FOOTNOTES:
[32] This article is based upon a report not yet published on women at work in millinery shops in New York City. It is the result of an investigation carried on for the Alliance Employment Bureau of New York from the autumn of 1907 until the spring of 1909. Two hundred millinery girls were interviewed at home or in the office of the bureau and questioned about their wages, hours, trade history, regularity of employment and training for work. Their names were secured from girls’ clubs, trade classes, employment bureaus, and fellow-workers. More than two hundred shops, including all in which the two hundred workers had been employed since July, 1907, were visited and questions asked about training of learners, wages, hours, seasons, demand and opportunities for experts, and the employer’s opinion of trade-school training.
[33] Tenth Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools, New York City, July, 1908.
TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP
ELIZABETH B. BUTLER
Bureau of Social Research, New York City
Since women began to be employed in mercantile houses, the public has gradually become accustomed to inefficient service. Since their employment has been extended from a few departments to most of the departments, and since public school children and ambitious factory girls alike have competed by thousands for department-store positions, the public has gradually accepted this kind of inefficiency as characteristic of retail employes. Yet at times customers grow restive. At times the marginal increase in buying which can be stimulated by intelligent service is abruptly checked by the absence of intelligence. This is a serious matter to competing concerns. The volume of sales is influenced not only by the quality of goods and the appearance of the store, but by fractional differences in courtesy and understanding. How to acquire employes with such qualities, or how to develop such qualities in employes, has become a managerial issue.
The acuteness of this issue is illustrated in the everyday experience of the department-store customer. You go into a store with the intent, we will say, of buying a linen collar. Having discovered the counter where such articles are for sale, you make toward it and glance with an unkindly eye over the stock displayed. Such collars as hang suspended from the steel display form have eyelet decorations too obviously machine made, whereas your desire is for something less pretentious and more genuine. You attract the eye of a young person and make known your wants. “I don’t wait on collars,” she replies; “the saleslady at the end of the counter will attend to you.” Thereupon you pursue “the saleslady at the end of the counter,” who has been conversing with her friend who “waits on neckwear.” You ask her if she can wait on you, and somewhat reluctantly she returns. Signifying your taste as to collars, you casually observe the expression of disapproval with which she pulls out a box and sets it before you. She waits in silence while you look over the contents of the box. If you ask her the price, she tells you but vouchsafes no further information. Then with a desire to solve the situation rapidly, you seize the first collar that appears to you at all suitable, order half a dozen like it, look at your watch and discover that over twenty minutes have passed since you entered the store, receive your change and depart.
You have your collars, and your unreasoned feeling is that you have secured them as against the enemy. You have a sense of having been actively combating a negative opposition to something, an indifference not fundamentally hostile perhaps, but translated into hostility because of your too definite intention to purchase a specific article. You reflect that had you removed two of the much-eyeletted collars from the steel display form and handed them to the lady with the remark that you would take them, she might have viewed your interruption of her conversation with more complacency. But you required her to lift down a box. Your choice was not to her taste. Your order might perhaps have been called conservative. The result was a perceptible variation in the density of the atmospheric waves between the saleslady and yourself.
Yet on further reflection you realize that after all your saleslady cannot be held accountable for duties which she does not understand. You have wanted attention, advice, understanding service. After some difficulty you have secured a collar. The saleslady thought that you were quite capable of knowing what you wanted and choosing it for yourself. In the concrete both the saleslady and yourself have meant the same thing. Where you have differed was in your interpretation of ways of reaching the concrete. You have wanted an expert; you have met a “counterserver.”