doesn’t have that value. But in the eye of that woman, it has that value. A cosmetic came out that was supposed to smooth out the wrinkles for five or six hours. It puffs out the skin. The wrinkles would return. We criticized it. But a woman came in one morning, she said, “I’m going for a job interview and I’m past forty. I want to look nicer.” I felt differently about selling it to her. It might bring her a job.
They say everything comes out of the same pot. (Laughs.) There isn’t a cream that’s worth forty, fifty dollars. But when you see the enthusiasm of the women who purchase these things (laughs), you don’t want to make them feel discouraged. They’re beginning to show lines and wrinkles. They know their husbands are out in the business world with young women who are attractive. They’re trying to look nice, to keep their husbands interested. So cosmetics have their place, I think.
There is always the competition of keeping their husbands interested. You see the fear in their faces—becoming lined. They all discuss this: “Look at me. I look terrible.” They will talk about seeing it on television—the cream that erases lines. Television is the thing that has brought all this. More anxiety.
Customers ask your advice. They rely on you. If you’ve worked in one of these places for a number of years, you have a following. People come in and wait for you actually. You become a little bit of a friend. They can speak to a stranger more than they can to an acquaintance. They may tell you some little tragedy or something. You learn a lot about people when you’re with the public all day. There are so many lonely people. So many women between the ages of forty and seventy.
You’re supposed to try and sell a certain brand. Many stores work that way. We suggest the brand we know about most. Many women come in and they’d like to see an Arden, a Lauder, or a Rubenstein product, and you show it to them. If they ask for a definite brand, you don’t try to sell them another. I’m not aggressive. I don’t want to send a customer home with a bag full of things and when she gets home she feels, Why did I buy this? You try to feel the customer out. I stress the saving: “How much would you like to spend?”
Years ago, women that sold cosmetics and perfumes made more money on the average than they do now. You could earn much more than girls working in an office. Today you hardly earn as much. The companies are spending so much money on advertising. Perhaps they feel the girl will sell much more and earn more, that way. (Laughs). They don’t put it into salaries, I know that much. They have tremendous advertising budgets. We work on salary plus commission. One of my children who’s sold said, “The lowest common denominator is the salesclerk on commission.” (Laughs.) It brings out their greed and their disregard for their fellow workers.
I’m not paid by the store. I’m paid by the cosmetics company. The company expects you to sell their merchandise. You send them a monthly report. There are ten of us in my department. Each one represents a different company. Out here in the suburbs you represent more than one company. You might have two or three cream lines; four, five, or six perfume lines. You have a tremendous amount of stock to take care of, reports to send in. You have to have an auditor help you with your income tax. (Laughs). You have salaries from so many different companies.
The extra work, making out reports, is done in your own home, on your own time. The Revlon report can be eighteen inches, with numerous items on it. You can’t work on these reports when you get home at night. Your eyes become a little blurred. (Laughs.) You’re a little weary. You have to do it on Sunday. You spend the whole day on it.
There’s another hazard to the job. (Laughs.) You get no health insurance or anything like that. The companies don’t cover you for hospitalization. I have to carry my own. You can’t get in on a pension plan either. A woman that just retired worked in this section fifteen years. If she worked directly for the store, she could have retired with a little pension. She retired with nothing. I will get nothing.
The company I represent gives you five days a year sick leave. If you’re sick more than five days, you don’t get paid. The one year I was sick, I didn’t get paid for the few days over. There are department store unions, but if you’re in the pay of someone else, it’s . . . no man’s land. Years ago, when earnings were greater, I could have retired with something. Now I won’t.
My manager is very friendly with me. She knows she’s secure with me. I’m going to stay just where I am. It’s been seven years and I’ve been here every day. When we get to the age where we have to . . . (trails off). I can be dismissed at will. We have no protection.
You stand on your feet all day. Years ago, there was a rule that there had to be a stool in the back of each counter. I don’t see that enforced any more. There aren’t any stools around. I think everyone’s feet feel tired at the end of the day. We have college kids that come in, especially before Christmas. They complain more about being tired than the older women.
The managers seem afraid to tell the young people what doesn’t go. They’re not as willing to work. A little less courtesy, too. Maybe it’s a good sign, in a way. Maybe they feel this is nonsense, all the thank you’s and the please and everything. The same thing with their appearance. There’s a certain independence they’re showing. But in showing their independence they look like all the others. (Laughs.)
When you have children that are going through college for years, it takes money. (Laughs.) That’s the reason many women go back to work, their children’s schooling. We have widows, women who were caught in the Depression, who couldn’t go into professions. So we turned to selling.
Stores like ours that carry high-priced merchandise have make-up for black women. Many buy light make-up. They think they’ll look better. You have to be very careful when you’re selling a black women. Some like a strong fragrance. Some, because they’re black, will not buy a strong fragrance. These are middle-class women. The prejudice behind the counter —I can’t begin to tell you. They use the words. You wonder how it’s ever going to be resolved. Sometimes you get discouraged with humanity.
There are other things you’d like to be doing. I was interested in teaching but the Depression . . . You would have liked to do something more exciting and vital, something you felt was making a contribution. On the other hand, when you wait on these lonely old women and they leave with a smile and you feel you’ve lifted their day, even a little, well, it has its compensations.