Representations of Retail Work in Popula
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School BEHIND THE COUNTER AND ON SCREEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF RETAIL WORK IN POPULAR MEDIA A Dissertation in American Studies by Brittany R. Clark © 2021 Brittany R. Clark Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2021 The dissertation of Brittany Clark was received and approved by the following: Charles J.D. Kupfer Associate Professor of American Studies, School of Humanities Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee John R. Haddad Professor of American Studies, School of Humanities Mary Zaborskis Assistant Professor of American Studies, School of Humanities Ozge Aybat Associate Professor Marketing, School of Business Administration Anne Verplanck Associate Professor of American Studies, School of Humanities Program Chair ii ABSTRACT The retail trade has undergone tremendous changes over the course of the 20th century in the United States. In the early part of the century the job was somewhat skilled, and seen as a legitimate career for adults to hold. Today the job has been deskilled and mechanized, and retail workers struggle with low pay and lack of concrete benefits. Media narratives have followed these changes. This dissertation seeks to examine these changes and explore the ways in which retail workers have been presented in popular media. It will largely rely on close-readings of a variety of texts including films, television shows, advertisements, and internet memes. These texts were chosen because of their prominence in society during the time periods being examined. Additionally, it uses frameworks which incorporate class and gender in the examination of these texts. In the early 20th century, the department store was the setting of many major films, spanning from the silent era to about the early 1940s. These films portrayed the grandeur of early department stores. Today the setting is used to indicate that a character lacks maturity or ambition. In the middle of the century the setting was used on television via socially-relevant shows as a reflection of the general public’s distrust in major institutions like government and big business. By the end of the century, exposes started to get written about the ways in which retail work is surprisingly difficult. Today, the internet has allowed workers from all over the country a place to communicate and share their own experiences. Media narratives exploring this topic have not been widely covered. Despite that, it is an important topic to consider as the job remains the most commonly held in the country according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................. vi INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: Advertising the Empire: Selfridge Advertisements at the Turn of the Century................ 11 CHAPTER 2: The It Girl and Man-Child Behind the Counter: Depictions of Retail on Film in the 20th and 21st Centuries ......................................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER 3: The Oleson’s Know Best: Little House on the Prairie’s Reflection of Cultural Distrust in the 1970s ....................................................................................................................... 55 CHAPTER 4: I Was a Retail Salesperson: An Examination of Two Memoirs About Working in Retail ...................................................................................................................................... 85 CHAPTER 5: Superstore: A Modern Working-Class Sitcom?............................................................ 103 CHAPTER 6: I Hate My Job (But I Love Tweeting About It): Deconstructing Short-Form Narratives About Retail Work in Internet Spaces .......................................................................... 128 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 148 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 153 iv LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 1 Figure 1. On Liberality, advertisement, 1909 ................................................................. 27 Figure 2. The Dedication of a Great House, advertisement, 1909 ................................... 31 Figure 3. Of Service Courteous, advertisement, 1909. .................................................... 31 Chapter 6 Figure 4: Example of the Retail Robin meme. .............................................................. 134 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank a couple of people who helped me get through this dissertation process. First, I would like to thank Dr. Charles Kupfer who has always encouraged me to explore this topic, and who has constantly been excited about the topic. Dr. Kupfer has always been interested in my perspective, both in the classroom and in my dissertation. I am exceptionally grateful to him. I would also like to thank my partner, Peter Bryan, Ph.D., who has helped keep me sane and motivated on the homefront. He has helped take care of me during this writing process, and this dissertation would not be complete without his help. I would also like to thank Dr. Charity Fox, who served as a mentor to me in my early days in the Ph.D. program. We entered the program at the same time, and her advice has been invaluable to me. She also supported me emotionally during difficult times in the program. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Bill and Brenda Clark. They have been excited for me from day one, and have only ever pushed me to succeed and be happy, rarely questioning my life choices, even though this is completely new territory for us all. I am the first in my family to get an advanced degree of this kind, and I am overwhelmed, grateful, and excited. Thanks to all the others on this journey who helped make it happen. vi INTRODUCTION According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the three most commonly held jobs in the United States in 2019 were Retail Salesperson with 4.5 million employees, Food Preparation and Serving Workers (including Fast Food), and Cashiers which both have 3.5 million workers. By comparison, Home Health and Personal Care Aids, which was the fourth most commonly held job, comprised just over 3 million employees. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Employment in wholesale and retail trade, including eating and drinking places, increased from 3 million (or 13 percent of nonfarm employment) in 1910 to 33 million (23 percent) in 2015.”1 In that time the job has evolved from a skilled trade to a one that has continuously been mechanized and de- skilled. Despite these numbers, work in retail is often overlooked in discussions about the working-class. Political rhetoric continues to express sympathy with the plight of the factory worker in the Rust Belt and the Appalachian coal miner who have lost their jobs to industrialization. Meanwhile, retail workers continue to make just above the national minimum wage and are plagued by inconsistent scheduling and the inability to receive a full-time schedule. Much has been written on the subject of specific retail institutions within very specific time periods such as the department store in the early part of the 20th century (Howard’s Main Street to Mall, Leach’s Land of Desire), including examinations of employees within this limited time frame (Benson’s Counter Cultures, Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, Peiss’s Cheap Amusements). Likewise, the changes in the way 1 “Employment by Industry, 1910 and 2015,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 3, 2016, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-by-industry-1910-and-2015.htm. people have consumed goods in the from the end of the 19th century and into the early 21st century is a subject that has been well covered (Blasczyk’s American Cosumer Society 1865 – 2005, Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic, Schmidt’s Consumer Rites). Additionally, some modern retail institutions such as Walmart have been well covered extensively, including criticisms of the ways in which they treat their employees (Lichtenstein’s Walmart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism, Fishman’s The Walmart Effect). However, retail work seems to be an overlooked profession in literature about the workplace in popular culture. Books such as Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Extended Guide to Films About Labor, which claim to be comprehensive examinations of films in which the workplace is the primary subject entirely excludes films set in the world of retail stores. As so much of the textual landscape about the retail employee is focused through the lens of particular institutions such as the early department store, or specific stores such as Walmart, I believe that this dissertation takes an important look at the ways in which popular culture has explored this profession. Despite what the lack of critical literature examining media representations of retail workers, there actually is a wealth of popular culture representations of retail workers. For this dissertation, I take a wide view of what ‘popular culture’ means, and start with advertisements from the early 20th century. That said, early films used the setting frequently