When ordered, by the assistant aisle manager, to go with Mrs. Johnson to lunch, my salesbook showed that I had sold three times as much as Mrs. McDavit and considerably more than Mrs. Johnson.
“You’ll make a good saleslady,” Mrs. Johnson encouraged. “Maybe they’ll make a permanent of you.”
“What am I now?”
“You’re an extra. You’ll get paid every night.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Dollar a day.”
Stopping in the middle of the floor I stared at the two women. “A dollar a day! Did you know you were to be paid only a dollar a day?” I demanded of Mrs. McDavit.
“’Tain’t much,” she apologized, “but my daughter thinks it better than takin’ in wash.”
“My son has charge of a stationary engine and Mondays and Saturdays are his long shifts,” Mrs. Johnson explained. “I can work without his knowing it. He’s studying for the ministry and me earning two dollars a week makes it easier for him.”
In the lunch-room maintained by the firm for its employees, from a long list of what appeared to be low-priced dishes I ordered vegetable soup, a baked apple, and bread and butter. The enticingly misnamed soup proved to be hot water thickened with flour and colored with tomato catsup. After investigating the lumps of uncooked flour at the bottom of the bowl I put it aside and devoted myself to the lumpy little apple and the bread and butter. This last consisted of two thin slices of white bread between which was the thinnest coating of butter I had, at that time, ever seen. Later I learned that it was put on with a brush dipped in melted margarine.