At the premium station as time wore on I learned the full significance of the dreaded Christmas rush. Every morning before the store opened the sidewalk was banked with people. As soon as the doors were unlocked they pushed in, trampling everything before them like a herd of cattle. It seemed to me that at least one-half of them always made straight for our counter.
There were whole days when I scarcely raised my eyes from the coupons I counted. Person after person was served without my so much as glancing at their faces. I had become a machine. My sole aim was to serve customers as fast as possible, and so lessen the crowd that packed the space in front of our counter.
And the team-work of the girls behind that counter! I never have seen it equalled. Never an impatient word nor an angry glance. Whenever a desired article was beyond the reach of the girl serving a customer some other girl would reach it for her. If a customer contested the count of his coupons—and they were continually doing so—the next saleswoman was always ready to change customers and verify or correct the count.
Don’t imagine that the low money value of the certificates and coupons prevented such incidents. During the five weeks I served behind that counter there were scores of persons, men and women, and most of them well dressed, who disputed hotly over a half, or even a quarter, coupon. One such individual threatened to have me arrested if I did not “produce” a quarter-coupon which he claimed to have given me. He was buying a pipe the value of which was two hundred certificates. In the soiled, crumpled mass of paper which he handed me he claimed was the exact number required. My count revealed only five hundred coupons, with one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine quarter-coupons. I’ve often wondered what punishment a judge would mete out to a woman accused of hypothecating a half of a mill.
Of the seven saleswomen in our department—not counting myself—there were five Roman Catholics, one Protestant, and one Jewess. Church questions were not infrequently touched on in our conversation. One point on which they all agreed was that clergymen of all denominations were best described by a shrug of the shoulders.
One day feeling Nora’s elbow on my ribs I glanced up from the coupons in my hand.
“That’s my clergyman,” she whispered. “Wait on ’im, please.”
He proved to be pleasanter than I had expected after hearing all the girls behind the counter declaim against men of his cloth. He did become irritated when I refused to break a box of silk socks for him. When I explained that it was against the rules to deliver goods until after the coupons had been counted, he turned his back on me. He was so much better than some other customers who had fallen to my lot that I remonstrated with Nora for refusing to serve him.
“Oh, I know’ em!” she replied impatiently. “See how sleek and fat and selfish he is! Last week one of ’em came to our flat and worried mother until she gave him the money she’d been saving for more than six months to get herself a pair of thick shoes.”
“Much he cared what she was saving for,” the little Jewess chipped in. “My father keeps a butcher-shop, and whenever mother sees a rabbi coming she hides everything except the toughest cuts. They only take the best, and want ’em for nothing.”