First Turning "purge"

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2018, 04:07 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Re: #2: Where would you put the like of Sears, among a few others, who are dying a slow death in the retail world?

Gone forever. People thought Sears not worthy even of a trip until the vulture sales, as I did with Montgomery Ward and Bon-Ton. I did go to a closing Radio Shack, but I forget what I got.

Let me describe the department store. It used to be a better place to work than a factory, relying as it did upon people with 'solid eighth-grade educations' for reliable literacy and numeracy that one did not generally find among semi-literate farm and factory laborers. Retail paid better than raw labor, and at least allowed one to avoid much heavy lifting or getting one's clothes dirty or torn. In the 1930s, industrial workers got unions, and retail clerks did not.  Factory labors started doing better, which may also reflect that factory workers also started getting 'solid eighth grade educations'. Retail clerks got paid better if they knew more about the merchandise because they might have to sell something to a customer.

Also during the Great Depression, school attendance by teenagers rose, and  far more people started getting high-school diplomas. The retail environment did not change. The pay stabilized at lower real levels after World War II, and the work got a more transient work force: women making a little extra money to save money for a down-payment on a house. students trying to make a little money to support their cars or buy stuff for girlfriends, people not quite sure of whether they wanted to work in an office or factory...

As the pay falls for an occupation, the quality or workers decreases. The joke about Soviet labor-management relations "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" fit this job. The store clerk began as a rule to know little about the merchandise. (Note well that in some grocery stores, a meat-cutter might be able to tell you at what setting and for how long to cook some meat or fish. But meat-cutters are skilled tradespeople with an incentive to know about the merchandise).

Retail became the sort of work one did if one had nothing else to do. It paid badly. It was transition work for someone with the 'wrong' college degree or someone who thought office work excessively male-chauvinist. After about two months in a department store, stenography seems fulfilling as it wasn't before one started work in a retail store.

Not getting and keeping good employees long enough to get them onto management tracks, the quality of retail  executives became, not surprisingly, execrable. Love of the merchandise? Not for long at that pay level.  OK, I will concede that Wal*Mart, Costco, Target, and Meijer (maybe Kohl's) rely heavily upon information management to keep stores supplied, and those entities recruit people to do information management who may have never worked inside a store. The traditional department stores mostly did not do so until it was too late.

In recent years, Sears was consistently rated among the worst companies in which to work. Before that, so was Radio Shack. Notice also that some critical assessments of some college majors is that "if you take that major you might get a job in retail with your degree".