The Service Economy (Or, F@#$ You Very Much), Part 3

In the previous two segments, I relate the story of a hapless bookseller in a ridiculous customer service situation as a frame to talk about the fate of those working in the service industry (1/3 of the economy). The first installment can be found here. The second installment can be found here. Some things covered: the term “a real job”, the consequences of the policy “the customer is always right”, and ruminations on unions. And so, blah, blah, blah, let us continue:

Happy Happy Happy Happy

So, why do you need me to pretend that I’m happy to serve you?

As any servant knows, if the boss really thought that the Jokester guy was nothing but a joke, then he wouldn’t have even bothered to pass the incident on to the bookseller. Deep down, the Jokester had gotten to the boss, sounded the capitalist alarm. The bookseller could see it working through the boss, coming out in the thought: “Sales are going down because the booksellers are not being pleasant to the customers! My god, I’ll go out of business before Christmas!”  The Jokester had showed the boss that the booksellers were not ‘servicing’ the customers properly! Why couldn’t they all just do their frickin' jobs? Why did he have to go up front and tell them simple things like ‘be pleasant?’ Aren’t they adults? Can’t they figure it out themselves?

           

Within days, the boss started lurking behind shelves in proximity to the front cash register, spying on the cashiers, making sure everyone was doing their job properly. When he was drunk, he roamed around the front of the store and screeched a too-loud welcome at the customers – “Heeeelllllllooooo, how are you doing? Thanks for coming in today!” – then he would turn and glare back at the cashiers with a look that clearly said, “You see that? That’s how you do it, you dumb cattle.” (And yes, the customers would make a bee-line for another part of the store because it was scary as hell. They had no idea who he was or why he was screeching at them.) 

Happy Happy Happy

         

In the weeks that followed, the boss told everyone: “You need to smile more.” 

     

Wait, it’s not enough that the customer is always right? It’s not enough that the cashier has to eat whatever bullshit the boss hands them? Sorry, the cashier must also be happy and smiley for you (oh you wonderful little consumer you). In the service economy, the servant is required to constantly give you the illusion that they love their work and that they love serving you (oh you precious wonderful special little consumer you).

           

Happy Happy

I’m reminded of a line from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: “You never saw the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you...”  That’s what’s going on. No one can be happy-smiley for eight hours straight, especially when they are being treated for the most part as if they are worthless.

Ironically, as mentioned in a previous section, the focus for the entire hierarchy is on customer service – the cashier’s smiley face. The entire edifice is balanced on the servant – and yet there is no compensation for it. There is only degradation and humiliation – and the constant reminder that they have no dignity, and deserve none.

      

O That Disconcertingly Honest Customer Service 

in the UK

When I lived in the UK, I noticed that most retail clerks, and service workers in general, were not required to have that faux Disney smile perpetually pasted on their lips. They went about their business with whatever face suited them best. Some smiled, some didn’t, but either way, for the most part they all did their work efficiently. No pretense about liking your job or liking where you work or liking the people that you serve. There was a refreshing honesty about this. 

           

David Mitchell (UK comedian, known for Peep Show and That Mitchell & Webb Look) once did a little rant about customer service on QI (a UK game show hosted by Stephen Fry), that cuts right to the core of the problem:

Mitchell:

The things that seem unfair to me are the number of people who are expected to pretend to care about jobs they don’t care about. They should be allowed to say: “Look, I’m fulfilling my contract – you can’t put in the contract, ‘Also, you have to seem like you give a shit.’” I think that’s expecting too much. That’s why I really like the fact that we live in a country with such poor customer service. I’ve got to respect that...

Fry: 

You know, you’re right – why have a cheesy grin on your face if you are working in an awful supermarket?

Mitchell: 

It’s either the sign of a liar or a moron.

(Although, I’d say that it’s not so much poor customer service in the UK as it is honest customer service.)

You can watch it here. Quite funny. 
(I couldn't get the You Tube link to post, for some reason)

 

Happy  Happy

What I’m trying to say here is that someone working in the service economy should be able to do their job and do it well without the demand that they look happy every second of the day. Someone that demands this of a cashier, demands this of any worker who is dealing with the public all day long, is someone who is unable to face actual reality. (Remember reality? That place where you have a real job? A job where you go to the bathroom whenever you damn well please?)

           

So, go ahead, sit behind a cash register and ring people up for eight straight hours and we’ll see how smiley you are at the end of that shift. Now do it for two weeks. Now do it for six months. Now do it for ten years. Do it for three decades. See how those smiles just keep on a-comin’?

           

And, let’s face it, forcing a smile on workers is meant as distraction to the reality of the economy, the culture itself. Very few in retail or related service work like their job; they are selling – for the most part – crap made in China or Indonesia or Mexico by slave labor; they are underpaid, overworked, etc. (You know the drill). Is the cashier’s fake smile the empty facade that helps many in this country get on with their business without too much guilt? What's the smile protecting? A system that works only when a large percentage of the working population live in poverty, go hungry, are depressed?

Happy Happy Happy

 This was said by a Walmart spokesman last November in response to a report about hunger among Walmart employees: “The truth of the matter is 1.3 million people choose to work for Walmart because they understand the company provides its associates with more opportunities for career growth and greater economic security for their families than other companies in America." (Article can be found here)

           

Oh that ole freedom of choice mantra. But we know better. Most work for Walmart because in many places it's the only game in town.

           

So, here’s the question that keeps coming back to me: Why pledge allegiance to an economy that requires so many underpaid servants? 

Next Installment:

“Welcome to Costco, I Love You”

The Service Economy (Or, F@#$ You Very Much), Part 2

In the previous segment, I began the story of a hapless bookseller as a frame to talk about the sad fate of those working in the service industry (1/3 of the economy), about how those behind the counters are perceived and treated. The first part can be found here. It includes the beginning of the bookseller’s story, along with ruminations on my former union organizing days, and the reigning corporate concept of service work as not being real work. 

And so, the story continues:  

The Customer is Always...

The bookseller behind the register doesn’t look up at the couple, just keeps ringing up the large stack of books. When he finally does look up to tell the couple their total, the Jokester’s eyes are wide – with hatred, rage? Just plain crazy? The bookseller doesn’t know. He tells them their total and Jokester throws his credit card at the bookseller.

           

This is not an unusual event. People do this all the time. Why? We’re back to the ubiquitous perception that those working in the service economy are just bottom-feeders who cannot – or simply will not – pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in this great land of ours, and so they deserve our contempt. But there is something else that has been added to the mix over the years, an insidious corporate concept that makes this obnoxious behavior okay: The customer is always right.* The one behind the counter is seen as someone who must do whatever the customer wants, no matter what.

           

What this does is make all "service" employees into servants. Not workers, but servants. If you look up the word servant online, these are the synonyms: “Domestic, cleaner, lackey, flunkey, minion, housemaid, valet, manservant, drudge, menial, and slave.”  (I am not putting down labor as an actual domestic servant here. I'm trying to point out that there are unconscious associations that go with the word servant, and that those associations are different for the words worker or employee.)

          

Here in the US, it’s clear that the many synonyms for servant are what flicker unconsciously through many a customer mind whenever they address anyone employed in the service economy. The bookseller knows this, but right at that moment he is only concerned with getting through the sale. What the hell, he has two minutes left on the clock. He swipes the credit card and slides the receipt across the counter for Jokester to sign. Jokester signs and leaves, obviously disgruntled. The bookseller doesn’t give it another thought and clocks out.

           

Ah, but when the bookseller returns to the store two days later, he’s pulled into the back office by the boss. Apparently, disgruntled-jokester-guy chewed over his “humiliation” at the hands of a mere bookseller for about an hour, then came back into the store, and complained to the boss that the clerk was rude and unprofessional. His words: “He looked right through me.” Jokester had not been SEEN and he had come into the store to be SEEN. Jokester wanted satisfaction. He wanted the bookseller fired. If the bookseller was not fired, then he threatened to never return to the store.

           

 Another typical day in the service industry.

            

 To his credit, the boss did not fire the bookseller. But that was probably only because the place was seriously short-staffed. Instead, the boss played the chummy old game of “It’s us against them, I know, comrade...and I’m on your side, really...but....” He calmly explained that he told Jokester that the bookseller was a bit distant, yes, but not rude...and, oddly enough, many customers actually liked him…even praised him for his helpfulness and book knowledge. The boss then gave the bookseller a sympathetic smile. But there was something else in the eyes that didn’t quite fit with the smile: anger. The boss was angry that he had had to deal with a complaining customer. Someone was at fault for this inconvenience, someone’s to blame, and it certainly wasn’t the boss. In the service economy, there’s always someone to blame, and blame bumps down the chain of command, eventually landing on those at the bottom.

                       

Now, as with many corporate managers or small business owners, this boss was rarely out on the floor and pretty much had no idea what went on out there. The extent of his participation was to make the rounds every once in a while to make sure that no two booksellers were standing together and talking. Sometimes the booksellers were talking about the weather, about books, about politics, about customers...but mostly they were talking about work – you know, passing actual information back and forth about what was going on in the store so that things went more smoothly. The boss was paranoid (from excess drink) and so interpreted every gathering of booksellers as either a conspiracy in the making (what kind, no one could say), or that they were simply slacking off. He was a firm believer in the motto: “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” Of course, because the boss was never out on the floor, he had no idea what the booksellers or the baristas actually did all day.

                       

Oddly enough, most of the time they were working. Remember, they were short-staffed, so they were busy all the time. The store functioned smoothly because of the dedication of the staff.  They didn’t do this because they felt any allegiance to the boss (he’d lost that long ago with his periodic firings and drunkenness), but because they loved books and wanted to get the right book into the right hands, and – this is key – because they didn’t want to screw over their fellow workers. They had what Linda Tirado, in her recently published book, Hand to Mouth (an insightful, wonderfully angry, and much-needed book about being poor in America from the actual point of view of a working poor person), called siege mentality. 

           “I will kill myself for my co-workers,” Tirado says. “A lot of us do that. When we work through fevers and injuries and bone weariness, it’s for the money but also because if we don’t, we know that we’ll be leaving our co-workers holding the bag. However bad the shift is, with a man down, it’ll be that much worse on whoever’s left. There’s a siege mentality in the service industry in particular; you go through hell together. If you tap out and go home, you’re leaving your co-workers to deal with more customers with even fewer hands. And that means that they’re more likely to get fired themselves – because if customers start complaining about the service, the boss doesn’t really care that you’re covering for someone who’s out sick.” (pg 22 of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America)

           

The boss continued: “I know everyone has their off days, their off hours, but it’s important to look everyone in the eye and smile.” The boss then went into a small lecture about greeting customers when they first walk in the store and how that was the key to making people feel welcome. It was a lecture for someone who was sixteen. At the time, the bookseller was in his mid-forties. 

 The policy of the customer is always right always ends in humiliation for the worker. It means that all the psychically wounded, the nut-jobs, and the viciously cruel, can walk into a retail outlet and put someone down without any repercussions. So, in the end, abusive people get better service than the nice ones.

Next Installment:

“So Why Do You Need Me to Pretend That I’m Happy to Serve You?”

   

      *Apparently, the phrase "The customer is always right" was originally coined in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge's department store in London. His life has been dramatized on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre's Mr. Selfridge. The story of "how a young American upstart entrepreneur taught England how to shop." (PBS promo language, not mine) You betcha.

The Service Economy (Or, F@#$ You Very Much), Part 1

 Cashiering Equals Bottom-Feeding?

Here’s a story: On a cool September morning a couple wanders into a bookstore, promptly engages one of the booksellers in a hunt for various books on the local flora and fauna and hiking trails. They are very demanding. The guy is a non-stop talker, keeps making stupid jokes, grinning at the bookseller, looking for a response. His wife or girlfriend looks on, bored – she’s probably heard it all before, has to listen to his endless patter every day.  

           

One half of the customers who come into this bookstore just want to browse in silence, maybe buy a book or some coffee, and leave with a minimum of chitchat. The other half didn’t come in for the books or for coffee. They came in to be SEEN, to get a bit of attention, and, as an added bonus, maybe get a chance to shame and humiliate the clerks. These customers want to be served. To fill some void inside them? Maybe staunch some inner psychic wound? For whatever reason, they come through those doors as hunters, preying on those they see as weaker than themselves– the anonymous retail clerk – the faceless drone behind the register – the bottom-feeders.

           

When the couple is ready to check out, they approach the register. Another bookseller rings them up. He has three minutes left on the clock. He hurries through the stack while the gregarious talker picks up the little tchotchke books off the front shelf, one after the other, and makes fun of them with a string of stale jokes (you know the kind of books I’m talking about: the photo books of puppies underwater, or tiny books filled with cute and poignant aphorisms about the trials of marriage...basically, the bestsellers of the 21^st Century...so, pretty easy targets). He’s trying to get a rise out of the bookseller behind the register, wants to make him laugh, needs to be SEEN.

           

Unfortunately (for both of them, as it turns out), the bookseller is tired, ready to get out of there. The place has been short-staffed all during the tourist season because the owner had gone on a firing binge three months before. The boss goes on a firing binge every six months, during the lulls between tourist seasons, fearing the low profits will put him out of business. We are in the heart of the service economy now, where there is no job security, no benefits. Most places make you sign a contract stating that you are an at-will employee. Whether your boss is a corporation or a smaller business, that means that you can be fired for no reason whatsoever and there’s nothing you can do about it. And oh, the wages, yes, the wages – the only reason you are there – are low, so low. There is no protection against drunk, paranoid bosses. There is no protection if you get seriously ill and can’t come in to work for a couple of weeks or months. There is no protection against anything (unless, of course, you unionize – but more on that later).

           

As a worker in Service America, you have no rights. And why should you, you worthless bottom-feeder, why don’t you go out and get a real job?

A Real Job?

(Or: 1/3 of Workers in the US are in the Service Economy*)

           

I’ve always been fascinated with this term: a real job. People in the US use it all the time. We all know what it implies: there are crap jobs and there are good jobs. The non-real job is one that is shitty, with pay so low that no one can sustain working them for very long; you know, a boring or humiliating job that, if you are middle class, you would only condescend to do during high school and the summers between your youthful, drunken college years.

           

So, the real would be the opposite: doing something that gives you a salary, an actual living (ability to buy a working car, get it fixed when it needs it; buy a house; have health insurance, a pension, and maybe various other benefits, etc.); a job where you are able to go to the bathroom whenever you damn well please, without asking anyone, or getting someone to cover for you. A real job is doing something that might give you a sense of dignity, maybe something that makes you feel as if you are actually doing something in the world. It is the world of THE PROFESSIONAL.

           

Ah, that elusive professional, that elusive real job...

           

When I was part of a group of organizers trying to unionize the Border’s Bookstore chain back in the nineties, we found that quite a few of the younger employees (and, oddly enough, those that were more vigorously tattooed) would tell us that they weren’t interested in joining the union because it wasn’t worth fighting for such a job. “What’s the point? I’m not staying here. This isn’t a real job.” Oh, that beautiful term. The irony (and the sorrow...and the stupidity) was that this was the same approach used by Borders Corporate Headquarters to fight unionization.

           

At first, the tactic was to have hip and happening younger executives from corporate headquarters tell us about the UNION THUGS who were only interested in getting more dues out of us. Keep in mind that our closest affiliate in the UFCW (Union Food and Commercial Workers Union), the union we were trying to join, were meat packers out of Davenport, Iowa, who weren’t going to get enough dues from our store to keep their office in pencils. “You’re better than that, aren’t you?” The corporate lackeys would say. “Don’t you want more freedom in the workplace?” And then they would continue to hiss in that alluring parseltongue of theirs: “If a union comes in, they will tell you what to do, how to run the store. They don’t know anything about this store.”

           

Some of us were actually paying attention and understood that we already had no freedom in the workplace, no benefits, were at-will employees, and yet we were the backbone of the entire corporation (back then, Borders actually talked about the knowledge of the booksellers as a selling point in their stock portfolios). The lie that is constantly spouted by corporations is the lie of freedom of choice. “Unions will tell you what to do! Unions will tell you what to do!” (Of course, they were riffing off the movie “On the Waterfront” where Union equals Corruption.) 

On the Waterfront

After we won, we found that each individual shop is autonomous. Our experience was that there was no central office – as in the corporate model – telling us what to do. We were in control of how and what the union did in the store – because the union in the store was...well...us. 

Where was I? Union thugs.

           

When they found that beating us with the term union thugs wasn't going to get us to stop, the corporation began talking about how working at Border’s wasn’t a real job. (Yes, they actually used that term to workers in their own chain.) They explained to us that working for Borders (and this argument is used across the board at every chain retail outlet) was just something we should be doing part-time, working our way to something else. “C’mon, this isn’t supposed to be a career...you people are smart folks, you don’t want to be here forever...this is a job for kids between undergraduate and graduate schools...you should have your eye on some higher prize.” They meant: something professional. You know, something more like what they were doing – crushing their employees.

           

Keep in mind, many of the people in the store who had joined the union had been in professional jobs – television, teaching, medical research, you name it – and had been laid off or phased out because of age, or ethical disagreements with management, or...the list goes on and on. So the argument that Borders used was basically this: this is not a real job, so if you want to stay here and fight for higher wages and benefits, then you must be a loser, someone who will not better themselves and do what needs to be done to get an actual bona-fide real job (You know, the paradisaical one that is out there, somewhere, beyond the rainbow).

           

The beauty of the argument is that if the work you are providing is not real, then of course the bosses don’t need to provide those things that are: a living wage, affordable health insurance, decent benefits for long-term service (things that make it so you are no longer in survival mode, but able to look around you, think about things other than how to pay next month’s rent, or feed the kids, or get the car fixed so you can get to work).

           

The job entailed up to forty hours a week. The booksellers and baristas worked hard. The work was as real as real can get.

           

All service work is real.

           

One third of all workers in this country are in the service economy now. That’s a huge part of the work force: retail clerks, domestic workers, telemarketers, maids, cashiers, burger slingers... 

           

So, tell me again, what is real?

Next Installment:

“The Customer is Always…”

(in which we return to the story of the hapless, bottom-feeding bookseller)

* 
The puffed-up website for The National Retail Federation reports that retail supports 42 million jobs.The Department of Numbers, along with the Bureau of Labor Statistics give the total number of jobs at around 141 million. So, retail encompasses (give or take) about one third. A happy little graph with a breakdown of jobs into specific categories from the Bureau of Labor Statistics can be found here.