CHAPTER 4

SERVICE WITH A SMILE

Retail

ANN MARIE REINHART DIDN’T INTEND TO SPEND HALF HER LIFE WORKING in retail. It just sort of happened that way.

“I have always worked. I have worked two and three jobs,” she explained. She had left her position in medical billing right before her first child was born, and hadn’t quite figured out what was next. A few months after her son’s birth, she stopped by a Toys “R” Us store and saw a “Now Hiring” sign. They hired her on the spot for the holidays. That was 1988.

“I had no aspirations of being a permanent cashier or working in retail. It was definitely not on my bucket list,” she said with a laugh. “The make-up of a part-timer today is either you are a mom, you are a student, or you are working a second job.” But she liked the idea of getting back to work, in part because she didn’t want to buy her husband a Christmas present with his money. “I always had my own money,” she said.

Reinhart is from Long Island, and you can hear it in her voice even though she’s been in North Carolina for years now; she is warm and motherly but with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes when she’s telling a funny story. She’d assumed her stint at Toys “R” Us would be over after the holidays, but instead the store started training her in customer service and how to keep track of the money. The pay wasn’t great, and retail could be stressful, but the company always gave her some flexibility in her schedule so she had time to be with her family. “Those will be my dying words, ‘They always worked with me,’” she laughed. “That was when it was more of the company that Charles Lazarus created, that family type of atmosphere.”

The flexibility allowed her to stay through her second pregnancy, when she briefly considered leaving for good. When both of her children were in school, she gave in to her managers and coworkers and took the full-time position her managers offered her, moving into a supervisor’s role. It came along with a new benefit: health insurance. Her husband worked in a small business with his brother, and insurance had been costing them thousands each year. The insurance from her job—and the continued flexibility—made it worth her while to stay. “Back then, Toys ‘R’ Us was very good to all of us. I was a Cub Scout leader. I was a mom on the football team. It let me be the mom that I wanted to be.”

That’s not to say it was a perfect job, not at all. The company might have allowed her time off for some of her kids’ activities, but she still worked long hours. “I think that nobody realizes all the sacrifices that are made by the people that work in retail. They sacrifice their families,” she said. “Almost the entire month of December, I didn’t see my husband. He got up early for work. I would come home and he would be sleeping. Then, he would leave for work and I would be sleeping.” Her husband once suggested it was time for her to find a “real” job, which frustrated her. “I was like, ‘You think I am not busting my ass every day at work? This is a real job.’”

And then, of course, there were the customers. Some of them were lovely, but others could be unbelievably nasty. Sometimes the customers abused her—“I have been called every name in the book”—and other times she had to intervene as a supervisor when they bullied her colleagues. Reinhart brushed her brown bob off her forehead to show me the scar from a Green Power Ranger toy that a customer had thrown in her face. The customer, she said, had brought the same toy back over and over again, taking advantage of the company’s return policy. “Finally, my boss was like, ‘Listen, she can’t come in here every week with this. She is showing no receipt, no box. We aren’t doing this anymore for her.’” So Reinhart had to tell the woman they wouldn’t take the toy back. “I am a good schmoozer, that is why it took me by surprise. She took it and she threw it at me!” She recalled touching her forehead and feeling blood.

Another incident that stuck with her had happened to one of her colleagues, and she’d had to intervene. A woman came in wanting to return something—again, clearly used—and the employee at the customer service counter politely told her that the store could not accept the item back. The customer, as Reinhart watched, “started berating her and insulting her.” The customer turned to her daughter, “who was maybe seven or eight,” and said, “This is why you get an education, so you don’t end up like her,” Reinhart recalled. “I turned around and said, ‘What did you just say?’” The worker was in tears, and Reinhart told the customer to leave. “It was just an ‘A-ha!’ moment for me, like, everyone does view people who work in retail as worthless.”

Another horror story involved Reinhart’s daughter-in-law, who also worked in customer service at the store. “[One] lady was so mad at her, she took her daughter’s wet panties off and threw them at my daughter-in-law,” Reinhart said. Her eyes welled up as she recalled her daughter-in-law’s scream when the wet underwear hit her.

Retail might have given her a thick skin, and she might have prided herself on her ability to manage difficult people, but these memories clearly still stung. “That is another thing with retail. If you are good at a job—no matter how crappy that job is—they won’t take you out of it,” she said. “Some days you go home feeling depleted.” And the worst part was that after customers behaved horribly, management would often give in to keep them happy. “Not only are you insulted and berated by customers, you felt it double for your store manager to come out and give that customer what they wanted anyway.”

The idea that retail was not a “real job” was echoed constantly by her customers. “The word ‘stupid’ comes out so much that I truly believe they think we are all uneducated,” Reinhart continued. “I went to college. Half my cashiers are all in college right now. How dare you?” But in the changing economy, she pointed out, retail work was far from just a job for teenagers. For her, it had been a career that paid her as much as the factory jobs that had built the American middle class—though with no union and with that modern innovation, a 401(k), rather than a pension. “Most of the people my age—I am sixty—grew up with stay-at-home moms,” she said. Now, women make up most of the workforce in retail and service, and many of them are moms like her, supporting a family.

After nearly ten years at the big Toys “R” Us store in Huntington, Long Island, Reinhart transferred to a new Babies “R” Us store. The holidays were calmer, without the mad rush every year at the toy store, and she was able to spend more time with her kids. “I came home and my house was decorated right after Thanksgiving. All those years, I didn’t get to enjoy the holidays. My kids were like eight, nine, ten years old, and they appreciated it more, too.”

As her sons grew up, Reinhart and her husband began to consider moving south, following her sister and brother, who were already in North Carolina. She once again questioned whether she wanted to stay at Toys “R” Us, but since the company had nearly eight hundred stores, she could move and have a job already lined up—and keep the salary she was making in New York. She also had noticed that in her years at Toys “R” Us, retail had begun to change: all the ads she saw were for part-time jobs with no benefits. So she moved to Durham, North Carolina, and became store supervisor at a Babies “R” Us by the Southpoint Mall. The baby registries, in particular, made the job worth it—she enjoyed sitting down with new parents and helping them pick things out. Years later, at a different job, she ran into a former customer, who remembered her immediately. “She says, ‘You did my whole registry with me. You sold me my furniture.’” It was moments like that that made her actually like the work.

It was sometime around her move that Reinhart first heard mention of Bain Capital’s involvement with Toys “R” Us, though, as it was explained to the employees, Bain was investing money in the company to help it expand the baby stores into superstores. She didn’t think too much of it at first. As a human resources representative, she said, she used to go to job fairs and talk up the company. “I would say things like, ‘It is a financially stable company. Toys “R” Us has been around forever.’”

Those words haunt her now. In 2005, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and Vornado Realty Trust took over the company, and things began to change. Slowly at first—slowly enough that Reinhart was shocked when she was told her store was being closed. It was shuttered in April 2018, and the company was liquidated shortly thereafter. Private equity buys up firms that are wobbly through leveraged buyouts that put the debt used to buy them back on the company’s balance sheets; if any more trouble hits a company, whether it be increased competition, in the case of Toys “R” Us, or, more recently, the global pandemic, things can unravel quickly. Once iconic brands like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus have fallen into bankruptcy in this way.¹

What that meant for Reinhart was the loss of a job she’d had for twenty-nine years, with no severance. “It was almost my entire adult life,” she said, shaking her head. “What was I thinking?” But the time she’d put in taught her to advocate for herself and for her colleagues, from those moments on the customer service desk to arguing, as HR, for higher wages. “I am most proud, probably, of my work then,” she said.

“It did prepare me to fight the company.”

IN 1892, THE WORKERS AT THE HOMESTEAD STEEL PLANT IN WESTERN Pennsylvania challenged their employers’ demand for massive wage cuts. They were locked out, the lockout became a strike, and the employer called in the union-busting Pinkerton detectives. In the resulting battle, seven of those workers were killed. Today, the smokestacks that burned over those deaths still stand, but the rest of the plant is now a shopping mall, with the tagline, “Where tradition meets trend.” Those factory grounds, where workers fought and died to uphold labor standards, now house retail jobs—the wages low, the turnover high, as if those old battles never happened.²

Retail salesclerk is the single largest job category in the United States and also a common occupation in much of Europe. Even with the rise of Internet sales, a pandemic, and headlines in recent years proclaiming a “retail apocalypse,” retail remains a cornerstone of the economy and a way that millions of people put food on the table. Yet those jobs, in so many cases, are “bad” jobs, with low security, few benefits, erratic schedules, and virtually no opportunity for upward mobility.³

Retail jobs are not new, of course, and they have long retained many of the characteristics we still associate with them—they are dominated by women and part-timers, and they are taxing not just physically but mentally and emotionally, as workers often feel trapped between customers and managers. But as the economy shifted from a manufacturing focus to a focus on consumption, the manufacturing jobs—gendered masculine and built on a full-time schedule—were cut back. Retail rose to dominance in manufacturing’s stead, and as it did, so did those feminine-gendered labor patterns. But the real difference between the retail jobs and the manufacturing jobs that were fading was the requirement of that “service with a smile.” Retail workers, unlike manufacturing workers, have to appear to love their work.⁴

Retail was long considered a sideline, an add-on to the “real” economy, its workers less important or serious than those in factories. For a long time, retail stores were small businesses; up until the Great Depression in the United States, independently owned stores constituted 89 percent of retail establishments and did 70 percent of retail sales. “Mom-and-pop” stores were just that: family establishments that had maybe one or two outside employees. Mostly, the family did what was necessary, even the children.⁵

But capitalist production led to capitalist retail—the massive department store or the sprawling chain that replicated across the country, promising a familiar array of goods wherever the shopper went. And capitalist retail, with centralized management, meant salesclerk jobs. In the United States, non-owner retail jobs exploded between 1880, when there were about 32,000 clerks, and 1930, when there were 2.3 million. The work varied with the stores—high-end clothing retail involved high-end personal service, with saleswomen patiently outfitting the shopper from head to toe. By contrast, “five-and-dime” stores served the growing working class, providing groceries, dry goods, and the occasional treat, with perhaps just a passing grin from the clerk. The jobs tended to be similar, though, in that they stretched over long hours for low pay.⁶

As retail stores expanded, the job of the clerk did, too. Hand-selling required a range of skills, from product knowledge to physical stamina (fifteen-hour workdays were not uncommon). It also called for the kind of patience and “people skills” needed to read a customer’s mood as well as her budget, in order to suggest products that would appeal and upsell extras. Yet such skills were not considered as important as the ones that men in the factory or on the farm might have; the service economy, historian Bethany Moreton wrote, “capitalized on this broad social agreement that women weren’t really workers, their skills not really skills.” In other words, they capitalized on the same logic that applied to women’s work in the home, paid or unpaid, as well as to child care and teaching.⁷

Shopping was also women’s work, an extension of housework. Retail stores therefore were designed to appeal to women’s sensibilities, whether they were upscale or downmarket. Retail employers staffed up with women workers, who the employers assumed innately had those sensibilities, and would be good at making the store feel homelike. Women, after all, were presumed to be naturally caring and sensitive to the needs and desires of others—and that made them better at selling to other women without overstepping boundaries.

Department stores, in particular, made skilled selling central to their business model. But they had to balance the need to develop the skills of their employees with the desire to keep labor costs down, profits high, and prices affordable. Hiring women, particularly young women, who were presumed to be pliant, helped. That those young women would presumably depart in relatively short order to get married and have families of their own had the benefit for the bosses of keeping turnover relatively high, so that workers never got too expensive or too demanding. And part-time scheduling went hand in hand with low wages: younger women were assumed to be dependent on parents, while married women, if they managed to hold on to a job at all in an era of intense prejudice against married women working, were assumed to be working for “pin money.” Their real job was supposed to be homemaking.⁸

Sales jobs were, despite the relatively low pay, respectable work for young women who aspired to class mobility. The department store clerk was expected to model the merchandise she sold, and store discounts encouraged her to shop. This expectation of respectability also meant that sales jobs were largely for white women. Black women—and even Jewish women and immigrants—did not give off the impression of middle-classness needed for sales work. Yet the saleswoman also had to give a convincing performance of deference to her clients, even when they irritated her or reported her to management. Skilled salesclerks found innovative ways to carve out space where they, not the imposing (and usually male) managers or imperious shoppers, were the boss. They maintained their own coded language for talking about customers in front of them; they collaborated to help one another meet sales quotas; and they revenged themselves on coworkers who did not follow the rules. The workers also could make occasional alliances with shoppers who, particularly in the Progressive Era (before World War I and the Depression), took an interest in social reform.⁹

The work it takes to suppress one’s true feelings, to maintain a calm smile and the appearance of enjoyment, in order to maintain the customer’s mood is familiar to anyone who works with people. This work—which sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild famously dubbed “emotional labor”—remains a major component of the retail salesperson’s job and a key difference between it and factory work. If you’re standing behind an automobile assembly line, it doesn’t matter if you smile or frown, but your failure to emanate a pleasant mood on the sales floor can ruin your workday (particularly if you rely on commissions or tips). “Seeming to ‘love the job’ becomes part of the job,” Hochschild wrote, “and actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in this effort.”¹⁰

Such labor is deeply gendered: women are made responsible for others’ emotions off the clock, and that emotion management has become part of the job while punched in. Yet this distribution of emotional labor reflects the inequalities of the broader society. To manage your feelings in order to avoid imposing them on others is to place yourself in a subordinate position; to have to massage others’ feelings all day long is to get used to swallowing your own emotions and needs. Skill in this field is a skill learned from a life without power; it should not be surprising, then, that such a skill is rarely seen as a skill by the powerful, who expect deference as their natural right.¹¹

Even as women’s emotional skills were undervalued, by paying women a wage at all, retail bosses provided some recognition that they contributed something important. The introduction of training programs and even vocational education in the early twentieth century upheld the idea that sales work was skilled work, yet the workers were also undermined by consistent low pay. Saleswomen earned between 42 and 63 percent of what men did in sales jobs—one shoe saleswoman complained to a labor investigator, “I don’t get the salary the men clerks do, although this day I am six hundred sales ahead! Call this justice? But I have to grin and bear it, because I am so unfortunate as to be a woman.” Unions, too, accepted the framework of what researchers Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman called “industrial breadwinner masculinity”—the breadwinner’s job was what mattered, and it was those jobs that should be prioritized, while “women’s work” was less important and less worthy of the unions’ attention. The same ideology that promoted the family wage therefore undermined the wages of women. It contributed to the sense that retail work was dead-end, short-term work—and easy.¹²

Despite sometimes having to convince unions that they were worth the effort, retail workers fought for shorter hours, higher wages, and looser dress codes, but most of all for recognition that their jobs counted, that their work was also work. Inspired by the sit-down strikers at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, Detroit Woolworth Five and Dime clerks—all of them young women—sat in and occupied their store for seven days in 1937 before winning nearly all their demands. The Woolworth’s was a four-story brick building, a shopping palace, historian Dana Frank wrote, “built for working-class people.” The saleswomen at Woolworth’s dished out candy and served food and sold a variety of low-priced goods for purchase by people who were slowly winning themselves disposable income and spare time in which to spend it. The saleswomen wanted these same things for themselves. They demanded union recognition, an eight-hour workday, overtime pay, discount lunches, free uniforms, seniority rights, hiring of new workers through the union, and a ten-cent raise per hour on their twenty-five-cent-an-hour wages.¹³

Striking Woolworth’s was a shot across retail’s bow; it was, Frank wrote, “like striking Walmart, the Gap, and McDonald’s all at the same time.” And the women did it with flair. They knew that the same charm that had gotten them hired in the first place would play well with reporters, and they performed for the cameras that turned up as well as for one another. They sang songs and danced and did one another’s makeup and hair. Their working-class clientele supported them, as did other unions in the city; the musicians’ union turned up to play for them. Strikers at a second Detroit store joined them days in; the Waiters and Waitresses Union threatened to take the strike national. Kresge’s, a competing chain, gave its workers an immediate five-cent raise, and then on the seventh day Woolworth’s gave in. Seeing the success in Detroit, retail workers around the country duplicated their efforts.¹⁴

Thus the period of rapid growth of chain stores was also a brief period of rapid victories for chain-store workers. The remaining opposition to chain stores—a hangover of the mom-and-pop days and a kind of littler-is-better populism that we still hear echoes of today in politicians’ paeans to “small business”—ensured that there wasn’t much sympathy in the Depression-era press for the titans of the retail industry. Particularly in the South, there was a belief that “socialism, atheism, chain stores, and companionate marriage” were linked in spelling doom for American culture, yet activists couldn’t stop their growth. By the late 1940s, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) had ninety thousand members, and the Retail Clerks International Association (RCIA) nearly two hundred thousand. Yet even at their peak, retail unions only represented one in ten employees in the industry, and retail workers were left out of early minimum-wage laws.¹⁵

The anti-chain-store movement, somewhat perversely, helped one of the twentieth century’s largest chains find early success. Walmart benefited from the down-home image cultivated by Sam Walton, its baseball-capped founder. Walton spun that image into a lasting perception that Walmart was a “family” company with local roots long after it had expanded beyond any possible family bounds. In the 2010s, longtime Walmart workers were still telling me fond stories of Sam. But the family, as we’ve discussed, is itself a style of work, and Walton understood how to capitalize on it. In order to appeal to the rural housewife as a customer, as well as to appropriate her labor as she moved into the waged workforce for the first time, Walmart had to feel like the family.¹⁶

Walmart was born in the rural Ozarks, in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, and there the company maintains its base to this day. From there, it grew, until, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote, it controlled a swath of global trade roughly equal to that of the eighteenth-century Dutch East India Company. And in the time of its growth, the global economy was shifting from one driven by manufacturers to one driven by retailers. Woolworth’s and the early mail-order houses—Sears and others—were able to use their size to exert some power over the manufacturers from whom they acquired goods to sell, but Walmart epitomized a larger change in the way the world did business.¹⁷

Though Walmart’s major innovation was in distribution, its success in this particular corner of America, largely rural and scarred by Depression-era evictions, relied heavily on the women who worked in its early discount stores. Those women taught Walton what mattered to them: a sense of Christian service and a feeling that they were helping their community, which animated them more than their (low) wages did. Christian family values were infused into the company by its employees and trickled upward to influence the folksy identity that Walton was building into his brand. While part of the anti-chain-store panic was inflected with a gendered fear that “a nation of clerks” would be unmanly, Walmart’s familial hierarchy restored order, with women doing the selling for the smiling male founder at the top.¹⁸

Walmart was also able to cut costs through its self-service model, where (mostly women) shoppers did much of the work themselves, finding branded products in neatly arranged aisles and only occasionally needing assistance from the sales staff. So even as Walmart advertised its quality service, it was in fact trying to cut down on the number of people it had to hire to provide that service. The company rewarded its employees for faster scanning at the checkout counter, giving out pins to cashiers who could scan five hundred items per hour. That scanning efficiency meant sore wrists, certainly, but more importantly, more data for Walmart’s distribution system and just-in-time stocking practices. It also meant deskilling the workers and devaluing the very emotional labor it had learned to pay lip service to.¹⁹

In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy made a raise for retail clerks a campaign promise and got it enacted into law. That was despite the opposition of conservatives like Barry Goldwater, himself the scion of a department-store family, and Sam Walton, who viciously opposed the minimum-wage increase and demanded that his managers ensure the stores remained union-free. Walmart achieved that goal by maintaining a culture that emphasized the importance of service work, even if that acknowledgment came verbally (and on name tags reading “our people make the difference,” a slogan reinstated in 2015 after Walmart workers began going on strike) rather than through pay increases. Walmart, and the other companies that followed its lead, worked to infuse a sense of belonging into its workers that would make up for low pay—and would make them better at projecting the aura of care that helped the company succeed.²⁰

Walmart’s spread across America and the world coincided with—but barely acknowledged—the feminist revolution, even as it relied heavily on the labor of women entering the workforce in droves. While middle-class women were going to work to find meaning, though, working-class women were going to work to find a paycheck, and the work they found was all too similar to the work they did in the home. Retail and food-service jobs didn’t pay well, and managers often treated their workers abominably; in such an environment, the pains that Walmart took to at least acknowledge the efforts and care of its workers made it a better employer than many. And as it continued to grow, factories were shrinking, closing, or departing for lower-wage countries; Walmart (or its distribution centers) might soon be one of the few jobs in town. In this way, even as women moved into the workforce, more men moved into jobs that looked like women’s work, where they, too, had to learn to do the emotional labor that, in women, was taken for granted. It wasn’t the equality feminism had dreamed of: men and women both cobbling together a living from multiple low-paying jobs as the conditions of women’s work became more and more widespread.²¹

The Walton family expanded its reach politically as well as economically. It invested in organizations like Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), now known as Enactus, which sponsors programs at universities to teach students about the beauties of “free enterprise,” otherwise known as capitalism. It poured money into small Christian colleges, from which it harvested management trainees loyal to the company and its professed values and willing to put in long hours. And through the Walton Family Foundation, it directed funds to “school choice,” the euphemism for privately owned charter schools. According to the foundation’s own documents, one in every four charter schools created in the United States has received Walton Family funds. Such an investment in education has ideological goals; it aims to reshape schools and what and how they teach. After all, with widely accessible education, but service industries dominating the economy, what we get is educated workers doing service jobs, and so the Waltons and others like them aimed to make sure those workers believed in the system under which they worked.²²

Walmart has changed the American workplace: more and more of the jobs of the twenty-first century are made in its feminized, low-wage image, with no health insurance, volatile schedules, and high turnover. More than 70 percent of all jobs, by one count, created in the United States between 1973 and 1980 were in services and retail trades, creating a new “service proletariat” mostly made up of women and people of color. Walmart argues that its low prices make up for the low wages, raising the standard of living of working-class people by offering them cheap goods. It also argues that its workers like their work. Regardless, the company’s impact has been such that, as Bethany Moreton argued, “the economic vision we call neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism.”²³

In the wake of Walmart, retail businesses had few options. Walmart’s entry into a community often triggered a wave of closures among shops that couldn’t compete with the chain’s massive advantages. One study found that in the ten years after Walmart’s arrival in Iowa, “the state lost 555 groceries, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 158 women’s apparel shops, 116 drugstores, and 153 shoe stores.” As a whole, the retail sector was growing, becoming a larger part of the economy in the United States and Europe, but it was also segmenting, splitting into high-end and low-end and then further in an effort to appeal to different demographics. Few companies could compete with Walmart; those that did either imitated its business model with a slightly fancier gloss (Target) or improved upon it (Amazon). Other companies—like Toys “R” Us—applied it to their specific sector, coming to ruthless dominance. Self-service and the barcode scanner deskilled the formerly skilled sales jobs in department stores, clothing retail, and grocery stores. Higher-end retailers did invest to a degree in service, even while attempting to keep labor costs (wages) low. But they went counter to the overall trend toward concentration and standardization, organizations that could replicate with a largely interchangeable workforce.²⁴

As this retail model spread, the recession of the 1970s hit, and then the administrations of Ronald Reagan, in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher, in the United Kingdom, slashed public services and public-sector jobs. Retailers that had been unionized or had upheld near-union wages and conditions felt the squeeze and began to slice away at labor costs. Workers got wage cuts and more part-time, no-benefits jobs. High turnover became a blessing for employers who wanted to shed their costliest workers—a shift from the decades of welfare capitalism that characterized even the earliest years of retail work. The shift to what sociologist Peter Ikeler called “contingent control” gave retail stores and other service employers a flexible workforce that can be hired and fired at need. Those workers, in other words, are unlikely to be around long enough to question managers’ power. Ann Marie Reinhart’s decades at one retailer, by the 2000s, was a rare experience.²⁵

By 2013, less than 5 percent of American retail workers were members of unions, down from 11 percent in 1983. Younger workers can expect more than twenty job changes in a lifetime, nearly double the number of baby boomers. In lieu of providing unionized jobs with decent conditions, the new retail stores learned from Walmart to pay lip service to workers’ wants and needs, to embrace “teamwork” while making sure workers didn’t actually team up enough to organize. Such paternalism works best with workers who don’t need to support a family on their wages—on young people, students, or women, as Reinhart noted, whose main job remains in the home. Something like one in three retail workers is a part-timer. It is easier for such workers to emphasize the positive parts of their jobs and shrug off the negatives; if it is, in the words of one young worker, “not my real job,” but just a stopgap, there is less incentive for the workers to make demands. A “cool” supervisor or one who is “like family,” snacks in the break room, those can make up for a lot if you never expected a family-sustaining wage in the first place. But it is still important to remember that two-thirds of the retail workforce is in fact over the age of twenty-five, and trending older. There are a whole lot of people working retail who are, in fact, supporting others.²⁶

IN 2000, THE FIRST CRACK IN WALMART’S ARMOR CAME WITH THE FILING of a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the company. Women at the time made up 72 percent of Walmart’s workforce but only 34 percent of its managers; they earned less than men at nearly every level of the company’s hierarchy. The company’s history of exploiting the service skills of women was still visible in the evidence in the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., v. Dukes case: it had only added its first woman to the board in 1986, when then First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton joined up. The suit landed in the wake of welfare reform, when women were being pushed into low-wage work, and it was decided (in Walmart’s favor, on a technicality) in 2011, as the world struggled to climb out of the recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis. Women’s work was holding together the economy, but it was still valued less than that of men. The contrast could be stark. One of the Dukes plaintiffs, for example, had discovered the pay discrepancy when she was accidentally handed her colleague’s tax form—a glance at it revealed that the man, in his first year as an assistant manager, a job she’d been doing for five years, made $10,000 a year more than her. When she complained to upper management, she was told that her coworker “supports his wife and his two kids.” Pregnant at the time, the woman realized how much Walmart’s vaunted family values were worth. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff, told reporter Liza Featherstone that the company was like a bad boyfriend. “They tell you exactly what you want to hear. But then you fall out of love and feel you were basically played.”²⁷

Walmart has not been the only major retailer to face such criticisms. Target has been accused of race discrimination by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and a class-action suit against grocery chain Lucky Stores resulted in a ruling for the plaintiffs in 1992. Home Depot, too, faced a class-action suit. An employee of Hobby Lobby—the same retailer that sued the US government to avoid paying for its employees’ birth control with their health insurance—said she was fired for asking for time off due to pregnancy. When she attempted to sue the company, the case was dismissed because she had, unknowingly, signed away her right to do so in a binding arbitration agreement.²⁸

Retail remains overwhelmingly gendered and racialized. Young workers of color tend to wind up in fast-food jobs, while white teens find jobs in higher-end retail. Those are the jobs more likely to be concentrated in whiter, wealthier areas that are harder to reach by public transit. Thus young people, in particular, tend to get jobs based not on economic need but on access. If they do make it into retail, workers of color are more likely to end up in the stockroom than on the sales floor. One study found that 70 percent of Black and Latinx retail workers make less than fifteen dollars per hour, compared to 58 percent of white retail workers. And another study found that transgender people faced a 42 percent rate of discrimination just in attempting to get a retail job.²⁹

Increased competition even for retail work means that employees often have to jump through hoops to get the decent jobs—and small, independent retailers are no better than the chains. A New York bookshop made one college student take a quiz on authors, and then recite her favorite passage from a novel—all for a minimum-wage job. A London toy store had prospective employees make up songs and demonstrate selling skill by choosing a random product from the store and making up a play about it. Some companies weed out workers who need a job by ensuring long wait times during the screening process, leaving them with workers driven less by economic necessity than by the desire for a specific position. Presumably, they’ll be more loyal.³⁰

There are “aesthetic labor” requirements for higher-end stores, which expect employees to embody their brands and use their products, modeling the goods the way early saleswomen did. These norms particularly affect women, who are expected to put forward a certain image of beauty; the cost of the products women are expected to use creates something known as the “grooming gap,” as writer and organizer Mindy Isser explained. The gap creates, as Isser wrote, a “pay cut catch-22: If women don’t conform, they are paid less; if they do conform, they’re expected to use those higher wages on beauty products and grooming regimens.” These requirements cut into women’s time as well as their budgets, yet forgoing them might mean forgoing the job. Buying and wearing the products they sell is yet another way that retail employees demonstrate their dedication to their jobs. “Sometimes I feel like all the money I earn goes back to the company,” one young worker said. Their pay, after all, remains low, and then some of them find that their dedication to the brand is used against them. “You’re just in it for the discounts,” they are told, another way of telling them their work isn’t work after all.³¹

High-end stores do not, in fact, necessarily provide higher-end jobs. Researchers found that high-road retailers that tout their excellent service rarely couple that with high-road labor conditions. In 2017, I spoke with Bloomingdale’s workers Betty Lloyd and Kathy Houser, members of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Local 3 and on the verge of a strike. They were in the aristocracy of retail workers, serving wealthy customers in a flagship New York City store, yet their commissions had dried up, their incomes had shrunk, and their conditions had worsened. Internet sales had eaten into their take-home, as Lloyd explained: “You give them your product knowledge. You show them what you have that is in their needs. You fit them, size them, give them the color. You tell them how great they look. You hear the customer say, ‘Thank you very much, Betty, for your service, but I am going to go home and order this online.’” Small boutiques are no better. As writer Aaron Braun pointed out, they trade on workers’ desire for a more authentic workplace the same way they do on customers’ desire for a more personalized shopping experience. “While these jobs promise a work environment void of the monotony and corporatism usually associated with working-class jobs,” he wrote, “they often simply deliver precarious work and a more personalized form of exploitation.”³²

There is, too, the overwhelming suspicion with which retailers have always treated their workers. “Service shopping” or “secret shopping” dates back to the early 1900s, when department stores would send undercover shoppers in to report back on their saleswomen’s behavior. Being patted down when one leaves the store is a common occurrence for retail workers. “Loss Prevention” is an obsession of most retailers: at Walmart it dovetailed with the company’s anti-union obsession, and the company created a sort of internal police department that monitored workers for pilfering or for protesting too much. New technology makes such surveillance easier—the scanning devices handed to workers to track merchandise also tracks the workers, who have to plug in their information to start the device. Japanese workers have been subjected to a “smile scanner” that gauges how well they project happiness on the job—an automated test of emotional labor. The video cameras that are now common in stores not only pick up shoplifters, but can also tell whether employees are smiling.³³

The schedule, though, is the biggest complaint among retail workers, and technology plays a role there as well. Retailers attempt to match staffing levels to sales flow, but that is always a guessing game. Scheduling software allows an algorithm to calculate the likelihood of a busy day based on a host of data points, from weather reports to the previous year’s sales on that day, and to assign workers based on the results. That means workers’ schedules are always changing and may vary wildly from week to week, with preference given to those whose availability is “open,” and who do not admit to any other demands on their time, such as school responsibilities or child care. With schedules so in flux, it is easy for managers to use hours to reward favorites, or as punishment for slipups, real or imagined. The dreaded “clopening,” where workers close a store late at night only to have to turn around and open it the next morning on just a couple hours of sleep, has made its way into popular consciousness. On-call shifts have expanded, too—one 2014 study in California found that one-quarter of retail workers had to be on call to work that same day. Women remain more likely than men to work part time, whether or not they want to—something like half of part-time retail workers would prefer to be full time.³⁴

These conditions are broadly true across the world in postindustrial nations. In the United Kingdom, the zero-hours contract is common—though a work contract at all might sound dreamy to US at-will employees, a zero-hours contract gives the worker no guarantee of any hours at all. As of 2017, over nine hundred thousand workers were on such contracts. In the book Where Bad Jobs Are Better, researchers Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly studied retail work in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States and concluded that while conditions varied by country, “in general, retail jobs have gotten worse across all six countries over the past two decades,” with women and young people overrepresented, and lower-than-average wages. German workers, who had better training, got their schedules six months in advance, and had union protections, nevertheless were increasingly in “mini-jobs” with lower pay and fewer benefits. French cashiers got to sit down on the job, and stores closed earlier in the day and on Sundays, yet French retail workers too were tracked for their scanning speed. In Mexico, Walmart is unionized, but the workers complained of excessive unpaid overtime.³⁵

Even without the union protections that workers in other countries enjoy, retail workers in the United States have managed to push back some of their worst conditions. On the heels of voting for the highest minimum wage in the United States—$15.20 an hour—and paid sick time, Emeryville, California, a tiny town in the Bay Area clotted with retail stores, voted in a fair workweek ordinance in October 2016. The ordinance required large retailers to give their employees their schedules at least two weeks in advance, and required an extra hour of pay for every time the employer changed that schedule—meaning workers would get paid if they were sent home early or called in from an off day. It also required employers to offer hours to existing employees before hiring new workers. The ordinance came from demands made by workers who organized with the Retail Action Project in New York and in Emeryville with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). Those groups realized that simply raising wages wasn’t enough. “You needed to also tackle the means by which they get those hours so that workers have more of a say and more of a voice and more control over the schedules and hours that they get,” said Anya Svanoe, an ACCE organizer.³⁶

Of course, every gain for retail workers has come amid howls of protest from the employers, who argued that raising retail wages will accelerate what’s come to be known as the “retail apocalypse.” Stores are closing, the Internet is now where people do their shopping, and entire brands are closing up shop. The result is that people like Ann Marie Reinhart are forced to restructure their lives. To keep up with changing demands, stores lay off workers or cut back hours, often worsening their already-existing problems, according to Richard Granger, organizing director at the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union Local 23 in Western Pennsylvania. “Our fear is that if people are spending less time and money in a brick-and-mortar location, that if they then also start to experience less customer service, less attention because a corporation makes a staffing decision, that creates a vicious cycle that drives consumers to look for other options,” Granger said. There is also the push to automate jobs: the self-scanner is now common in grocery stores and some other retail outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, but thus far it has had a relatively modest impact on job loss.³⁷

The apocalypse was sometimes overstated. Sociologist Stephanie Luce explained that brick-and-mortar retail and even customer service remained popular. “Shopping isn’t just buying; it is also an activity. Tourism, for example, involves lots of looking in stores.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects only a slight decline in the industry over the next decade. While e-commerce has grown relatively rapidly, it still makes up a small portion of total retail sales and only employs a small percentage of total retail workers.³⁸

But e-commerce has also expanded the role of the distribution center. Central to Walmart’s business model, and now to Amazon’s, the distribution hub is a place for goods to move rather than to be held, and jobs in it are infamously miserable. Yet in some ways the jobs are similar to those in the retail stores: the handheld scanner, the shelves of goods, the pressure to go faster. But instead of the emotional labor of smiling at customers, the “pickers” in the warehouse face the grinding boredom of long hours alone, without even music to keep them company. Emily Guendelsberger, a journalist who took an Amazon “fulfillment center” job and wrote about it in her book On the Clock, encountered a coworker one night dressed as Santa Claus for a pre-Christmas shift. He was, she wrote, a professional—well, a volunteer—Santa in his time outside of the warehouse, but Santa-ing didn’t pay the bills. Santa encouraged her to feel “blessed” to be “healthy enough to work here.” But the shift toward more distribution center work is unlikely to leave anyone feeling blessed—or fulfilled.³⁹

It might be easier to differentiate oneself from the warehouse work, though, than it is from the enforced smile of the retail shop floor. Arlie Russell Hochschild noted that the risk of overidentifying with the job was the dreaded “burnout,” now a buzzword of sorts. Burnout, associated, in particular, with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes from convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of higher wages.⁴⁰

And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control.⁴¹

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated many of the trends already existing in retail. With the shift to online ordering as shelter-in-place orders spread across the globe, some companies, such as J. Crew, slid into bankruptcy, while some e-retailers—particularly Amazon—profited wildly. Companies laid off workers, particularly part-timers, as they tried to save money for eventual reopening. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target remained open, putting up safety shields for workers and providing in some cases short-term bonus pay for those who continued to show up. Workers, however, demanded more. The workers deemed “essential” during the pandemic, explained Travis Boothe, a pharmacy technician at Kroger in West Virginia, were retail workers like him, and the whole country was realizing “just how essential we are to the very foundations of this country’s economy.” Kroger, he noted, was doing “extremely well”: “Profits are up, sales are up. They pretty much have a guarantee that those profits will continue throughout this crisis.” But the company moved to take away the workers’ $2-an-hour “hero pay” just two months into the crisis, and the workers (and some customers) were angry. Telling them that they were essential, that they were heroes, one minute and then taking away their hazard pay the next didn’t sit well with them, and that anger lent fuel to the protests that erupted across the nation in late May 2020.⁴²

WHEN ANN MARIE REINHART FIRST HEARD THAT TOYS “R” US WAS GOING bankrupt, she said, “I think it was the seven stages of grief. I think we all went through them. It was mostly denial at first.”

The announcement came in September 2017. At first the company said it would keep operating as usual; then, Reinhart said, they were told that over one hundred stores were closing, including the superstore where she worked in North Carolina. She tried to keep up her hopes, though, telling herself, “I had seen them close stores before.” Since the leveraged buyout—one of a stack of finance terms Reinhart and her coworkers would learn in the ensuing years—“the whole mentality changed.” Before, Toys “R” Us had a family atmosphere, she said—she recalled the founder, Charles Lazarus, arriving at her store for an unexpected visit one time, in jeans and a plaid shirt. The store, she said, “was his baby.” Lazarus, she noted, died just as the company went into liquidation, in March 2018.⁴³

Reinhart had researched Bain Capital during the 2012 presidential race. Mitt Romney (now senator from Utah) was running, and he had been one of the firm’s founders. She always read up on the candidates before making her choice, and Bain’s business model struck her as predatory well before she had any idea how much it would affect her life. So when her manager mentioned Bain’s involvement as they changed her Babies “R” Us to a superstore, she said, “It was like, ‘Ding! Ding! Ding!’ I said to him, ‘Do you know what Bain Capital does to companies? Do you know anything about Bain Capital?’” He defended it to her at the time, but during the liquidation, she said, he messaged her to apologize for not listening to her. “He was with the company maybe ten years, but they sucked thirty years out of me,” she said.

The Toys “R” Us workers weren’t the only ones poring over the news to find out what would happen to their jobs, their health insurance, and their retirement plans. The organization now known as United for Respect was looking to expand its organizing among retail workers. United for Respect had begun as Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, as a project of the UFCW to organize Walmart workers around the country. It used social media to build a broad-based group of workers who might never win a union election at any one store, but who could take action at many locations at once, coming together to apply pressure to the company’s leadership to improve working conditions. The organization’s founders had always thought of their work around Walmart as a way to affect the retail sector as a whole—as goes Walmart, so goes the low-wage job. But what was happening at Toys “R” Us seemed to them to be another piece of the retail story—the “retail apocalypse” wasn’t just because of the Internet, but because finance capital had gotten involved and was attempting to wring every possible dollar out of retail firms before dropping them.

Toys “R” Us workers, like Walmart workers, had deeply identified with the company. They felt betrayed by the liquidation, and had felt the erosion of their working conditions as private equity turned up the heat. And they were organizing themselves. One of Reinhart’s coworkers told her about a Facebook group called the Dead Giraffe Society, but at first, she said, she wasn’t interested. When she took a look at it, she saw people sharing memories and pictures, mourning and remembering good times.

The society was also a space for a lot of anger, and the United for Respect organizers dove in, hoping to help. But how do you organize workers at a chain that is closing? Strikes don’t work—you can’t shut down business to make demands if the business itself is closing down. Still, the workers were eager to figure out a way to fight. People would say to Reinhart, “It’s just a job,” she said, but “it is a job that I gave thirty years to, so I am willing to fight. We weren’t treated well.”

The stores weren’t all closed yet when Reinhart’s shut down, and lots of the workers on the Facebook page were nervous about making trouble. But Reinhart had had enough, and though the company had always warned workers about talking to reporters, when a request went out in the Dead Giraffe Society from United for Respect, asking if anyone would like to talk to a BuzzFeed reporter, she said she’d do it. “What are they going to do? They can’t fire me, I don’t have a job anymore.” Her first media interview took an hour, and she said she “was very tearful. It was very, very raw.”

The same organizer from United for Respect then wrote her to ask if she’d like to come to Washington, DC, and meet with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She called her friend MJ, who had moved to Texas from New York and had also worked at Toys “R” Us. “She said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’ve spoken to them on the phone twice. I have to trust my gut instinct.’ She said, ‘Tell her to call me.’” On the basis of Reinhart’s gut, she and MJ went to DC with United for Respect. “My daughter-in-law was like, ‘Are you crazy?! You are going to get on a plane with strangers. You don’t know these people!’ Lo and behold, it was the best decision we ever made.”

There were only six of them at the meeting in May 2018, out of over thirty thousand workers losing their jobs. Reinhart was nervous—she’d never done anything like this before, and suddenly she was meeting a senator and making her first picket signs. “We didn’t think anybody cared about our story,” she said. “We made all these signs and I was like, ‘Yes, but we are six people.’ We went to Bain Capital. They have an office in DC. We came around the corner and all of a sudden these two buses unloaded onto the streets of Washington, DC, with signs and balloons, and they were all Walmart workers. This one lady, Donna, she said, ‘We got you. We’ve got your back.’ I looked at her tearing up like, ‘Oh my god.’ She hugged me and I will never forget that day.”

It was the beginning of the campaign that would be called Rise Up Retail, which brought the Walmart workers to support the Toys “R” Us workers and showed the Toys “R” Us workers that it was okay to make trouble. The video that Sanders put on his YouTube channel helped, Reinhart said, and then, as more workers came together, the campaign built momentum and power. Other stores joined in as the private equity apocalypse spread. “It is just sad that there are so many of us now,” Reinhart said.

She went from a nervous activist to volunteering to do civil disobedience. Lily Wang of United for Respect recalled Reinhart looking at her and saying, “We’re not going to get severance, are we?” Wang said, “Probably not.” But Reinhart and the others were committed to raising hell to make sure that at least the people who came after them wouldn’t have to face what they had. Wang recalled, “They were like, ‘We are not going to hold out the hope that we are going to get it. What we really want to do is to change the law so that no one has to go through this.’”

The stores were closing, but the workers had the offices of the private equity firms and pension meetings and the halls of Congress for targets, and they had the Internet. They held press conferences—the next one had seventy-five workers, from the original six—and marched on Wall Street. They learned to make their actions dramatic to draw press attention, and to hold them in stores as they closed, sharing videos online. They had, too, their personal conversations, as they learned more about how private equity companies operated and the ins and outs of what had happened to their company. They learned that executives were getting “stay bonuses” while the workers got nothing; that Bain and KKR and Vornado had made something like $470 million off destroying Toys “R” Us. “This has truly been an education and the more we find out, the madder we get,” Reinhart said. “It just puts more fire in our belly to fight.”⁴⁴

“I think they kept me sane because it gave me an outlet to all of this anger and resentment that I had,” Reinhart said. “Especially in that situation, you feel like you don’t have a voice. I felt like they gave us all a voice who didn’t have one.” From the low point—when she found herself, without her Toys “R” Us health insurance, literally choosing between her own asthma medication and her husband’s diabetes medication—she found her power. She’s traveled back and forth several times; she’s met Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as well as Sanders. She was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit asking for the bankruptcy court to take the workers’ claims seriously in the process. She’s spoken on a Senate panel before the Financial Reform Committee. “It was a surreal moment. Like, ‘What am I doing sitting here in Washington, DC, speaking on finance reform?’” She pointed to New Jersey’s new labor law requiring severance payments for mass layoffs as a success of the campaign.⁴⁵

And then there was the settlement. KKR and Bain announced, in November 2018, a $20 million fund for the workers—less than the $75 million that Reinhart and her colleagues had asked for, but still a victory. It was a small check each—“I just got a check for $300 a week before Christmas. That was the last of the fund money,” Reinhart told me in January 2020—but nonetheless the workers enjoyed spreading the news in the Dead Giraffe Society, which lives on. They won another $2 million in bankruptcy court, Reinhart said. “Nothing but good has come out of it for me.”⁴⁶

Not long ago, Reinhart was on the phone with a friend, who said to her, “You realize this is in the books now. You were the plaintiff.” In that moment, she realized the significance of her fight. “There was power in numbers, for sure.”