Representations of Retail Work in Popula

Home , Bachelor Mother, Diane Chambers, Diane Rehm, Hooterville, Justin Spitzer, Michael Landon

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

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

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.

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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

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

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.

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 deskilled. 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 – so much so that I had to decide what criteria I would use to narrow down the scope for that particular chapter. The reason for this might be that at this time department stores still maintained a sense of awe as grand Palaces of Consumption, built for the spectacle as much as for shopping. Over the course of the 20th century, as the job became de-skilled thanks to the popularity of the self-service model and technology like

2 the barcode scanner, representations waned and changed. By the turn of the 21st century, the image of retail work was that it was seen as a starter job for the uneducated or the unambitious, or for teenagers who just wanted extra spending money. Popular culture representations followed this narrative. Today there are a small handful of books and articles written about what it is like to work in retail either from those who had to after being laid off from more prestigious jobs (something the reading is constantly reminded of), or by someone going undercover. Barbara Ehrenriech’s critically acclaimed 2001 expose Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America by itself garnered several rebuttals or re-examinations by those who themselves took on her same experiment of going undercover to work in low-wage jobs. Film, meanwhile, uses the job as a narrative shortcut in order to demonstrate something else unflattering about the employee – that they are unambitious or stunted in their maturity, for example. And despite being a fairly successful network program, NBC’s Superstore continues to use its prime-time platform to occasionally address in meaningful ways the actual difficulties about working in the industry. This dissertation is organized roughly chronologically. The reason for this is to show the evolution of the retail trade and the evolution of genres as clearly as possible. I have organized this dissertation roughly chronologically, so that this evolution of thought can be as clearly seen as possible.

Media representation is important. It shapes how the general public sees and perceives different groups of people. Diana Kendall in her book Framing Class states that

“narratives are organizations of experience that bring order to events… narratives wield power, because they influence how we make sense of the world.” People look to media narratives to help them understand things that they don’t know much about. Even though

3 someone may interact with a retail worker regularly, they might not have much knowledge about what it is like to work in that trade. Just as the retail trade has changed over the course of the 20th century, so have the ways in which we consume popular culture. Pop culture representations of retail workers are not non-existent. We just aren’t talking about them, or shining any kind of critical light on them. Alongside the close- reading of popular culture texts, this dissertation additionally seeks to explore how the mediums for dissemination have also changed and evolved by covering print advertisements of the early 20th century to internet memes of the 21st. When we fail to critically examine representations of certain groups, the narratives that do exist, no matter how wrong or demeaning, can be absorbed unquestioningly.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also admit that I have a personal stake in this topic. I have worked in the retail trade for over fifteen years, or approximately half of my lifetime. I began working in the service industry when I was fifteen years old, and worked in the industry until as recently as about a year ago, when I was laid off because of a global pandemic. I worked two jobs as an undergraduate in college, one in retail because of the flexible hours, and one on-campus in an office where I often felt out of place in such a setting. It is an industry that has helped shape who I have become as a person. It is an industry that I have often been vehemently upset with, one that I have been depressed by, and one that I have simultaneously been grateful for. It has given me some of the worst experiences of my life, and has taught me many useful, transferable skills. When I started this project, I was concerned I would not find a way to examine these works with a sense of detachment about what I perceived to be the authenticity of

4 how the job was presented. Indeed, some of the early drafts of the chapters focused too much on this aspect. Eventually I found my way.

For the purposes of this project “retail employee” will be defined in the same manner as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “retail sales worker” as, “those who sell retail merchandise, such as clothing, [and] furniture… and those who… help customers find the products they want and process customers’ payments.” This definition will not be expanded to include those from the fast-food industry. It will largely refer to those working unskilled jobs on the front-line, including both managers and associates.

Chapter 1 examines ads created for Selfridges department store at the turn of the

20th century. In order to do that, however, it first looks at the history of the early, urban department store. Specifically, it considers how the department store changed and adapted when it was built in the United States. This includes the ways in which the department store evolved from a place for the upper-classes to a place of leisure for the middle-classes during the last half of the 19th century. By putting goods on display for the customer to see and to browse without the pressure to make a purchase these

Americanized department stores democratized the buying-and-selling process.

Harry Selfridge, having worked for many years at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, built his own store in London as a way to tap what he saw as an untapped market. Several other prominent department stores already existed in London, but Selfridges offered shoppers not simply a new shopping center, but a new experience.

His store promised to center the customers in the shopping experience instead of the salespeople. To do this, he advertised heavily in local newspapers months in advance of his store’s opening. These ads were unique in that they did not promote the goods being

5 sold, but instead the service customers would receive by shopping at his store. Selfridge presented this message coded in symbols that British customers would likely be aware of, and which they would associate with quality service -- including images of Roman mythology, and British royalty. This chapter uses Roland Barthes work on implied meanings in language, and Frederic Jamison’s theories about parody and pastiche to help decode a select few advertisements.

Chapter 2 delves into the evolution of how retail employees have been represented in film from the 1920s through the early 21st century. A close reading of a selection of films is used to examine the narrative through-lines that appear in both early films and more modern ones, including the use of the retail profession as an indicator of class status. In other words, as a way to show that the person who works in the retail trade is working-class. However, there is a distinct difference to the way in which this is represented. In the early films it is used as a catalyst for the protagonist to achieve the

Horatio Alger or Cinderella ideal by improving their class status by the end of the film.

This usually involves the store owner or his son taking an active role on the sales floor and an interest in particular, morally superior employees. In the later films, however, it is used as a way to indicate to the audience that the protagonist has not matured beyond a retail job, and is in some way stunted in their mental growth. The protagonist’s job is held up next to other clear signals indicating that the character is immature: he still collects action figures, he lives with his parents, or he dropped out of community college, for example, and frequently goofs-off while he is at work. Thus, in the early films the growth of the character is tied to bettering themselves financially or improving their social status, while in the later films it is more closely aligned with personal or inner growth and

6 maturity. Despite the means being different, however, the achievement of this goal is almost always tied to falling in love and forming a commitment with that partner.

This shift in focus from the poor-but-moral retail worker to the immature and unambitious itself mirrors the shift retail has made over the same period of time. While the early 20th century was the heyday of the massive department store, the late 20th century and early 21st century saw the dominance of big box and superstores that offer a less personal, more standardized experience for the customer. Early 20th century department stores were designed as tourist attractions for a customer base with disposable income for the first time. They employed a number of different attractions intended to get customers in the store including grand architecture, restaurants, and personable and skilled salespeople. By contrast, today, superstores are designed to be as uniform and as no-frills as possible as a way of streamlining the building and shopping process. They have de-skilled the profession through the use of disruptive technology such as the barcode scanner and the invention of self-service so that the salespeople no longer need to appear to be experts in the trade.

Chapter 3 examines the ways in which the 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie acted as a reflection of the tumult of the decade. It also traces the evolution of the culturally relevant television series, which saw its peak in the early 1970s with shows like All in the Family. The Federal Communications Commission’s enactment of the

Family Viewing Hour in 1975, which dictated that only family-friendly shows air between 8:00 - 9:00 in the evening caused many of these new socially relevant shows to lose ground to new nostalgia-heavy shows like Happy Days, which presented non-

7 offensive plotlines. Culturally-relevant storylines were relegated to single “Very Special

Episodes.”

The popular 1970s television show Little House on the Prairie, however, managed to weave culturally-relevant plotlines into its family-friendly, inoffensive narratives; much like the books series the show is based on. Set in a small Minnesota frontier town of Walnut Grove, the show manages this delicate balancing act by presenting it as a class conflict between the protagonists, the poor-but-happy Inagalls family, and the wealthy-but-snobbish Oleson family. The Oleson family owns the town’s mercantile shop, as well as the town restaurant and hotel. This wealth and status afford them a great deal of power in town. In positioning the Oleson family as the villains of the show, the creators are able to reflect the average American’s distrust of those in power during the 1970s, even though the show is set in the 19th century.

Chapter 4 looks at the ways in which two seasoned journalists set out to uncover and expose what working in the retail trade was really like in the early 21st century.

Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover in three different cities to expose what it was like to work low-wage jobs. Working as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and at a

Walmart in Minnesota, she learned the harsh realities of surviving on jobs that are often overlooked. Her findings were published in 2001 in the critically-acclaimed Nickel and

Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. Caitlin Kelly began working one day a week at a

North Face store at her local mall when she was laid off from her full-time job at the New

York Daily News in 2011. Her book Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail is part- memoir part-expose.

Both books are undertaken with good intentions and do some good work in their critique of the low-wage labor system that makes it difficult for those workers to get ahead. However, there are some concerns regarding their presentation of the work itself, and those who work in these jobs. Neither writer is able to distance themselves from their privileged status, and often fail to perceive themselves as equal to their co-workers. This chapter uses Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and the work of Stuart Hall in his discussion of ‘Othering’ to explore this privilege, and to develop a new theory about class tourism.

Occasionally both authors use phrasing that presents their co-workers as an

“other” -- someone who is not as smart as the authors are, and could use the benefit of the author’s input into their lives. In doing so, both Ehrenreich and Kelly are participating in a kind of class-tourism. Their ability to leave at any point keeps both authors at a distance from their low-wage work and their co-workers. They are able to get away with this kind of class tourism because they are using their status to supposedly expose the harsh realities of the retail trade. In framing the narratives around themselves, both authors diminish the emphasis on the real issues facing the working-class, instead evoking our sympathy toward them and what they have gone through.

Chapter 5 explores another television show. In 2015 NBC debuted its latest workplace sitcom Superstore. As the title suggests, the show is set in a fictional Walmart- type superstore, Cloud 9, and features an ensemble cast which mirrors the real employee structure of such a store. Superstore is a show that seeks to exist within a long history of working-class sitcoms which have been around since the earliest days of television programming. Despite being a workplace-set, the show retains many of the tropes present

9 in domestic working-class sitcoms such as the dim male lead and the sensible female lead. Notably, the show takes these tropes and subverts them for a new, modern, context, by making the foolish male lead a business school dropout from the upper-middle class who is out of place within a working-class context. This chapter charts the history of working-class sitcoms, and where Superstore fits within that timeline. It also breaks down some of the individual plotlines which feature real-world and high-profile issues faced within the retail trade, including the difficulty in unionizing (a plot it attempts twice).

Chapter 6 looks closely at the ways in which retail workers use online memes as a form of storytelling and shared community. In order to achieve this is chooses two examples to closely examine: the retail robin meme and the Twitter #retailproblems. A wide variety of people work in the retail trade, possibly a more diverse group than any other trade. As such, storytelling on the job can serve as a way for workers to bond and connect, even though they might have vastly different backgrounds and histories. The internet has made sharing these stories even easier, as these workers find new ways to communicate and connect with one another outside of the workplace and with people who might work at the same chain but live many hours away. By becoming conversant in the narrative structure of memes and limitations set by forums such as Twitter, the creators are able to boil down their storytelling into what amounts to a joke. That is, they are able to create a setup and a punchline. This is then decoded by those who understand both the context of the joke and the function of the meme or Twitter hashtag. This chapter examines the creation, function, and spread of memes and Twitter hashtags specifically related to those who work in the retail trade.

Chapter 1: Advertising the Empire: Selfridge Advertisements at the Turn of the Century

When Harry Selfridge opened up his London department store, he helped to

Americanize the way the English shopped. Central to this change was keeping goods on display instead of hidden away to be taken out by employees. While this may seem like a small change, Selfridge’s intention was to put customers at the center of the shopping experience, not the employees doing the selling as had been the British custom in the past. Despite rigid and complex class differences permeating English society, he opened his doors to those from all class backgrounds, and he promised to treat them all like royalty. At the heart of this move was his recognition that customer’s money knew no class. It is precisely this point which made traditionalist British conservatives leery of capitalism and anxious to preserve class privilege. This idea shows capitalism’s potential to erode long-held social barriers, and create new ones, since money is fungible. To promote these new ideas, he bought out space for full-page advertisements in the local newspapers before the store even opened its doors. Using barely-coded images of the

British Empire and British nobility, these advertisements not only displayed American ideas about conspicuous consumption; they did so in a way that positioned the employee in a role of subservience to the customer. This offered customers with cash but scant claim to aristocratic privilege the novel experience of being deferred to on the basis of their money, not their social status.

In this dissertation chapter, I employ Frederic Jameson’s ideas on postmodernism, and Roland Barthes’ concepts in post-structuralism to interrogate the Selfridge shift.

Both Jameson and Barthes suggest that language and images are not neutral. That both

11 carry with them cultural history and context. Jameson posits that images can hold a

“nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again.”2 The specific images Selfridges choose to use, images from Roman mythology and of historical British nobility, are similarly not neutral. They are used because they evoke a familiar history, while simultaneously introducing Americanized ideas of consumption. Barthes, likewise, argues that language and images carry with them implied meanings specific to different cultures. Selfridge uses images of British royalty in order to call up the implied meaning of what it means to be a member of the upper-class and the kind of service they are granted. When placed in the context of an advertisement for a new department store, then, the reader is meant to understand that they will receive that kind of service at this store. This chapter posits that the symbols embedded in these advertisements reflect the changing role of both customer and employee in the early-20th century department stores.

Americanizing the Department Store

The department store is not an American invention. Early versions sprung up across Europe several years before they appeared in the United States. Le Bon Marche opened in France in 1838, and Harrod’s in England in 1849 and expanded into a department store in the 1880s, adding the motto “Omnia Omnibus Ubique,” meaning “All

2 Frederick Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 116 12 things for All People, Everywhere.”3 Daniel Boorstin states, “If the department store was not an American invention, it flourished here as nowhere else.”4 Despite not being an

American invention, American entrepreneurs will take it to a level unseen in Europe and elsewhere.

Though the business model itself did not change dramatically when it arrived in the United States, the presentation did. In the older, European version, customers would enter with a purposeful intention to buy. Once inside, a floorwalker would show the customer to the proper department, where a skilled salesperson would recommend items that had to be taken out of storage to be displayed for the customer.5 The Americanized version, however, did away with this system. In his book on early department stores Land of Desire, William Leach claims, “American department store merchandising was different in its scope, size, and prolific middle classness… they contributed to the creation of a new powerful universe of consumer enticements.”6 While customers still had to deal with skilled salespeople in order to make a purchase, goods were put on display, either in glass cases or on the counters themselves, to entice customers.

When A.T. Stewart expanded his New York dry goods emporium in 1846 he called it the “Marble Palace,” evoking not just the architectural splendor outside, but also the impressive stock of goods for sale – many enticingly displayed in back-lit glass cases.7 Other stores capitalized on new technology like elevators, and created elaborate

3 “History of Harrods Department Store,” BBC News (BBC, May 8, 2010), https://www.bbc.com/news/10103783#:~:text=Its%20motto%20is%20Omnia%20Omnibus,1849%20by%2 0Charles%20Henry%20Harrod. 4 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans (New York: Random House, 1973), 137. 5 Boorstin, The Amerians, 144-145. 6 William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 21 7 Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 11 13 displays in their front windows to attract new potential customers. Boorstin suggests that

“The shop itself, the stock, and the goods themselves had become a powerful new form of advertising.”8 The novelty of putting everything under one roof and displaying it in public would bring people into the store. This palatial image also helped to entice working and middle-class patrons to indulge in a fantasy of what it must be like to be a member of the elite upper-class, who were more accustomed to service and luxury.

By marketing this way, and by allowing people free access to the store without the pressure to make a purchase, department store owners were able to position their stores as tourist attractions. To an extent, architectural theory and practice helped to accomplish this. Chicago architect and author Louis Sullivan, who championed commercial architecture, described how steel frame buildings, with their inherent strength and lack of bulk, allowed for huge display windows on the ground floor. An effect was to entice those strolling downtown – increasingly, women were permitted to function in this public space – to view the store’s contents and wander in. The sidewalk-window-entry became a liminal space where barriers were minimal and onlookers could drift in and out.

They came to see the department store as a space in which they could wander, shop, and be accepted.

This model was meant to attract not only the newly expanding middle class with money to spend thanks to the rise in industrialization, but also the working-class. Soon other stores such as Macy’s in New York, Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia, and Marshall

Field’s in Chicago, built off of this technique by adding improved amenities including

8 Boorstin, The Americans, 140-141. 14 restaurants and waiting rooms where kids could be dropped off. In doing so, they became grand Palaces of Consumption – more than simply a place that customers could go to get everything under one roof. These new department stores turned shopping from something customers did out of necessity, into a leisure activity.

Conspicuous Consumption

The end of the nineteenth century and turn of the twentieth century – roughly from the 1870s to the First World War – is known in American history as the Gilded Age partially because of the massive amount of wealth that appeared at this time. Gilt of course is a gold applique, and the idea was that the bursting forth of new wealth represented a public display of riches that was new. A new industrial revolution created jobs for the masses and created enormous wealth for captains of industry like Andrew

Carnegie and John Rockefeller. Innovators, industrial and managerial thinkers like

Frederick Winslow Taylor, with his seminal work Principles of Scientific Management helped to de-skill factory work, so people flooded into major cities in record numbers. No longer would the artisan, possessing a wide array of technical skills, dominate manufacturing. Instead, line work meant that a factory could employ many workers who specialized only in repetitive, perhaps quite simple (even if dangerous) tasks. While this widened the gap between those in charge and those doing the work on the ground floor, it also helped grow the middle class in new white collar managerial-type jobs.

As the wealth grew with the standard of living for this new middle class, so did the idea of conspicuous consumption. This means that these middle-class workers, for the

15 first time, had access to disposable income which could be spent not only on necessities, but on luxury goods and leisure activities – both of which were in abundance during this period. The latter because some recognized the danger cramped, urban housing and industrial work life could have on a morale. Environmental designer Frederick Olmsted’s solution to this was to design a ‘Central Park’ in New York City – an outdoor recreation area where visitors could escape the stress of the city by venturing into a more natural space.9 Another solution was the rejuvenation of amusement parks such as Coney Island, where visitors were not just spectators to some amusement as at sports games and vaudeville theaters, but where they could participate in the revelry and spectacle, letting loose on newly mechanized rides.10

On the other side were the goods being produced by these new massive factories.

Newly middle-class consumers used many of these new goods as status symbols of their newfound place in society. Through these goods they could emulate the wealthy, by purchasing goods that were meant to demonstrate a specific lifestyle. While they could not hope to gain entry to upper-class clubs, they certainly could patronize luxurious stores whose retail workers were instructed to act solicitously.

Department stores were in the right position at this time to take advantage of this new conspicuous consumption. In the best capitalistic fashion, they created and then answered a need that earlier citizens might never have felt. American Palaces of

Consumption did not simply sell goods, they sold a new lifestyle. By placing restaurants and other amenities directly into their stores, and offering services like free delivery, they

9 John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003) 12-13. 10 Kasson, Amusing the Millions, 7-8. 16 were developing the idea of shopping as a leisure activity. With goods now on display instead of hidden behind a counter to be taken out by an employee, the customer became the center of the shopping experience.

Early Department Store Employees

Employment in department stores was similarly expanding at this time, particularly as a position in which women could work. The constructed, genteel, respectable aura of a store, as well as the plethora of female customers, made a department store a place within which women could serve without violating norms. Like most industries of the period, department stores utilized a version of Taylor’s theories of

Scientific Management to make their shops more efficient.11 A major component of

Taylorism, as it came to be called, was the breaking up of tasks into smaller parts so that one individual was no longer responsible for multiple jobs, but only had to do one thing over and over all day. Of course, as Chaplain made clear, it was mind-numbing to be treated as a human widget, and Marxism offers more than a few possibilities for analyzing the alienation which Taylorism engendered. On the other hand, so mighty was the industrial revolution that even the socialist Soviet Union would cultivate a cult of respect for the factory model, with the difference being that workers supposedly controlled the system themselves.

11 Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987) 35. 17

In the western department store Taylorist principles meant breaking up the store into separate departments, where one employee was now responsible only for a single department such as fabric or shoes. That employee was not responsible for checking the stock room for items, ringing up a transaction, or packaging a customer’s purchases – these were all separate jobs for a stock boy, cashier, and packager. While department stores still relied on skilled salespeople, selling was the only job an employee had. In theory, this method allowed employees to be more attentive to a customer’s needs.

Harry Selfridge

Harry Selfridge started work as a stock boy at Field, Leiter & Co. (what would later become the Marshall Field’s department store) in Chicago in 1876 when he was 22 years old.12 By 1883 he became an in-house copywriter, and was free to implement several other ideas he had for the store.13 This included making the store more shopper- friendly by lowering counters for customer’s ease and the implementation of the bargain basement. Selfridge also took out full-page advertisements for Marshall Field’s – the first in Chicago,14 although John Wanamaker had used this tactic for his Philadelphia department store for some time.15 In doing these things Selfridge helped Marshall Field’s to attract a new class of customer by making sure the store was not just a tourist attraction for the working-class, but that they provided goods the working-class could actually afford to buy. It is telling that Selfridge did not get his start on the shop floor working as

12 Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge (New York: Random House, 2008), 9 13 Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge, 24 14 Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge, 29 15 Boorstin 144 18 a salesman. This significant detail more than anything else, would come to shape how he ran his own department store later on. Instead of focusing on using the goods themselves to get customers in the door, Selfridge saw the spectacle and novelty of these new stores as the real attraction for potential customers. Also worthy of mention is the fact that his vertical rise through the non-public-facing areas of the store allowed him to claim a sort of Horatio Alger-type ascent of the sort people found fascinating, as with Andrew

Carnegie. That is to say, Selfridge could lay claim to representing a favorite capitalistic trope of the Gilded Age.

One of the most important moments in his time at Field’s was arguably the 1893

Chicago World’s Fair16. The Fair not only expanded his horizons toward future possibilities, but helped cement the power of promotion and media in his mind. Joe

Dobrow in his book Pioneers of Promotion suggests that, “the Columbian Exposition was designed to... be an architectural, technological, and cultural expression of the audacious

American experiment itself, a manifestation of all the progress that had been made since

Columbus had first set out for the New World four hundred years earlier.”17 Mona

Domosh in her article “A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893

Chicago Exposition,” called the fair “the first commodity spectacle… a showcase of

American Progress to be consumed by the masses.”18 In either case, it was a spectacle

16 Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge, 50 17 Joe Dobrow, Pioneers of Promotion: How Press Agents for Buffalo Bill, P.T. Barnum, and the World's Columbian Exposition Created Modern Marketing (Norman, OK,: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). 18 Mona Domosh, “A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition.” Cultural Geographies 9, no. 2 (2002): 181. 19 that was heavily promoted long before the fair began, with an average of over 9,000 printed ads going out daily in the year before.19

While the fair showcased many exhibits from around the world, the primary focus was to showcase the United States as a new major player on the world stage. Just as the nation, having incorporated most of North America, was now ready to play a global strategic role, so was it ready to emerge from Great Britain’s shadow as a major international economic and trade power. Viewed in this way, the department store and all its appurtenances represented reification of rising American power. Advertisements for the fair and for goods sold at the fair relied on “a complex lexicon of images, symbols and myths,” representing “a powerful discourse about ‘civilization’ and American identity.” These images melded classical Roman iconography such as chariots with images showing the harvesting of the American Frontier, for example, as a way to both display and sell farm equipment at the fair. Domosh suggests that the selling was a key component, and that ‘decadence’ was a major theme of the fair.20 “Exhibits of ‘dynamos’ and massive machines and engines of transport and production; with rows and rows of commercial booths displaying and often dispensing America’s mass-produced material goods.”21 Even the architecture of the buildings at the fair were built in a neoclassical style as a way to suggest just how civilized the United States had become in such a short period of time.22 It is no doubt that Selfridge absorbed these images, as he later used a similar tactic in advertising his own department store.

19 Dobrow, Pioneers of Promotion 20 Domosh, A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition,”183 21 Domosh, A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition,” 184 22 Domosh, A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition,”184 20

By 1904 Marshall Field’s department store profits had reached $1.5 million, partially due to work by Selfridge, and he wanted his name on the door next to Field’s23.

Field, a quieter, stately man turned him down, and later that year Selfridge left to strike out on his own.24 Selfridge was a brash, obsessive man, and felt he had earned a chance to make a name for himself. When not given the opportunity to do so at Fields, he was determined to do it on his own terms.

Selfridges Department Store

Part of starting his own store involved entering what Selfridge saw as an untapped market in the department store industry: England. Erika Rappaport states that, “the alliance between consumerism and national identity did not fit in twentieth-century

England as it did in the United States… Selfridge tried to separate the perception that consumerism was in itself American.”25 Despite London already having several department stores by 1909, Selfridge wanted to bring American ideas about shopping as a leisure activity and conspicuous consumption to England. He was convinced that his

American practices, unburdened by remnant British notions of class separation, could lead to enormous profit and popularity.

One of the reasons English stores had not yet adopted these new ideas of shopping may have to do with the more pronounced class divisions in England than in the United

States. Rappaport claims, “One retail expert… argued that English houses were smaller

23 Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge, 56 24 Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfrdige, 60 25 Erika Rappaport Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 149-150 21 than American firms because the practice of selling to ‘all classes of trade can hardly be imagined over here’.” 26 As had been his policy at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Selfridge made a point to assert that his store was for everyone, not just those of the middle or upper classes. As such, many of his advertisements from this period talk about the stores being open to all customers whether or not they had money to spend.

For Selfridge, these American ideas did not just apply simply to making appeals to the masses, but also applied the promotion and design of the store itself. His store was eight floors, covered six acres of land, and (like the American versions) included amenities such as a restaurant, waiting rooms, and a library.27 Rappaport says, “Selfridge hoped that the mere sight of his building would strike awe in the hearts of Londoners. But he also taught Londoners to look at his store by… encouraging consumers to think of the store as a theater.”28 Selfridge wanted to challenge the way English consumers thought about shopping, and that included creating not just another department store, but an

American Palace of Consumption.

Even before the doors opened to the public, Selfridge had spent £36,000 on advertising and promotion, an unheard-of amount at that time.29 (This amounts to over

$206 thousand dollars in 1908, or over four million British pounds today and over five million U.S. dollars today) Advertising was particularly important to Selfridge. He was forging what he saw as a relationship with both customers and the media that would continue throughout his ownership of the store. As he had with Marshall Field’s,

26 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 151 27 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 154 28 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 155 29 T.R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1982), 74 22

Selfridge began the practice of using full page newspaper ads with large, bold pictures in an attempt to capture his potential customer’s imagination.

For department stores in America at this time, advertising in newspapers was an important part of their business model. In the time that Harry Selfridge worked for

Marshall Field’s he witnessed the development of mass advertising. Between 1880 and

1890 the number of newspapers in the United States rose from just over 4,000 to

13,000.30 This meant more advertising, and department stores spent so much on advertising that they often helped to keep local newspapers afloat and non-partisan at a time when major political parties often had a major influence on newspapers. 31 Daniel

Boorstin suggests that “It was no accident that the largest and most enterprising department stores were the pioneers of newspaper display advertising. Their need to attract crowds within a small geographic radius made the city dailies their perfect medium.”32 Unlike chain stores today, with many locations even in the same city, department stores at this time had a single location. When your geography is limited, you need to advertise where your potential customer base is.

Department stores at this time did not merely pour money into advertisements; they also used the medium in creative new ways. In the early 19th century, advertisements in newspapers were generally small so that the newspaper could get as many ads onto the page as possible.33 Despite this, “department-store[s]... were pioneers in the art and science of advertising… Macy used repetition, composed bad verse, and

30 Dobrow, Pioneers of Promotion 31 Boorstin, The Americans 143-144 32 Boorstin, The Americans, 192 33 Boorstin, The Americans, 187 23 combined hundreds of tiny agate-sized letters (the only kind which newspaper editors tolerated at the time) to make the Macy star or to produce larger letters.”34 John

Wanamaker is considered the first to take out a full-page advertisement for a retail store, liberating department store advertisements from being just small, solid blocks of type.35

More importantly, this push in advertising meant that stores were not just presenting individual products to get people in their doors, but they were helping to create what Boorstin calls “consumption communities.”36 Shopping at a certain place, or buying a specific product showed that one was not just another face in the crowd. Instead, it showed who one truly was. At least, that was the capitalistic gist. In the same way that people were using conspicuous consumption to appear to be in a different social class than they were, advertising suggested what one should buy and where one should shop.

Harry Selfridge knew that not all audiences are the same, though, and that moving to

England meant he would have to adapt his advertisements to a new audience with a different sensibility than those in Chicago.

Evoking the Empire

The idea of the British Empire was important to the cultural identity of those who lived in England in 1909 when Selfridge was building his store. The Empire reached from India and Hong Kong to Australia and Africa. The saying that the sun never set upon it was literally true: it was a global concern. It was both the height of and the

34 Boorstin, The Americans, 143-144 35 Boorstin, The Americans, 192 36 Boorstin, The Americans, 196 24 beginning of the end of this Empire. At the center of it were the citizens of England – the center of civilization like Rome millennia prior. It can be argued, then, that Selfridge, in full awareness of the awesome sway the imperial ideal held in the public imagination, devised an advertising campaign that evoked the idea of the British Empire as a successor to the Roman Empire. The Imperial ethos – whose benefits to the British working class might be less than glaringly obvious, nevertheless had a strong grip on the consciousness of all ranks in the United Kingdom. To illustrate, I will now look at three particular advertisements that both evoke this notion of British exceptionalism in an attempt to change the perceptions of shopping in England at this time.

The first ad is titled “On Liberality” and was created by R.W.S Crane. This advertisement depicts Proserpina, the Roman goddess of agriculture and vegetation

(possibly more well known by her Greek name, Persephone). The image of Proserpina is frequently associated with the notions of abundance. In this ad, she is standing and carrying a bounty of fruits and vegetables in her robe, some of which are spilling over for a group of cherubs whose hands are outstretched. The text partially explains what is meant by the idea of Liberality: “Liberality is… of advantage to both giver and receiver.

More than any other quality it establishes a good feeling between both the two.” In other words, Selfridge uses this symbol as a way to give customers permission to indulge because Proserpina is giving you permission to indulge. It is her job to help you indulge.

To put it into context of the department store: employees enjoy the act of serving as much as customers enjoy the experience of purchasing. This image most clearly evokes American notions of consumption, in particular the idea of conspicuous consumption and shopping as a leisure activity. It plays on the myth of America as the

Land of Plenty, the Land of Milk and Honey, or possibly, the land of the decadent

Chicago World’s Fair and all of its new mass-produced goods. Proserpina not only holds a wealth of items, but offers them generously. She is encouraging the potential customer to take advantage of her offerings, because she has plenty to give.

Fredric Jameson, in his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” examines notions of parody and pastiche within a larger media context. While his work looks specifically at film, his ideas can be applied across a wide range of other media, including advertising. Parody, according to Jameson, mimics some aspect of a cultural text in a way that seeks to satirize the original text. Pastiche, on the other hand, mimics the text without an ulterior motive. “It does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period, it seeks to reawaken a sense of the past associated with those objects”37 In this way, an author replicates familiar images in order to capitalize not just on the familiarity of those images, but also the subtext that comes with those images. By using images from both classic Roman mythology instead of using the actual goods that might be purchased in

Selfridges Department Store, American idea about conspicuous consumption are coded in a way meant to appeal specifically to the new British customer through the use of an image that signifies respect for the role of the United Kingdom in the larger world, and respect for its history.

The text continues, “The comforts, amenities, and luxuries of shopping will be provided generously; our Service will be unstinted; the stocks of Merchandise, the range

37 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 116 26 of qualities, the assortments, will be on a lavish-scale, with all the scope of choice which this implies.” That is, Selfridge is using the American value of plenty – in this case, a wide variety of goods in stock at the store – and coding it in symbols reminiscent of the

Roman Empire (Proserpina) as a way to evoke the British empire in the minds of consumers. Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field of public relations, says that good advertising “takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but… the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit.”38 Selfridge used symbols to evoke a common British tradition of empire as a way to demonstrate that American and British values were compatible. He was bridging the historical gap, by using familiar pictures of the past to demonstrate what his store would bring to London in the present.

Figure 1.R.W.S. Crane, On Liberality, 1909. Print Advertisement. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

38 Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn, NY: IG Publishing, 2018), 16. 27

Consumers as a Part of the British Empire Two other advertisements depict the British Empire more directly by using images that more closely correspond to British ideas of nobility. At this time, the idea that people from different class backgrounds might intermingle in the same shop in

England in the same way they did in the United States was considered scandalous.

Despite this, Selfridge’s ideas in London were the same as those in Chicago: his department store would sell something for everyone, not just those of a middle- or upper- class background with a large disposable income to spend. In this way, he used images of

British nobility to promote the idea that those of any class background were not only welcome at his store, but would be treated with the same degree of respect and deference.

To do this, Selfridge’s ads place the store’s employees in a subservient role, and the customer in the role of nobility.

One advertisement, titled “Dedication of a Great House,” was created by Fred

Pegram. This advertisement depicts an average woman sitting on a throne in a room that resembles Buckingham Palace. In front of her kneels a man with his head bowed, holding with outstretched arms, a small version of Selfridges Department Store. Part of the text reads, “This house is dedicated to Women’s service first of all, and our purpose is to make her Shopping more attractive than it has ever been before.” The second advertisement, titled “Of Service Courteous,” was created by Edmund Sullivan. This advertisement depicts the famous historical scene of Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his coat over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth.

Both of these advertisements evoke well-understood and even internalized symbols to demonstrate the quality of the service customers were meant to receive at this new department store. Bernays suggests that a group of people’s, “first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader… But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences.”39 By using such clear and obvious symbols of nobility, the message becomes: everyone will be treated like royalty.

Roland Barthes’ essay, “Mythologies” discusses the construction of meaning in language phrases. Going past the classic structuralist ideas of language as being made up of a signifier and a signified creating a sign, he talks about the implied meaning inherent in language. Barthes believes that there is a subtext within language that must be accounted for. Language should take into account not simply the literal meaning of a phrase, but also, “a whole system of values: a history, a geography, a morality, a zoology, a Literature.”40 That is, any image or text must also account for the subtext or implied meaning, which can include a whole history not seen on the surface level. In Barthes’ notions of mythology and implied meaning, Selfridge is taking into account specific notions of British history in order to sell, not the store itself, but an experience that can be had while shopping there, as well as the idea that this kind of service should be common place -- or at least, that it would be in his own store.

Similarly, both images depict employees who are subservient to the customers.

The Americanized version of the department store at this time differed greatly from the

39 Bernays, Propaganda, 33. 40 Roland Barthes Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 118 29

English version. In the English model, customers were limited by items suggested by employees who would bring the items out for display based on their own knowledge of the product. Now, however, with the items already on display, the customer has the power to choose an item they want instead of one that is chosen for them. Selfridge is attempting to demonstrate this new power structure in play at his department store with these advertisements. In particular, these advertisements are changing the way customers view the employees, thus helping to change the way they shop. The text of “Dedication” partially reads, “the unaccustomed and luxurious appointments instituted to provide every possible comfort... This house is dedicated to Woman’s Service first of all, and our purpose is to make her Shopping more attractive than it has ever been before…” In other words, shoppers who frequent this store become part of a consumption community that makes the customer feel like nobility by creating the atmosphere and experience of luxury. The employee is now there to assist in the customer’s choices instead of advocating for what they might feel the customer needs. Their primary function has gone from making recommendations to receiving the customer’s input and service.

Figure 2.Frederick Peagram, The Dedication of a Great House, 1909. Print Advertisement. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 3. Edmund Joseph Sullivan, Of Service Courteous, 1909, Print Advertisement. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 31

Conclusion

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, department stores went through a radical shift in the United States. This shift was more dramatic than simply changing the way goods were displayed before being purchased, but included a complete shift in the power relationship between the consumer and employees. As the middle class grew and had more disposable income, ideas about shopping changed from only buying necessities to conspicuous consumption and the spending of money to purchase a lifestyle through the purchasing of goods.

When the American entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge opened up his first store in London, he brought with him these new ideas about consumption. Seeing an untapped market, he encouraged English shoppers to indulge in the same way Americans were. Part of his strategy included the heavy use of advertising, even before his store opened. Selfridge utilized the power of full-page advertisements that included large pictures, and he was able to sell his message. Needing to code these new ideas for a unique audience he played on ideas of the British Empire by evoking both the Roman Empire and classical values about British monarchy such as Queen Elizabeth. Both the image of Proserpina offering up her bounty for all, and a woman on a throne being offered a version of the store by a subservient employee demonstrate these new ideas about consumption: indulge because we are here to serve you. By examining three of these advertisements through the postmodernist lens of Frederick Jameson, and the post-structuralist lens of Roland

Barthes, we can see beyond the image on display to the implied meaning. This includes the use of images the audience would be familiar with in order to conjure up the thoughts that subconsciously come with them, and the looking beyond the literal meaning toward

32 the implied meaning which includes historical notions about Britain and the role of nobility within it. These early advertisements use the meaning implied from images of

British nobility. In using such images, Selfridge changed the power structure of the department store, by placing the customer in the position of nobility, to be served by the employee, not the other way around. Selfridge’s message was that his doors were open to anyone who wanted to come through, no matter what their class status. Customers were no longer at the beck-and-call of employees to make recommendations. He was selling a lifestyle to anyone willing to take it, and that included placing the customer at the center of the department store; by changing up the power dynamics.

Chapter 2: The It Girl and Man-Child Behind the Counter: Depictions of Retail on Film in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Introduction

Early in the 1994 cult classic film Clerks, a sardonic send-up of the working lives of two employees in a convenience/video rental store, Randall half-jokes to his fellow clerk (and friend) Dante that, “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the f---ing customers.” Far more significant than a throwaway laugh line, this quote clearly articulates a through-line in the representations of retail work on film. Whether it is

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1927) fending off a horde of customers on a sale day by brandishing a yardstick like a sword, or Dante and Randall watching women search through an entire milk freezer for a gallon with the latest expiration date, the customers, and their all-too-often problematic behavior, play a major role in the depiction of retail workers on film.

Another through-line in films which prominently feature retail workers is the use of the setting to indicate a particular character’s class status. Regardless of whether the film is from the early 20th century or today, the retail setting as a job has maintained the narrative shortcut of indicating that the protagonist is working-class, even if they have pretensions to higher-class status, or are smarter and more capable than the clientele or their bosses. Indeed, the humor in these films frequently stems from the non-correlation between clerk and customer’s capacities and status. The point is that engaging in customer service for money puts the character into a subordinate position. In this situation, the unequal power dynamic between customer and employee ensures that the cliché “the customer is always right,” no matter how ridiculous it may occasionally seem.

While early depictions of the retail trade on film tended to eschew the Horatio Alger myth of rags-to-riches – or in the case of female protagonists, the Cinderella narrative – later films use the setting to indicate that a character has no ambition or is immature.

In some ways, this mirrors the evolution of consumption itself over the course of the 20th century. Where people once visited grand Palaces of Consumption and requested help from skilled salespeople during the golden age of the Department Store, now store interiors are cookie-cutter and sterile and the job has been deskilled. The classic department stores have changed the architecture of urban downtowns, and going to one was a leisure outing, an occasion. Most major cities in the early 20th century had at least one major department store as a source of pride for the city. Think of, for example,

Marshall Fields in Chicago, Macy’s in New York, or Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia.

Now, stores are located in strip malls or other non-descript locations, and their appearance is in many ways un-memorable. Once a department store clerk was presumed to be an expert on ‘their’ area, answering to an upward chain of authorities, culminating in the boss. Today, that notion of expertise is replaced by an assumption of indifference.

This chapter examines the aftereffects of this major change by analyzing how retail workers are represented on the big screen through close readings of a handful of films, and interpretation based on a myth-symbol critical structure. It aims to delve deeper into these films by going beyond just showing that they use the retail setting as a narrative shortcut to indicate the class status of a character. It will identify, dissect, and examine the tropes that run-through these films, and assess what this setting means to audiences in particular time periods.

Criteria for Choosing Films

In order to achieve this goal, a set of criteria had to be established for choosing the films which would be examined. This criterion represents patterns that I located in the films, and separates outliers that go beyond what might be considered a reasonably accurate representation of the space and trade. In this vein, I excluded films that incorporate an element of magical realism into their storytelling. This eliminates films like Miracle on 34th Street in which the plot revolves around whether or not a man is the real Santa Clause, and Elf in which a man raised as an elf in the North Pole briefly works the Christmas rush in a department store. Additionally, this chapter will look exclusively at comedies instead of drama films. This is because the drama films which prominently feature retail as a setting often heighten the plot with melodramatic elements. This excludes films such as Fritz Lang’s You and Me (1938) in which former members of the mob go to work in a department store after being released from prison, and The Good

Girl (2002) about a woman having an extra-marital affair with her co-worker at a K-

Mart-type store. Additionally, in order to meet my selection criteria, the protagonists of the film must be employees in the retail trade instead of the owners of the store or someone outside contracted in. This rules out the film You’ve Got Mail (1999), about a wealthy man who secretly falls in love with a woman, despite his big box store putting her small bookstore out of business. It also eliminates the Marx Brothers film The Big

Store (1941), in which the brothers work as private investigators hired to go undercover at a department store in order to protect the new owner. Likewise, the retail setting must be prominent in several scenes in the film. Finally, the film must be set in the United

States, which excludes the film The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which is set in

Budapest. This criterion has allowed me to keep the chapter reasonable in scope and to maintain a sharp focus on the American retail trade. Examinations of the working-class and retail workers on film in other countries - particularly Britain and Canada - have been thoroughly covered by other scholars and are beyond the scope of this dissertation.

This chapter will, however, cover quite a wide variety of films from the early 20th century through the early 21st century. The films examined are mostly in the genre of the romantic comedy, although the demographic audience changes over that timeframe for reasons that will be discussed. This chapter covers the following films: silent films Safety

Last! (1927) and My Best Girl (1927), It (1927), Bachelor Mother (1939), The Devil and

Miss Jones (1941), Clerks (1994), High Fidelity (2000), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and Employee of the Month (2006). These eight films (four from the early 20th century, four from the late 20th century/early 21st century) are representative of how the view of the retail employee has evolved and changed over the course of a century on film.

Indication of Class Status in Early Films

In both the early and the later films, the retail setting works as a narrative shortcut to indicate that the protagonist is lower-class. The main premise of these films, aside from the characters finding love, is for the protagonists to “better” themselves in some way. In the early films this idea is more closely tied with the Horatio Alger ideal, in that the protagonists often rise above their station (usually through marriage). In the later films, however, the characters only need to learn a moral lesson about themselves for the plot to be resolved. In these later films, the characters do not frequently rise above their station, but become better people because they have found love.

In the early films, the setting of the retail department store as a workplace is simply an indicator to the audience that the protagonist is poor, but potentially ambitious or industrious. Likewise, the character who works in the trade is often morally upstanding. In My Best Girl, Mary Pickford must work to support her aging and impoverished parents and derelict, flapper sister (who is dating a mobster). In Safety

Last! Harold Lloyd moves to the city and works in a department store so that he can save- up to marry his country sweetheart. Meanwhile, the workers in The Devil and Miss Jones are actively organizing a union to collectively bargain for better working conditions.

In these early films the main thrust of the plot is about moving up and out of the retail world - that is, up and out of poverty. This is usually accomplished through marriage, where the poor shopgirl gets to climb the social ladder by marrying a wealthy man (often the son of the store owner or, as in The Devil and Miss Jones the boss himself). Jeanine Basinger in her book A Woman’s View suggests that this narrative (the

Cinderella story) is the female equivalent of the Alger up-by-your-bootstraps story for men.41 In these stories the working girl does not seek out great wealth or status, but keeps her head down and works hard in her job. She is often surprised in the end to learn that she has fallen in love with a wealthy man and no longer needs to work. Even Safety Last ends with Lloyd walking off with his girlfriend into the sunset after the famous scene in which he is forced to climb the side of the department store he works at as a stunt to bring in customers, indicating a happily ever after, as he has won a large sum of money.

More often than not it is the supporting characters in these early films who are on less morally fine ground. Several of them feature the trope of the contemptible, wealthy

41 Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 228. 38 store owner. This character does not understand his workers, and often makes their lives

(and jobs) more difficult. Claire Mortimer calls this trope the “playboy” in her book

Romantic Comedy, stating that he “needs to learn the value of commitment and love… needs to develop maturity to be a worthy partner for the ultimate price, the good girl.”42

The term “playboy,” however, is somewhat misleading in its assumption that the character is a womanizer. While this is certainly true of the films My Best Girl and

Bachelor Mother, it does not quite fit The Devil and Miss Jones or Safety Last!, which both feature similarly immature male protagonists. For the purposes here, then, the term

“man-child” has been adopted to refer to immature male protagonists who better themselves in some way by the end of the film.

In both My Best Girl and Bachelor Mother, the male protagonist is an irresponsible son of the store owner. Their character’s stories in these films revolve around the primary idea that they must shape-up so that they can someday run the store themselves. Early in the film Bachelor Mother we see David Merlin (played by David Niven) arriving at his father’s store late in the morning and wearing the fancy suit he went out in the night before. He changes into work suit right in the office as his father, store owner J.B. Merlin

(played by Charles Coburn) lectures him. In order to mature as his father thinks he needs to, David takes an interest in salesgirl Polly Parish (Ginger Rogers), who he mistakenly believed was trying to give up her baby for adoption. It is only after he falls in love with

Parish and asks her to marry him that his father comes to view him as mature enough to run the store.

42 Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (London: Routledge, 2010), 50. 39

My Best Girl takes a less direct path. This film is similar to Bachelor Mother in that the store owner’s son, Joe Merrill (played by Buddy Rogers), must work at the store because his father thinks it will build character. In order to do so, however, he goes undercover as Joe Grant so that no one at the store will know it is him. At first, he doesn’t take his job in the stockroom seriously, and his co-worker Maggie Johnson (Mary

Pickford) calls him “The dumbest stock boy in the world.”43 Because he is actually the store owner’s son, he eventually gets promoted, but continues to eat lunch with Maggie, as the two have grown close, even though she doesn’t know his real identity. When Joe defends Maggie’s honor after a comment made by her sister’s gangster boyfriend by punching him. When this scuffle makes the newspaper, Joe’s father decides he must leave town until the scandal blows over. Joe’s character arc is complete after her refused to leave without Maggie, because he has fallen in love with her despite their vastly different class backgrounds.

Unusually, in The Devil and Miss Jones it is the store owner himself that goes undercover. John P. Merrick (Charles Coburn) disguises himself as an employee in order to thwart a union from organizing at his store. Initially Merrick is a comically inept employee. His co-workers Mary Jones (Jean Arthur) and Elizabeth Ellis (Spring

Byington), who is close to Merrick’s own age, take pity on him and befriend him.

Embarrassed by this, Merrick forces his butler to pretend to be a customer and to buy several pairs of the hardest-to-sell shoes in the store from him. Unfortunately, this scheme doesn’t work out as he is undermined by an ambitious but obnoxious co-worker.

The climax of the story actually revolves around the employees he has befriended

43 My Best Girl, Directed by Sam Taylor. United Artists, 1927. 40 learning his true identity, his siding with their union over his own board of directors, and marrying Elizabeth.

Mortimer attributes this trend of irresponsible rich men learning to have a heart partially to the Depression. She suggests that during that period, audiences wanted to see the wealthy as flawed in some way, while, “the less-privileged [are seen] as being in touch with their instincts and as being essential to the emotional well-being of society …

[they] articulate the good impulses at the bottom of the American soul…”44 Thus, when the two come together in the end it must indicate that the wealthy have been taken down a notch in society, and that the poor working person has been shown to be the truly smart and capable one.

In contrast, the 1927 silent film It begins with shopgirl Betty Lou (played by possibly the first movie star sex-symbol Clara Bow) trying to win the affection of her boss Cyrus Waltham, Jr. (Antonio Moreno). At the beginning of the film Betty Lou is presented as a female version of the playboy. She possesses the “It” quality of the title, and enjoys going out at night to have a good time, much like the men in the other early films. In short, she appears to be a gold-digger, who simply wants to marry her boss because he is wealthy. Halfway though the film, though, Betty vehemently defends her roommate, an unwed mother, when social services attempt to take away the baby. In doing so we learn that Betty Lou is not quite the vapid gold-digger we thought she was, as well as the hardships endured by many shopgirls who work for low wages. In the end, she does, of course, win over Waltham with these virtues.45

44 Mortimer, Romantic Comedy, 12. 45 It (Paramount Pictures, 1927). 41

The other man-child character in these early films is Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!

In this film, Lloyd’s unnamed character actually sets out himself to achieve a sort-of

Alger narrative for himself. He travels to the city in order to earn money to marry his country sweetheart. He finds a job at a department store, but finds the work challenging

(we literally see him battle a crowd of harried women at his counter in the fabric department), and discovers that it pays too little. Despite this, much of his man-child behavior happens outside of the workplace. In one instance he gets in a scuffle with a police officer when he tries to pull a prank on his friend, which ultimately leads Lloyd to having to the famous building climb stunt at the end of the film. In another instance

Lloyd and his friend hide from their landlord by literally climbing into their coats which are hanging on the wall. Only in a couple of instances does this cross over into his work space such as when he is late to work because of traffic and must frog walk across the store in an attempt to hide from the floor manager. In another instance he actually pretends to be the manager of the store to impress his girlfriend when she comes to visit.

In fact, in many instances we actually see him as a hard worker by, for example, staying late to help a single old lady even after the store is set to close. While the man-child of the later films discussed here has many similarities to Lloyd’s character, they are hardly ever seen with the same resolve in their own work.

In these early films, the retail environment is used as a way to set up clear class distinctions between at least two characters. Here the narrative-arc of the wealthy character is only complete after they have learned something from the more morally- upstanding working-class retail employee. In many ways they also frequently serve as

Alger or Cinderella narratives for the working-class retail employees. This morality

42 rewards both the wealthy man-child with a lovely wife, and his former employee with a step up the societal ladder.

Indication of Class Status in Later Films

In the late 20th century/early 21st century films the setting does not just indicate that the person working there is poor, but rather that they have no ambition. Many of these films use this setting to further illustrate that the characters are immature because they are stunted in their growth. For example, Andy’s (played by Steve Carell) job in the stockroom of an electronics store is held up next to the fact that he owns many action figures in the film the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Additionally, the protagonists of these later films are more often men than women. Claire Mortimer suggests that this was a way for romantic comedies to reinvigorate themselves by, “by targeting different audiences…

[and] integrating elements of gross-out comedy… [to] appeal to male audiences.”46 The male protagonists of these films still need to start out at a place where there is room for them to grow. Since these films focus less on the Alger or Cinderella narrative, the growth of the character must be emotional. As such, the retail setting is re-purposed to imply that the character hasn’t grown past his first job as a retail employee.

One of the most prominent ways in which these characters are shown as immature is the way in which they treat the stores where they work. These characters are not hardworking, and are frequently shown finding creative ways to play around while at work. The store setting is used as a means to goof-around with their friends, rather than as a legitimate job from which a paycheck earned as in the earlier films. The electronics

46 Mortimer, Romantic Comedy, 18. 43 store in the 40-Year-Old Virgin allows our main characters a chance to play video games at work, and the Costco-like warehouse store of Employee of the Month allows many creative ways for Zack (Dane Cook) to play pranks on his rival at the store (Dax

Shepard). In other instances, such as the record store that Rob (played by John Cusack) owns and works at with his buddies is used as a way to amuse themselves at the expense of customers they do not like in High Fidelity. In one notable scene, a customer comes in looking for an obscure record – the store has the record, but they refuse to sell it to him because they don’t feel like that particular customer would properly appreciate it. As soon as the customer leaves, they offer it to their friend who is also at the store shopping.

Finally, the store setting in Clerks is used as a way to express the general angst Dante

(Brian O’Halloran) feels about his life. When he is called in to work on a day he was scheduled to play hockey with his friends, he instead transfers the game to the roof of the convenience store he works at and allows them to take drinks from the cooler.

These films do not provide a way for the protagonists to better themselves through social class, but rather to become more emotionally mature. The characters become better by becoming more self-aware of their flaws. John Alberti, in discussing this type of film as “bromances” suggests that “although many bromances feature a version of the traditional ‘battle of the sexes’ this conflict operates less as an argument between women and men… than as an internal struggle of the male characters with their understanding of their identities and roles as men.”47 So, while love usually creates the catalyst for these men to begin the reflection process about their lives, the real transformation happens alongside their friends, who also grow and mature throughout the film.

47 John Alberti, "“I Love You, Man”: Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of the Romantic Comedy," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 30, no. 2 (2013): 162. 44

The earlier films promoted the idea of external improvement by having the protagonists obtain wealth or move up the social status ladder. This could be seen, as earlier stated, as a reaction to the Great Depression, at time when much of the country lived on the precipice of economic insecurity. So, showing the characters move up the social ladder would be seen as a fairy tale during difficult times. The late 20th and early

21st centuries were a time of relative economic stability for the American middle-class. It is not surprising, then, that the self-help market began to boom, including books like The

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, groups like EST (Erhard Seminars Training), and motivational coaches like Tony Robbins became household names as middle-class

Americans looked inward instead of worrying about financial issues. It is no surprise, then, that films of this period would feature character improvement by way of self- introspection rather than by climbing the social ladder.

Another reason for this depiction could be as a reflection of the so-called “Crisis of Masculinity” which occurred in the early 21st century. This idea, as described by a number of scholars including Susan Faludi, Hanah Rosin, and Anthony Clare, is that men are losing their status in society as the breadwinners as more women enter the workforce in the wake of 2nd and 3rd wave feminism. As such, traditional gender roles in the home are becoming blurred and men are becoming confused about their role in society. Diane

Negra suggests that these media representations are “a response to the media concern about the underachievement of men in education, as they are often seen to be left behind as women grasp career opportunities and postpone commitment… that is, the male- centered romantic comedy with a hero who has failed to effect the transition into

45 manhood, living in a state of arrested development.”48 In short, these films were not simply created to broaden the appeal of romantic comedies by targeting men as well as women, but were also a reflection of a massive shift in societal norms in which more men felt that they were losing their place in society as more women became family breadwinners. In the instances discussed in this chapter, the retail setting as a workplace functions as a narrative shortcut to indicate that these men are in a state of arrested development. As adults they should have moved up and beyond their retail jobs into a

“real” job, but because they haven’t, we know that they are stunted in their growth in some way, and lack ambition.

Although none of the characters leave their jobs in retail by the end of their films, they all depict the characters start the process of becoming successful adults by becoming more self-aware of their flaws. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin Andy moves from stock boy to floor manager, and fully matures when he sells his action figures to pay for a wedding to his girlfriend. Zack, in Employee of the Month, initially attempts to gain the title in order to impress the new girl (Jessica Simpson). He does get the girl in the end, once he learns to stop slacking off at work. By the end of High Fidelity, Rob learns that there is more to a person than their taste in pop culture (specifically music), and manages to get his girlfriend back. The only one that doesn’t improve notably is Dante in Clerks, although he does become more self-aware that he is the cause of many of his own problems. This occurs only after a fight with his friend (and fellow clerk) Randall (Jeff Anderson) which culminates in a wrestling match through a rack of impulse-purchase items near the cash

48 Diane Negra and Yvonne Trasker, “Neoliberal Frames and Genres of Inequality: Recession-era Chick Flicks and Male-centered Corporate Melodrama,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 48.

46 register. Alberti suggests that “the perpetual state of adolescence… derives not so much out of selfishness as aimlessness; specifically, the lack of clearly defined social roles that are necessarily encoded for masculinity.”49 As soon as the characters find love they find a purpose in life, and are able to fulfil their expected societal roles. This could suggest that the reason the characters mature as they get the girl at the end is correlated to finding their place in society as men.

Cross-Class Romances

One notable feature of many of the early films is the emphasis on class-based romances. Many of them actually feature cross-class romances, where one person’s status has risen thanks to their new partner. In My Best Girl, The Devil and Miss Jones, It, and

Bachelor Mother the main female protagonist gets to rise up because she has fallen in love with the store owner, or the son of the store owner. The indication is that she will no longer need to work. This is an evergreen trope that continues to this day, of course, in films like Pretty Women (1990) and Maid in Manhattan (2002). However, in these newer films, the class difference is frequently commented upon, and we see the couple more often in the domain of the wealthy suitor than that of the poor working girl.

In the early films, by contrast, there is great effort to demonstrate that the wealthy are just like the common people - or that they could be. To achieve this, the couple are either frequently alone and separated from others, or are in the domain of the common people. In Bachelor Mother, for instance, many of the scenes between Polly and David take place in her apartment, while The Devil and Miss Jones features a double date

49 Alberti, “Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity,”165. 47 between Mary Jones and her boyfriend Joe with Elizabeth and John Merrick – really the store owner in disguise – at a crowded Coney Island beach. Even in this scene, the main couples are isolated in a way as they sit on a towel literally surrounded by a crowd of faceless people as almost everyone else is standing. This isolation allows for the audience to similarly believe in the eventual class-jump on both sides by creating a sense of intimacy between the partners.

In many instances cross-class romances occur because the woman has, in some ways, tamed her wealthy suitor with her feminine charms, values, or wiles. In My Best

Girl, Bachelor Mother, It, and The Devil and Miss Jones the female protagonist manages to impress her male counterpart with her kindness, resolve, and practicality. In The Devil and Miss Jones Elizabeth offers John Merrick some of her homemade tuna fish popovers when he doesn’t bring anything for lunch, and insists that he eat some after he refused to take her charity. In several cases, the lower-class female protagonist is contrasted with another woman – usually from the upper-class. In My Best Girl, the protagonist Maggie is contrasted with her irresponsible flapper sister, and her beau’s snobbish arranged fiancé,

Millicent. While a pivotal scene in Bachelor Mother involves David Merlin taking Polly to a New Year’s Eve party when his date cancels at the last minute. Here we see David joking with Polly, while she is contrasted with arrogant high-society women. Sharot suggests that, in this way, the poor female protagonist does not just win over her man, but also, “proves her worthiness… by redeeming the wealthy male.”50 The natural resolution of these films is that the poor female is risen up by her attachment to the wealthy male, but in the same way she is able to change him into a better person. This contrast with

50 Stephen Sharot, "Wealth And/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression," Journal of American Studies 47, no. 1 (2012): 98. 48 other women who are high-status allows us to see how this is accomplished, and helps make these types of Cinderella narratives so popular by suggesting that this position jump is possible even for the modern working woman.

The late 20th/early 21st century films, on the other hand, could be read as a subversion of the Alger Myth depicted in the early films. Although the 1970’s and 1980’s saw the resurgence of the Alger Myth in films like Rocky and Trading Places,51 the

1990’s and early 2000s saw the rise of the ‘slacker’ generation - Generation X.52 Many of the protagonists in the later films perpetuate this ‘slacker’ moniker as they do not value class status, but rather their adolescent pursuits above all else. Mortimer suggest that these films depict, “the underdog, the male underachiever, managing to achieve credibility through partnership with beauty… [and] are directed more at a male audience, giving them the opportunity to identify with the flawed hero.”53 This could possibly account for the shift from cross-class romances to romances in which the protagonists gain a greater sense of self-awareness over a status shift.

The Evolution of Consumption as an Indicator of Change

Stephen Shaot suggests that romantic comedies begin to be linked to consumerism in the 1920s, which would be just as the department stores started to come into prominence in the American imagination, having only been invented at the end of the 19th century.54 Early department stores relied heavily on shopping as an experience,

51 Harry M. Benshoff, and Sean Griffin, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (Malden, MA, USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 199. 52 Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film, 202-203. 53 Mortimer, Romantic Comedy, 66. 54 William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993): 21. 49 and skilled salespeople. Retail today looks much different thanks in part to self-service, which has helped de-skill the profession. Part of the reason for this narrative move from the Cinderella narrative toward the man-child narrative could be in part because of how our ideas of consumption have changed over the 20th century. That is, as our views of consumption have changed, so has our perceptions of who works in the retail trade in our public imagination.

In the early part of the century, department stores, where these early films take place, were built to thrill the senses and seduce potential customers. As grand Palaces of

Consumption they became a novelty or a tourist attraction where people were lured in with the promise that you could look at the fantastical displays but did not have to purchase anything. They also served the aspirational dreams of both their customers and employees. In their book America on Film, Benshoff and Griffin comment on how early films were meant to serve as a means to conspicuous consumption with “sumptuous and glossy production values, subtly yet incessantly displaying the appeal of material wealth.”55 In this vein, early department stores are the perfect setting for the Cinderella narrative because they allow for the poor working girl to be constantly surrounded by the types of goods that serve as aspirational symbols of luxury and wealth. In a relatively new consumer economy, these goods carried abundant cultural meaning. Jeannie

Basinger similarly suggests “The department store contains all the rewards that society has to offer a woman. If she goes by the rules, she will be found ready and then removed from it into the proper world of love and marriage… The store represents not only what a woman wants, but what she can have. The early films were totally optimistic about her

55 Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film, 180. 50 chances.”56 Thus, in these films the poor shopgirl gets to go from selling these goods, to owning them once she has moved in her class station. Rather than serving the goods themselves or serving them up to a customer, she can finally have them serving her. It is the pinnacle of arriving at consumer status.

In real life, these jobs were often viewed as aspirational for working-class women in the early 20th century and seen as a step between working in a mill or factory and a white-collar job. For these women, the job had a certain level of prestige.57 The workplace was clean and controlled, not physically dangerous like a factory or a farm, and allowed for the impression of being somewhat autonomous in your work, like a maid.

Susan Porter Benson in her examination of saleswomen in department stores in the early

20th century called it the “Cinderella of occupations.”58 Sharot suggests that, “this particular ‘escape’ may have been especially pleasurable to particular audiences (urban, female…) because it was grounded in a reality of class and gender inequality, which, given the limited opportunities for women in the labor market, made the social mobility of women dependent on marriage.”59 These films, then, built on the real aspirations of the women who were likely to be their audience.

Today, however, many big box and superstores are intentionally built with cookie-cutter layouts and fluorescent lighting as a way to save money. While some brands do work at creating an atmosphere for their customers, like the Apple Store, these are not the type usually featured on film where our protagonist is an employee. The stark

56 Basinger, A Woman’s View, 228. 57 Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 211. 58 Benson, Counter Cultures, 177. 59 Sharot, “Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression,” 105. 51 blandness of these stores work in conjunction with the deskilled nature of retail work today as a narrative shortcut to indicate that our protagonists are immature in some way.

Thanks to the rise in popularity in self-service in the late 20th century,60 store employees no longer present the image of being experts or skilled in a trade, but are rather often stereotyped as lazy and rude, regardless of whether or not they actually are. Today, employees are no longer surrounded by items which serve as symbols of aspirational upward mobility, but by those that indicate the dullness of the everyday.

So, while the perceptions of these jobs as for the working-class have not changed, what has changed is our ideas about what type of work such jobs represents. In other words, these films demonstrate the evolution of the de-skilling of retail work. In the early

20th century, work in retail, in the capacity as seen in the films, was still, in some ways a skilled job. However, today with the invention of self-service and the continued deskilling of the work thanks to advances in technology, such as the barcode scanner, retail has become a low-skilled job like laboring on an assembly line.

In the early films, we see this as the employees often show that there is a skill to retail work. In Bachelor Mother, Polly is seen not only knowing the proper way to “wind a duck” (she works in the toy department), but also the trick of making a return. When

David (the playboy son of the owner) disguises himself to make a return so that he isn’t recognized by the store clerk he is unable to because he does not know the store policies.

Likewise, in the Devil and Miss Jones, we see many times the undercover store owner fails at selling shoes and other items. He is so bad at the job, in fact, that the titular Miss

60 Clarence Saunders is widely credited with inventing the self-service business model for his Piggly Wiggly stores in the 1930s. The model became widely popular with the expansion of the supermarket in the 1950s and 1960s. 52

Jones and her friends believe that he is simply a helpless old man instead of a business tycoon. Even in My Best Girl Maggie is able to show Joe the ins-and-outs of the stockroom where she works.

In the late 20th/early 21st century films, however, the employees are more likely to be seen goofing off than actually working. The workers these films 40-Year-Old Virgin are indeed ‘experts’ of a sort, but their expertise is a childish one which sparks more derision than respect. Rob and his friends laugh away customers in High Fidelity and spend their days playing “Desert Island Top Five.” In Employee of the Month Zack and his friends build a hideout behind a stack of goods on a high shelf. When he goes on a date with Amy (played by Jessica Simpson), the date is mostly playing around with the cool stuff in the store like go-carts. Dante plays hockey on the roof in Clerks instead of cancelling the game when he gets called into work. In the end he earns a lecture by his friend Randall about how he fails to appreciate the benefit to such a job, which is that one gets paid to spend the day hanging out with one’s friend. The “skill” in Clerks is actually coming up with clever names for the different types of customers such as the “milk maids,” and being able to re-tell stories about annoying customers.

Conclusion

Notably, neither the early or the later films critique the socioeconomic system itself which keeps these jobs low-status, because in some way the goal is the attainment of the Alger ideal of improving life. In the early days of film, the retail setting was used for the Alger narrative in the strictest sense – that is, as a starting point of a character who would eventually rise above their station in life (whether through marriage or hard work).

Later films use the setting as a way to demonstrate that a character has chosen not to advance themselves in any meaningful way in life. This evolution, of course, mirrors the cultural values of the time periods in which the films were produced. In the early 20th century, and especially during the period around the Great Depression when work was scarce and working at a department store constituted a skilled profession, the films present the audiences with a working-class hero. Someone who not only works hard, but is able to take the wealthy character down a notch. After the retail trade had become deskilled, however, our representations of these workers has also become devalued.

Today, it seems, we no longer value a hard days’ work (in all industries), but perceive some workers as slackers with no ambition. This is a clear example of how cultural values are mirrored in popular culture.

Chapter 3: The Oleson’s Know Best: Little House on the Prairie’s Reflection of Cultural Distrust in the 1970s

The 1970s were a decade in which American concern with the way the country was being run boiled over. This was a decade rife with scandals from Watergate and the resignations of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew on separate charges, President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon (which, while perhaps not corrupt in and of itself, certainly felt unsavory to a cynical public); to the Pentagon Papers which chronicled the United States government’s dishonesty regarding alleged progress with the war in Vietnam. On top of all this, the economy moved into a recession due to an oil crisis, and the forces of globalization started to move once steady jobs overseas where labor laws weren’t so stringent. Low growth and persistent inflation (“stagflation”) provoked widespread pocketbook uncertainty. Adding corporate scandals such as Love

Canal and social disasters such as the Jonestown Temple, it becomes easy to see how the public’s distrust of institutions grew.

Popular television of the early 1970s addressed these issues with new, culturally relevant shows, but by the late ‘70s nostalgia was a way for networks to tap into the undercurrents of public consciousness that had arisen in the previous decades. While the television show Little House on the Prairie (NBC 1974 – 1983) may seem an unusual lens through which to view the tumult of this decade, it in fact clearly reflects this trend of the public’s distrust in governmental and corporate institutions. The show achieves this by setting up a dichotomy between two main families: the individualistic Ingalls who are warm and friendly, and the (unofficial) ruling class family, the Olsens, who are rude and snobbish. This dissertation chapter will examine the perceptions of retail as an institution

55 in the 1970s through the perspective of the Olsen family and their Mercantile Store and

Restaurant. While almost every other representation of retail workers in popular culture uses the job setting as a way to indicate that a character is a member of the working-class, the historical setting of Little House allows it to flip that narrative so that the retail employees actually wield a great deal of power in the small frontier town. In the 1970s the retail trade was undergoing a massive shift as the deskilling process was advancing as self-service stores became the norm in most peoples lives and disruptive technologies such as the barcode scanner became popular in stores. On the other hand, stagflation was a double hit to the average American as wages stagnated and inflation caused the price of consumer goods to rise. This environment, then, likely contributed to why the Oleson family, who own both the mercantile and the only hotel and restaurant in town, are presented as arrogant and self-centered. Little House on the Prairie explores the class and power structures of the idealized American frontier, which enables it to critique consumer culture by examining the double-sided nature of it (joys of consumption contrasted with the distrust of those doing the selling).

Rise and Fall of the ‘Culturally Relevant’ TV Show

Prior to the 1970s the Nielsen company did not break down their ratings by demographic, but only recorded how many households viewed a program. As such, television networks pushed for shows that would, in theory, entertain the most people and offend the fewest. With a push from the FCC’s Newton Minow who, in the early 1960s famously railed against television as a “vast wasteland,” and from concerned viewers who wrote in to stations complaining about the violence on programs such as The

Untouchables (ABC 1959-1963), networks began showing “what NBC head of Audience

Research Paul Klien called ‘least objectionable programming’... Since there were so many people in the audience, and the sheer volume of exposure was what advertisers paid for, it didn’t make sense to alienate anybody.”61 This manifested in two distinct ways: the first was by replicating shows that were known hits (where, for example, Lucille Ball repurposes her comic stylings of I Love Lucy (CBS 1951-1957) into The Lucy Show (CBS

1962-1968),62 and through shows that served as light, escapist entertainment.

Many of these were rural-set, or starred characters that played on the ‘Rural Rube’ stereotype developed on the Vaudeville stage.63 Although the mass cancellation of these shows would become a famous moment in TV programming history, later known as the

‘Rural Purge,’ it is a mistake to think that all, or even a majority, of these escapist shows were rural-based. While The Beverly Hillbillies, the Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle

U.S.M.C., Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres were hugely popular, there was also a variety of adventure shows from Lost in Space and Star Trek, to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea which fit into the “do not offend” category likely because the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are easily distinguishable from one another in such a fantastical setting.

Also popular were shows with outrageous premises like My Mother the Car, Mr. Ed

(featuring a talking horse), The Flying Nun, and Gilligan’s Island. These, too, were unlikely to draw angry viewer letters. Likewise, domestic sitcoms proved not to have gone out of fashion, although they now tended to feature a ‘twist’ such as in Bewitched

61 Josh Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968-1978 (Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 4. 62 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 6. 63 Mark Evans Bryan, “Yeoman and Barbarians: Popular Outland Caricature and American Identity,” The Journal of Popular Culture 46, no. 3 (2013): pp. 463, https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12036. 57 where the mother, elegantly played by Elizabeth Montgomery, was a witch, or The

Munsters which featured a family of lovable monsters as a tight-knit and supportive family. Rather than being strictly farm-based, it is more accurate to note that all these shows took light-hearted comic turns, and that even the adventures remained steadfastly, even relentlessly, wholesome.64 At this time this meant heteronormative families with

Christian morals, something that will be upended later with the rise of the culturally relevant sitcom in the 1970s.

In the early 1960s, the Nielsen Company began to expand their ratings guides to networks. Instead of just counting the number of households watching programs, they began asking households to document exactly who in the household was watching programs. This new information allowed Nielsen to breakdown viewership by demographic categories including by age, gender, race, and income.65 This information fundamentally changed the way networks thought about the shows they programmed.

Instead of just aiming for the most households per program, networks (and, more importantly, their advertisers) could now target specific audiences. Specifically, they could now target the large Baby Boom generation who had disposable money to spend thanks to the strong economy, and who would have money to spend for a long time in the future. Indeed, the economy and culture of the entire second half of the 20th Century were to a large extent, driven by this generation. Ozersky notes that “It was not merely that, as a common rule of thumb had it, half of the population was, or soon would be, under the age of twenty-five… beyond youth, the counterculture – or rather an idea of the counterculture –

64 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 12-13. 65 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 44. 58 beckoned for businesses seeking the future of capitalism. For many sales, marketing, and advertising executives, the counterculture was exactly the shot in the arm American consumerism badly needed.”66 The problem was how to turn that generation into viewers.

This process was not resolved overnight. ABC attempted to harness the youth audience by programming shows that had young Boomer-aged casts, and by creating shows that had a vaguely counterculture feel to them like the campy Batman (ABC 1966-

68). Both strategies proved moderately successful and spawned imitators on other networks.67 The first true breakout success would come with a longshot variety show dropped into the CBS Sunday lineup mid-season: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

(CBS 1966-1969).

Needing a show to program against NBC’s ratings juggernaut, CBS took a chance on two young brothers, Tom and Dick Smothers, who performed as folk singers and comedians. The show, with a distinctly ironic and vaguely subversive aura, was an instant success and drew a large number of young adult viewers and “broke the intellectual stranglehold of the 1950s corporate consensus on programing… because, alone of all the

‘youth shows’ of the period, it was true to its core audience on their own terms… The

Smothers’ innovation… was in producing a show whose youth-appeal came not as a result of smoke-filled deliberations in the boardroom but as a direct result of its makers’ own youth and exposure to” different movements of the period.68 That is, despite their clean-cut appearance, the brothers were unafraid to take on cultural issues of the period.

Ultimately, this would be the show’s downfall, as the brothers attempted to push the

66 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 32. 67 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 30-31. 68 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 34 59 limits of what they could get away with in songs and sketches, particularly in regard to satirizing the ongoing Vietnam War. Despite huge ratings with the coveted demographic group, CBS struggled with the controversial humor and regularly censored the show, until it was finally cancelled after three seasons in 1969.69

While the brothers failed at their endeavor in bringing social commentary to prime-time television, they succeeded in opening the door for other networks to test out the waters with youth-oriented socially relevant content. Both ABC’s The Mod Squad

(1968-1973) and NBC’s Julia (1968-1971) premiered in the 1968-1969 season, and were some of the first successes following The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Created by

Aaron Spelling (who went on to create some of the most successful prime-time soap operas of the 1980s and 1990s), The Mod Squad was a new take on the police drama.

Instead of Jack Webb speaking stiffly while wearing a stiff suit, it featured a diverse group of young people (two men - one white and one Black, and a white woman). The premise was that each had been caught up in petty crime and were recruited to take on rising youth-related urban crime. The squad members were, in fact, countercultural youth working on behalf of law enforcement to save other countercultural youth. Julia, meanwhile, followed a single mother and nurse who was widowed when her husband died fighting in the Vietnam War. While the premise is revolutionary for featuring a

Black single mother, the show was notable for the light hand it took on issues of race.70

Lighthearted or not, this was the first prime-time weekly show to start a black female,

Diahann Carroll.

69 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 36-38. 70 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 46-47 60

The two biggest successes of the culturally relevant shows of this period, however, was one show that skewed harder on the social commentary and one that treated issues of the day with a more subtle hand. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS

1970-1977) starred a single woman in her thirties who worked in a newsroom, and featured a large ensemble cast. Working together, this set-up allowed the show to talk about of-the-moment issues (including the burgeoning women’s movement) without making it feel too forced.71 A collection of co-workers at an urban television station had a radically different feel from a sitcom set in Hooterville. CBS’ other show, All in the

Family (1971-1979), on the other hand, was much more in-your-face about its socially relevant content. This was by design. The premise of the show built upon the timeless idea of the generation gap, by pitting a middle aged, conservative, working-class father against his twenty-something daughter and her liberal, college-student husband. The show was created by Norman Lear, who felt “that genuine relevancy need not be laid on superficially, as a gimmick, but could work as the engine behind a comedy series, one that drew on conflict for its humor.”72 Lear would go on to create several more shows in this mold in the 1970s, including several All in the Family spin-offs Maude (CBS 1972-

1978), Good Times (CBS 1974-1980), and The Jeffersons (CBS 1975-1985). Despite their different vibes, both Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family were popular and beloved, and both are now widely remembered as evoking their decade.

In light of the popularity of these socially-conscious, sometimes sharply incisive shows, and to avoid being cast as uninterested in American family politics, in 1975, the

Federal Communications Commission enacted a Family Viewing Hour. This policy was

71 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 62-63 72 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 63-64. 61 intended to appease citizens groups who were concerned about the content of the programs that occupied the prime-time slot on television. It dictated that only shows that were family-friendly could be shown from 8:00 - 9:00 in the evening. “The FCC… cited

NBC’s The Wonderful World of Disney as an example of the kind of programming it had in mind.”73 This meant that previously popular shows like All in the Family had to be moved to a later time slot. When this happened, the ratings for these shows often suffered dramatically.

The shows created to fill the prime-time hour in light of the Family Viewing Hour policy were heavy on nostalgia, and harkened back to sitcoms from the 1950s. Nostalgia here being coded as a return to a time before life was complicated. “No single indicator of the shift could be more telling than the supplanting of All in the Family in the top

Nielsen spot by the pointedly named Happy Days (1974-1984). All in the Family had occupied it for the previous five years – the longest such run in network history. It would never be on top again.”74 Even though the Family Viewing Hour was only active for one television season before it was ruled a constitutional violation of free speech, it set the tone for the rest of the decade. Nostalgia-based television reigned supreme for the last half of the decade with shows ranging from the 1950s set Happy Days and Laverne and

Shirley, the Depression era setting of The Waltons, and, of course, the frontier-set Little

House on the Prairie.

Prior to the 1970s nostalgia boom, scripted television series depicting a historical past were most frequently Science Fiction programs like The Twilight Zone (CBS 1959-

1964) and Star Trek (NBC 1966-1969). On these programs, history was often used as a

73 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 108 74 Ozersky, Arichie Bunker’s America, 109. 62 parable, stressing “that the past was at once remote and foundational – worth remembering and reflecting upon, but necessarily kept apart from, and ultimately in service to, the present,” and was a trend particularly notable in genres of programming, echoing the commitment to technology, modernization, and progress that characterized the postwar period.”75 It makes sense that shows that depict the ways in which technology moves society forward (for better or worse) would depict the past as a place you either don’t want to revisit, or can’t.

Westerns were the other genre on television where the past was depicted, although they did not always romanticize it. Westerns on television tended to favor action and adventure over nostalgia about a lost moment in time. In this time period Westerns on television were no longer in fashion. Between 1969 and 1974 the number of Western programs on television were cut in half (from twelve to seven). These also coincided with a tendency in Westerns to include storylines which portrayed Native Americans in more sympathetic ways than had been the case during earlier productions. On the big-screen, however, they remained very popular as they took on a less nostalgic tone for one that was more counter-cultural. 76 It was in the movies that westerns such as Little Big Man revised the standard treatment of frontier morality tales.

Unlike the Science Fiction and Western shows of the 1950s and 1960s, new shows treated history not as a static place or a place from which we had come a long way in terms of technology and modernity. The post-Family Viewing Hour programs instead treated the past as a place warmly remembered; a simpler time. The past on TV became a

75 M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive Popular Culture and Public History in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 21. 76 Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London: Tauris, 2008), 143. 63 sanitized place of refuge from modern stress. Public Historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska suggests that, by portraying “the past as normal and every day, a source of interest, not fear,” they helped to usher in a new era of nostalgia culture in the mid-1970s. 77 Instead of facing current issues head-on as culturally relevant programs had, these shows, instead, gave viewers family-friendly programing while allowing them to feel connected to it, remembering their own past - or, at least, a version of the past they remembered from the history books.

This is not to say that culturally relevant programming died out in the mid-1970s after the implementation of the Family Viewing Hour. Shows continued to critically examine current issues, although the way in which this was done changed from being an integral part of the show to individual “Very Special Episode.” So ubiquitous and heavy- handed were such “special shows” that they now constitute a funny meme among

Boomers of a certain age. These episodes also tended to avoid overt discussions of politics or matters that might be construed as overly political in favor of less controversial issues such as teen smoking (Happy Days, The Brady Bunch), drugs, and child predators; issues which have a clear right side and wrong side and which there is little room for nuance or ambiguity. The episodes were often much more serious in tone than regular episodes of the show, and they were likely written with an eye toward the television’s

Emmy awards.78

The nostalgic Little House on the Prairie did include their share of “Very Special

Episodes” in its nine-year run, with individual episodes tackling issues such as veterans

77 Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive, 22. 78 Manuel Betancourt, “A Very Special Episode, but Maybe Not So Precious,” The New York Times, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/arts/television/very-special-episodes-history-one- day-at-a-time-vaping-drugs.html. 64 returning home from war with Post Traumatic Stress, addiction, adoption, disability, and child abuse among others. However, despite its historical setting and nostalgic tone, the show, in many ways, also mirrors the feelings for yearning after a putatively simpler time, felt by many in the 1970s as the happy but poor Ingalls family must survive among the wealthy but indignant Oleson family.

Little House - From Books to TV

Laura Ingalls Wilder first wrote her memoir about her childhood as a homesteader in Minnesota, Kansas, and South Dakota in the late 19th century after the stock market crash of 1929. Her daughter, Rose Wilder-Lane had invested heavily in the stock market with both her own money and her parents' money and was now broke.79 Wilder wrote the manuscript with the intent that her daughter edit it. 80 A freelance journalist who struggled to find work, Lane edited her mother’s book into a children’s book and shopped around for a publisher.81 In 1931 a publisher asked for an edition to be fleshed out and updated for older children.82 Wilder and Lane went to work revising the book, and in

1932 it was published. Some have suggested that Lane did more rewriting than editing.83

Little House in the Big Woods, the first in what would become a series, received critical praise and sold well despite the economic hardship caused by the Great

Depression.84 In fact, it became a successful and well-loved literary franchise. One likely

79 Caroline Frasier, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (s.l.: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 313. 80 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 315. 81 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 318. 82 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 321. 83 Maria Russo, “Finding America, Both Red and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ Books,” The New York Times, February 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/books/review/little-house-laura-ingalls-wilder- anniversary.html. 84 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 334-335. 65 reason for this is that, despite being set nearly fifty years in the past, it was about a family struggling with issues that were still relevant to the general population in the 1930s. It made relatable yet hopeful Depression reading. This was a time in American culture when many took comfort in tales of past hardships overcome. The Ingalls and Wilder families both lived in makeshift houses and dealt with crop failures, poverty and debt – relatable troubles that still plagued many in the country at the time. Instead of focusing on the overt hardships her family experienced, however, Wilder focused on nostalgia.85 The books rely heavily on family events like Sunday church and Christmas, and downplay some of the real hardships the family endured like near starvation and severe illnesses.

Themes of family togetherness and the kind of Horatio Alger “up by your bootstraps” ideal seem to be the main message.

This was not the first time that Wilder had written about homesteading life by glossing over some of the more uncomfortable realities of hard frontier living. In the early 20th century, she worked as a freelance journalist writing farming articles. These articles tended to over-simplify the work that was needed to put into a homestead, and made no mention of the fact that she and her husband were barely surviving on their own homestead.86 Her works tended not to feature tales of disease, hunger, savage weather, and tensions with Native Americans – just like her books later on.

For her part, Lane is considered one of the founders of the Libertarian movement in the United States. Lane was also a freelance writer, and many of her articles and works of fiction espouse the Libertarian ideals of minimal government intervention, and individual responsibility. Both women were appalled by President Franklin Roosevelt’s

85 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 322. 86 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 223, 228. 66

New Deal programs, expressing that they had survived much worse and had never relied on “handouts.”87 These themes of self-reliance are seen heavily in all of the books in the

Little House series as subtext, and this portrayal of pioneer life would be further entrenched when the book series was made into a television show in the 1970s. Just as it had in the 1930s, the series would resonate with an audience who was becoming more cynical about the role government and businesses were taking in their lives. The embedded messages about a family’s capacity to handle crises and overcome tough situations relying mainly on optimism and each other carried a not-very-subtle appeal in the 1970s.

When she died in 1957, Wilder left the rights to the series to her daughter. The popularity of the books allowed Lane to live comfortably for the rest of her life. The two most popular books in the series, Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the

Prairie had both been reprinted over two dozen times, and the series as a whole had sold nearly a million copies. Royalties from the books were around $18,000 a year.88 Wilder’s will also stipulated that when Lane died the rights to the series would transfer to the

Laura Ingalls Wilder Library in Mansfield, Missouri. Instead, when she died in 1968

Lane left the copyrights to her friend, Roger MacBride – a Vermont lawyer and moderately successful politician.89

It was MacBride who sold the rights to the Canadian Broadcasting Company to make a television show in 1971. The CBC had approached Lane in 1959 about turning the books into a television series, but Lane was adamant against the idea. When Ed

87 Russo, “Finding America, Both Red and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ Books” 88 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 489. 89 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 499-500. 67

Friendly, who had produced Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, approached MacBride he had no objections. Needing a name behind the project, Michael Landon, star of Bonanza, came on board. Landon would become the vehicle behind the show as a writer, director, producer, and star, playing the role of Pa Charles Ingalls.90 Like the books before it, the show was immediately a hit with audiences, ranking at the top of the Nielsen ratings on the night it premiered.91 The show ran for nine seasons, and remained in the top thirty most-watched shows for all nine seasons.92

Like the books, the show minimized the poverty and hardships of real pioneer life in subtle ways. This time it was because the producers were concerned that it would be too depressing for the audience.93 It also broadened Lane’s Libertarian ideals. Fraser notes that “It reinforced a powerfully simplistic reading of Wilder’s work, extending her portrait of Charles Ingalls’s stoicism to absurdly heroic lengths. Its audiences were led to believe, among other things, that small-scale farming had reliably and sustainably fed

American families on the Great Plains.”94 Like the books, the show preached the virtues of self-reliance; unlike the books it stopped being subtext and became text.

On the surface, Little House on the Prairie was a family-friendly, nostalgia-based show in the mold of those that popped up after the implementation of the Family Viewing

Hour. In actuality, it was an outgrowth of the culturally relevant sitcom (despite not being a sitcom). Rymsza-Pawlowska suggests that “On the one hand, viewers saw a chronicle of frontier life that seemed familiar, yet was packaged as a realistic representation of the

90 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 501-502 91 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 503. 92 Alison Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated (New York: IT Books, 2011), 53. 93 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 504. 94 Frasier, Prairie Fires, 507. 68 past. On the other, issues such as racism and sexism were shown to have been present in the 1870s… dispelling notions of an idealized frontier life. By maintaining this dialectic, the program pointed to a new cultural understanding of the present as proximate to the past and… for identifications and consciousness-building in the present.”95 The class conflict that undergirded many culturally relevant shows of the period was still present, but instead of watching for the bigoted main character to get his comeuppance like in All in the Family, Little House depicted families coming together to solve problems. Little

House on the Prairie utilized the feel-good nostalgia of the past that many late 1970s shows relied upon to make current issues feel as if they could be easily overcome, just as they had been in the past. A clever part of the formula was that social issues relevant to the 1970s could be rendered seemingly uncontroversial by dressing them in gingham and flannel.

One of the of-the-moment reasons for the show’s popularity might be the fact that it was still a relatively new show when the nation’s Bicentennial was celebrated. In 1976 many Americans felt cynical about the state of national politics after being rocked by political scandals. In some cities this manifested in protests or counter-celebrations. In

Boston, for example, a group threw boxes labeled ‘Gulf Oil’ and ‘Exxon’ “into the

Boston Harbor, to symbolize opposition to corporate power [and the energy crisis] in

America.”96 At the same time, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was moving towards victory in the presidential campaign by promising a new administration anchored in older

95 Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, “Broadcasting the Past: History Television, ‘Nostalgia Culture,’ and the Emergence of the Miniseries in the 1970s United States,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 42, no. 2 (March 2014): pp. 84 96 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: from 1492 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 562. 69

American virtues. His small-town farm upbringing in Plains, Georgia, worked to his advantage, as did his promise never to lie to the American people. The Bicentennial was mostly celebratory, and in most cases, people celebrated the event on a more local level.

A resurgence in genealogy and local history allowed many to celebrate and feel patriotic without condoning the actions of the federal government.97 Not only does this kind of history encourage the nostalgia about the hard work of one's own individual ancestors, it places a high value on family and community. So, while Little House was not set during the American Revolution, it promoted the values and kind of nostalgia many Americans were seeking at the time.

Likewise, instead of being overtly liberal, as most culturally relevant shows had been in the past, the show’s rural self-sufficiency skewed Libertarian at just the moment when the general public’s distrust of the government and big businesses was at an all- time high. Coincidentally, Carter’s own rural roots served him well in the same way; he ran and won not as a left-wing liberal, but as a son of the soil who also happened to serve aboard a nuclear submarine and then to govern a large and diverse state.

A Close Reading of the Television Series Little House on the Prairie

Little House on the Prairie, the television show, was only very loosely based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder book of the same name. While the show is set almost entirely in

Walnut Grove, Minnesota, the real Ingalls family moved around extensively, and only lived there for a short period of time. Many of the characters, including the young

97 Beth Bailey, David Farber, and Christopher Capozzola, “‘It Makes You Want to Believe in the Country’ Celebrating the Bicentennial in an Age of Limits,” in America in the Seventies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 37-38. 70

Laura’s nemesis Nellie Oleson, are composites based on several different people in her life. Likewise, the plotlines of individual episodes are just as likely to be taken from star, writer, and director Michael Landon’s previous show Bonanza as they are to be taken from the book series, or the real life of Wilder. Despite this, the setting and protagonists seemed primed to be hugely successful when the show aired. Just as audiences found the books relatable when they were published in the 1930s, television audiences tuned in as the show mined the present for conflicts that could reasonably be seen to have happened

100 years in the past.

One of the biggest recurring themes of the show is class conflict. The protagonists of the show are the Ingalls family – Pa Charles, Ma Caroline, and daughters Mary, Laura, and Carrie. They are poor-but-happy homesteaders in a small Minnesota town. Charles farms and raises his daughters, but he supplements his income by working at the mill in town, owned by Lars Hansen, who is also the town’s founder. While the town has a bank, a doctor’s office, and a schoolhouse that does double duty as the church on Sundays, the only other businesses in town appear to be Olsen’s Mercantile and Nellie’s Restaurant and hotel. Both are owned by the Olsen family -- good natured Nels, his overbearing wife

Harriet, and their two ill-tempered children Nellie and Willie. Because of this local commercial monopoly, the Olsen family appears to hold a great deal of wealth and power in town, and money becomes a frequent source of conflict with their neighbors who are often struggling to make ends meet.

Unlike most other depictions of retail workers, this representation is of the owners of the establishment, and differs significantly because of it. Most depictions of the retail trade in popular culture focus on the employees and feature characters who are

71 overworked, poor but clever, and who don’t usually have spouses or children. Here, however, the Olsen family is wealthy and has a fine home, and carry outsized influence in the small town. They represent the closest thing the town has to an aristocracy, although of course the family members are essentially parvenues rather than ancestrally wealthy. Mrs. Olsen is a busy-body who enjoys gossip and feels her wealth makes her smarter than most of her neighbors. The children are rude to their classmates and are constantly causing trouble. Later in the series, when Nellie has grown-up, she is shown to have no work ethic as she struggles to work in the restaurant which is named after her.

Only Nels has a sense of compassion toward his neighbors, and even he occasionally fails to do the right thing.

Culturally relevant sitcoms of the early 1970s addressed many issues of the period bluntly. These shows largely focused on issues of discrimination and bigotry, or the economic squeeze felt by many working-class Americans. Set in the then-present, they put their characters into situations where these realities could be seen and discussed.

While Little House addressed some of these issues, it favored an approach that centered on the country’s rising distrust in government and big business in a more general way.98

In this fashion, it gently channeled the Progressive ethos of the late 1800s, in which small-town farmers were seen as sympathetic victims beset by rapacious railroads and far-off Eastern financial interests. Doing so allowed it to feature moralistic endings to episodes that showed the audience the way life should be lived: simply, and valuing family and community over all else. The show’s setting – a small Minnesota frontier

98 Kevin Michael Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 17. 72 town in the late 19th century – aided in this manner by allowing the show to simplify down the number of people who could reasonably be in power in this town.

On Little House the Olsen family acts as a stand-in for all those with power in society. The setting of Walnut Grove, a small Minnesota frontier town, does not have a formal system of government (it has a founder but no mayor until the final season), and is run by a council, which both Harriet and Nels Oleson are on. The only businesses in

Walnut Grove are the little-seen bank and post office, the lumber mill, and the Oleson's

Mercantile and Olsen-owned Nellie’s Restaurant and hotel. Under this situation the

Oleson family wields a lot of power in town. In real life, this was not a time period of great trust toward those in power, both in the government and corporations at large.

Historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer describe it this way:

“Grassroots social movements … had exposed racial and gender

inequalities at the very foundations of American government... The

growing movement against the war in Vietnam, meanwhile, shattered the

so-called ‘Cold War consensus,’ the notion that the spread of Communism

must be challenged all around the globe... During the 1970s, in the wake

of Vietnam and Watergate, the soundness of ‘the establishment’ suddenly

seemed in doubt.”99

Meanwhile, previously abundant union factory jobs in the Rust Belt of America’s

Midwest moved to the south where unions were weak, or out of the country completely due to globalization, and jobs started to dry up.100 During this period the general public was more and more aware of problematic issues that had long been ignored. As these

99 Kruse and Zelizer, Fault Lines, 7. 100 Kruse and Zelizer, Fault Lines, 17. 73 issues came more to the forefront of society, the general public began to feel that those in power may not always have their best interests in mind as they made decisions that affected them.

On the show, the Oleson family regularly throw around their status as the wealthiest family in town in ways that other townsfolk find distasteful. When the local schoolhouse, which doubles as the church, decides it would like a bell, the Olesons agree to buy one - as long as it comes with a plaque that shows who purchased it.101 Likewise, when a school for the blind in a neighboring town needs a new building, it is moved to the home of the deceased town founder. After Harriet Oleson makes a large donation to the establishment, it is named after her, and her motivations for the donation are suspect.102 .Even the Oleson children engage in this behavior by, for instance, inviting other children over to their house for a birthday party, showing off all of their toys but not letting anyone else play with them.103

Two episodes in particular highlight not only the Oleson’s status as the wealthiest family in town, but as the owners of the only retail outlet - the Mercantile. In the 1970s when the show aired, the one of the biggest concerns for everyday Americans in the

1970s was the economy. For the first time in history the economy fell into a recession as a result of ‘stagflation’ - a new term coined to explain the simultaneous rise of inflation with low economic growth - took hold.104 This position in town gives the Olesons a particular type of power that likely mirrored the everyday concerns of viewers. The

101 “The Voice of Tinker Jones,” Little House on the Prairie, (NBC, December 4, 1974). 102 “The Blind Journey, Part 1,” Little House on the Prairie, (NBC, November 27, 1978). 103 “Town Party, Country Party,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, October 30, 1974). 104 Bailey, Beth, and David Farber. America in the Seventies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004, 2. 74

Olesons become the arbiters of goods for the town, and hold a financial power in setting prices for those goods and allowing (or not allowing) their neighbors credit for them.

In the second episode of the series titled “Country Girls” the Ingalls family has just moved in and are trying to establish their place in town. When Caroline Ingalls attempts to sell the family farm’s eggs to the Oleson’s Mercantile, Mrs. Oleson informs her that the brown eggs she has brought in will yield a lower price than the white eggs. In this instance, Mrs. Oleson is acting as the arbiter of how much money the family will make, and as the only business in town that buys eggs, she has the power to make such arbitrary decisions as how much brown eggs vs. white eggs can be bought for. Later, when Caroline admires a bolt of fabric, Mrs. Oleson publicly shames her by loudly proclaiming that it is much more than Caroline could afford, and she suggests a much dowdier fabric instead. Not only is Harriet Oleson the arbiter of prices, but she also acts as the arbiter of taste for certain families in town. 105

In some ways, the dichotomy between Harriet Oleson and Caroline Ingalls could also be seen as a referendum on the Women’s Lib movement of the 1970s, or what is today called Second Wave Feminism. In her book Backlash: The Undeclared War

Against Women, Susan Faludi chronicles the ways in which television and the media moved away from representations of independent, non-married women in the 1980s.106

Partially in response to what media studies scholar Andrea Press suggests was a

“proliferation of middle-class family images” that “characterized most… programing of

105 “Country Girls,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, September 18, 1974). 106 Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Crown Publishing, Inc., 1991) 157. 75

American televisions prime-time from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s,”107 the

1970s featured a wide variety of non-married, working women. From The Mary Tyler

Moore Show to the crime-fighting sexpots of Charlie’s Angels to classic television staple

Lucille Ball in her third sitcom Here’s Lucy, where she portrayed a widow with two kids, working, single women were all over television in the 1970s108 In the 1980s, however, programs that featured women seemed to have taken two steps forward and one step backward, moving women back into the domestic sphere as wife-and-mother, but allowing her a job (albeit one that we never saw her perform in the way we regularly saw her husband on the job).109 “The rare show that included working-mothers tended to present them as incompetent, miserable, or neglectful,” Faludi suggests.110 Little House could be seen as an early version of this backlash against portrayals of working women on television. While Caroline Ingalls seems to spend all of her time worrying about and caring for her family, working mother Harriet Oleson is greedy, self-absorbed, and spiteful. While Harriet does dote on her children, it often comes in the form of expensive gifts instead of more traditional care and affection. When her daughter Nellie pretends to be paralyzed, for example, Mrs. Oleson buys her all of the expensive toys she wants, instead of sitting by her bedside the way a more traditional, non-working mother like

Caroline Ingalls might.111

Another second season episode highlights the wealth and status of the Oleson family and the economic troubles faced by the country as a result of stagflation, which

107 Andrea Press, "Gender and Family in Televisions Golden Age and Beyond." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625 (2009): 141 108 Andrea Press, 143 109 Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Crown Publishing, Inc., 1991) 153. 110 Faludi, Backlash, 155. 111 “Bunny,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, October 4, 1976). 76 caused the loss of many jobs. In this episode Charles Ingalls finds a second job at the lumber mill owned by the town’s founder, Lars Hanson. When a customer can’t pay

Hanson, the owner has no money to pay Charles and must temporarily shut down the mill. Unfortunately, this leaves the Ingalls family with a sizable debt at the Oleson’s

Mercantile that they cannot immediately pay. The Olesons stop allowing the Ingalls to purchase items on credit except for absolute necessities. In order to pay off the debt, everyone in the Ingalls family must pitch-in. Charles takes a third job helping out a neighbor on his farm, while Caroline takes over more of the farm work at home, oldest daughter Mary stops going to school to work full-time, and daughter Laura helps Mary with her chores on the farm. In the end, the family earns enough money to not only pay back the debt, but they even have a little left over to purchase desired items like coffee and sugar. Nels Oleson comments to Charles that he feels he is the “Richest man in

Walnut Grove.”112 Plainly a part of the episode’s moral message is that the Olson family’s greedy insistence on prompt payment despite difficult circumstances is not at all admirable.

In other episodes, the Oleson family represents American’s growing distrust of government and big businesses. On Little House the Oleson family not only holds the coin purse of the town, metaphorically speaking, they also frequently leveraged their position in the town by making decisions that benefit few besides themselves. In the second season episode “The Troublemaker” the Olesons use the fact that they comprise half of the school board to oust the current teacher because they think she is unable to handle the older children in class, who have been fighting. In her place they install a man

112 “The Richest Man in Walnut Grove,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, September 10, 1975). 77 who is a strict authoritarian, prone to implement harsh punishments for minor issues that come up in class. The Olesons also host him over for dinner upon his arrival and warn him about one student in particular, Laura Ingalls, whom they claim is a troublemaker because she is Nellie Oleson’s rival in class. Sure enough, the new teacher singles out

Laura for minor infractions unnecessarily until Charles Ingalls overhears the way he is treating the students, and has him removed and the original teacher reinstalled.113 Here the Olesons attempt to not only wield power over their neighbor’s employment, but also to exert influence over the social order of town by choosing who should be singled out for reward or punishment.

In another episode, Nellie Oleson volunteers to tutor the teacher’s son, who is getting some of the worst grades in class. Mrs. Oleson herself has been publicly shaming the teacher by loudly proclaiming how embarrassing it must be to see her own son failing in her own school. She also donates a prize for the student who does the best on the final exam of the school year, because she believes it must be her own daughter, Nellie.

Instead of tutoring the boy, Nellie teaches him how to cheat, and then blackmails him into giving her the questions to the final exam. In the end the boy confesses to cheating in class because of a guilty conscience, and he and his mother conspire to stop Nellie from being able to cheat on the final exam as well.114 In this instance, both Nellie and her mother believes that they would be free of consequences of their actions because of status in the town, and that they could act with immunity.

In both of these episodes members of the Oleson family attempt to use insider influence and to exert power in ways that benefit only themselves. Here, parallels could

113 “Troublemaker,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, February 25, 1976). 114 “The Cheaters,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, November 20, 1978). 78 be drawn to many instances of the Nixon administration attempting to subvert democratic norms and processes for their own ends. From Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre where he fired two Attorneys General because they would not get rid of special prosecutors who were looking into abuses by the administration during the Watergate Crisis, to the

President’s attempt to obtain insider information on his perceived enemies including the

1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and Daniel Ellsberg the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, the administration more than once abused its power. They gave the public plenty of reasons to distrust governmental institutions, and it is not difficult to imagine Little House playing with those themes in its episodes.

In a much less subtle episode titled “Welcome to Olesonville,” Mrs. Oleson buys the house of the town’s founder who recently died. When she cleans it, she discovers a town bond, and uses the debt to essentially blackmail the town into getting special privileges for her family, including naming the main road “Harriet Oleson Boulevard” and re-naming the town “Olesonville.” Viewers could see before them the specter of an unsavory, grasping class of people asserting themselves as the town’s establishment. One could easily draw parallels to current events and social attitudes of the decade. Realizing how far she can take this, she decides that it is ineffective for the town to be run by a town council, and decides it should instead have a mayor - her husband Nels Oleson.

Despite many in the town being concerned that he will simply be a puppet of his wife if he is elected, he largely runs unopposed until someone enters the race at the last minute.

His opponent is Lem McCary, one of the town’s oldest inhabitants. Throughout the episode we learn how charismatic McCary is, as he knows and socializes with just about everyone in town, and freely accepts offers to be driven home as he lives on the outskirts

79 of town.115 Airing in 1982, this episode is likely a not-so-subtle vindication of Ronald

Reagan who, despite being former Governor of California, ran for president as an

“outsider” candidate against “the establishment” candidate, incumbent Gerald Ford, during the 1976 campaign primaries. Reagan repeated his outsider campaign, this time successfully, against Carter in 1980. Like Reagan, McCary’s election promise is to largely run the town in a hands-off manner, and let the free market take its course. This episode, of course, harkens back to the series’ Libertarian roots. Even if the Reagan angle is not directly correlative, the idea of the avuncular, elderly-but-vigorous politician in whom the community’s best memories and values, was a happy political tale.

The source of the Oleson’s power should not be overlooked, however. They are the wealthiest family in town because they own the Mercantile. They sit at the apex of local retail commerce, and are quite delighted with the power this gives them in a town full of incipient consumers. In the 1970s consumer culture in the United States was rapidly growing. With the post-war flight of many middle-class families into the suburbs came a new market for retailers to target. Supermarkets came first, and it brought with them new technologies meant to appeal to suburban women such as automatic doors and frozen food.116 In 1971 they added the laser scanner and barcode. But with land in the suburbs so cheap, suburban shopping malls sprang into existence. The creator of the

American mall, Victor Gruen, had envisioned a grand community center where families could come together and spend an afternoon. He modeled the design after the buildings constructed for government workers to live in at Los Alamos, New Mexico during World

115 Dexter, Maury. “Welcome to Olesonville.” Episode. Little House on the Prairie9, no. 3. NBC, October 11, 1982. 116 Erin Blakemore, “Sex and the Supermarket,” JStor Daily, January 3, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/sex- supermarket/. 80

War II. While Gruen didn’t propose having apartments in these shopping complexes, he did design them with the idea of including services like Post Offices and grocery stores inside.117 By 1975 (the year Little House on the Prairie debuted) there were 16,400 malls in the United States.118

Not everyone bought into the malls-as-community-centers idea, though. In 1978, while Little House on the Prairie was in its fourth of nine seasons, film director George

Romero satirized what he saw as a growing turn toward mass consumerism with his film

Dawn of the Dead. In the film a small group of survivors of a zombie takeover find refuge in a suburban mall. Here they have everything they need to survive: food, shelter, and entertainment to seemingly last them forever. When they attempt to rid the mall of the zombies one asks why they’ve gravitated toward the mall. Another survivor responds

“Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”119

Romero wasn’t the only one taking note of this trend. In 1979 President Jimmy

Carter delivered a speech on what he saw as the nation’s growing crisis of confidence. In this speech he chastised Americans for their growing consumer habits: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”120 Carter’s speech was

117 Marni Epstein-Mervis, “How the Cold War Shaped the Design of American Malls,” Curbed (Curbed, June 11, 2014), https://www.curbed.com/2014/6/11/10090762/how-the-cold-war-shaped-the-design-of- american-malls. 118 Dawn Burton, Cross-Cultural Marketing: Theory, Practice and Relevance (London: Routledge, 2009), 134. 119 Dawn of the Dead (United Film Distribution Company, 1979). 120 Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence,” PBS (Public Broadcasting Service, n.d.), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/. 81 specifically about the oil crisis, but he felt the need to speak to larger societal issues he saw playing out. Kruse and Zelizer note that “Despite the new limits on energy use imposed on them from both home and abroad, many ordinary Americans angrily resisted cutting back on their own consumption.”121 What Carter was seeking was a return to the kind of family and community values that play out on Little House on the Prairie. But so much of the Seventies zeitgeist was focused on self-fulfillment. Some of the trends, such as Gestalt, Macrame, or Yoga, were practice-based. But many stressed purchasing power along the way to self-fulfillment.

This issue comes up on the show in a number of different episodes - usually in relation to revealing to the audience what is most important in life is not possessions, but family and community. Often, but not always, the plots involve the children rather than the adults. In the second season episode “At the End of the Rainbow” Laura thinks she and her friend have discovered gold in the local river. She imagines all of the things she will buy with her new money, and pictures the Olesons giving it to her, except now the

Olesons are poor. When she learns it is fool’s gold and not real, her Pa teaches her that it is easy to be fooled, but that real value comes from the experience she had with her friend in discovering the fake gold.122

In another episode titled “Town Party, Country Party” Nellie Oleson has many of her school classmates over to her house for her birthday party. There she shows them all of the amazing toys she has - from a Noah’s Ark playset to a China doll - but forbids anyone from playing with them. In response, Laura asks to hold a party at their

121 Kruse and Zelizer, Fault Lines, 29. 122 “At the End of the Rainbow,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, December 10, 1975). 82 homestead, and all of the kids have just as much fun eating an outdoor picnic and running around as they did at the stuffy Oleson party.123

When the plots do involve the adults, they frequently revolve around how desperate the Olesons are to make a sale, often to the detriment of their neighbors. That is to say, the shopkeepers become unscrupulous, preying upon the naivete of their customer base. In the first season episode “Christmas at Plum Creek” a young Laura is persuaded to sell her horse to buy her mom a wood burning stove.124 More clearly is the fourth season episode “the Inheritance” in which Charles believes he has inherited a great sum of money from an eccentric uncle from St. Louis. When news gets around town,

Charles is persuaded to buy new books for the school, and an organ for the church. The

Olesons are more than willing to order these items, and persuade the family to splurge on new clothes, and presents for each other - all on credit as the inheritance has not come through yet. Unfortunately, the debt comes due, but the inheritance money hasn’t, meaning Charles must put up his farm as collateral. When the inheritance turns out to be in worthless Confederate money, he must put up his farm for auction. Nels Oleson feels bad for this before being chastised by his wife because he “wanted to make the sale as much as [she] did.” Eventually, the neighbors rally together to buy his farm for him from the auction, including Nels.125 This message certainly resonated in a decade during which inflation – the economic phenomenon which, more than any other, causes people to feel their security drifting away – proved so persistent.

123 “Town Party, Country Party,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, October 30, 1974). 124 “Christmas at Plum Creek,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, December 25, 1974). 125 “The Inheritance,” Little House on the Prairie (NBC, February 6, 1978). 83

Conclusion

Little House on the Prairie was a show that successfully managed to combine two major trends in television in the 1970s: cultural relevance and nostalgia. In doing so it managed to reflect the present while letting viewers know that everything would be okay in the end. Instead of using the popular ‘Very Special Episode’ the show weaved into its narratives discussions of corruption, greed, class differences, and the ills of mass consumerism. Maybe that’s why it continues to air in reruns on television even still today.

Chapter 4: I Was a Retail Salesperson: An Examination of Two Memoirs About Working in Retail

Introduction

Work in retail is often overlooked in discussions about the working-class.

However, two books in the early 21st century sought to expose what the working conditions in the retail trade were really like. Barbara Ehrenreich’s well-reviewed 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America became a standard-bearer of working-class literature for the grittiness and honesty about the lives of the working-poor.

Ten years later, journalist Caitlin Kelly released her memoir Malled: My Unintentional

Career in Retail detailing her own two years working in retail after being laid off from her job at the New York Daily News. While in some ways these books are important in their bringing to light often-overlooked aspects of retail work, they are also deeply flawed. A close reading of the texts through the concept of class tourism, and Stuart

Hall’s ideas about Othering will provide a framework to demonstrate how each author keeps themselves at a distance from the work they are doing when they enter the retail trade. Likewise, Augusto Boal provides an additional framework for approaching these works as performance, making them voyeuristic portraits of the working-class. Instead of exposing the realities of retail work, both works represent a form of class tourism due to each author’s inability to separate themselves from their former privileged lives, and the

Othering they engage in as they are unable to find much value in the work itself.

Nickel and Dimed and Malled

There are several notable similarities between Barbara Ehrenreich and Caitlin

Kelly. Both make their living as authors and journalists, both began working in retail in their mid-50s, and both used their experiences as fodder for a book whose secondary intention was to expose the truth of what that work is really like. The biggest difference between their two books comes with the primary intention of each work: Ehrenreich’s

Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America was written as a piece of investigative journalism exploring the day-to-day lives of the working-poor, while Kelly’s Malled: My

Unintentional Career in Retail was intended as a memoir. Each received national attention as Ehrenreich’s book became a New York Times bestseller and received several awards for its humanistic approach to the subject,126 while Kelly’s book led to major interviews with the CBS Early Show, The Washington Post, and Diane Rehm of NPR.

Both Ehrenreich and Kelly currently enjoy status as members of the white upper- middle class. Ehrenreich was born in Montana, and by all accounts watched her father achieve the American dream working from coal miner to middle-class respectability.

Even though she holds a Ph.D. in biology from Rockefeller University,127 she today works as a freelance writer/activist championing causes like “health care, peace, women’s rights, and economic justice.”128 When Nickel and Dimed was published, she lived near Key West in Florida. Unlike Ehrenreich, Kelly was born to an upper-class family in Toronto and who, by her own account, began working as a journalist right after

126 Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Picador), 2011. 127 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed,193. 128 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Barbara Ehrenreich – About,” Hachette Book Group, July 16, 2020, https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/landing-page/barbara-ehrenreich-about/. 86 graduating from the University of Toronto.129 Today she lives just outside of New York

City.130

In the introduction to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich lays out how her book came to be: In 1998, over a dinner with the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, she questioned “how does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” After suggesting that it would make for a compelling piece of investigative journalism, her editor proposed she be the one to explore the subject further.131 What initially began as an article quickly turned into a book project when she decided she would visit three different cities. She ‘stripped- down’ her resume and then tried to subsist for a long as possible on whatever low-wage work she could find. Over the course of her investigation she lived in Key West, Florida where she worked primarily as a waitress, Portland, Maine where she worked as a maid, and Minneapolis, Minnesota where she worked as a retail clerk. She also decided that if, in that time, she could not afford to pay her housing cost or food, she would end the experiment.132 While occasional references will be made to other parts of the book, this paper will largely focus on Ehrenreich’s time spent in her last location, Minneapolis, working for Walmart. Ehrenreich’s book has become so popular that at least two books were written in response: Below the Breadline by Fran Abrams, who attempted to replicate the experience in London, and Adam Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings which attempted to imitate to refute the findings in Nickel and Dimed.133

129 Caitlin Kelly, Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail (New York: Penguin, 2012). 130 Caitlin Kelly, “About: Caitlin Kelly,” About | Caitlin Kelly, 2021, http://caitlinkelly.com/about. 131 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 1-2. 132 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 2-5. 133 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 224. 87

While Ehrenreich started out intending to write an exposé on the life of the working-class, Kelly did not intend to write about her experiences when she began. After getting laid off from her job at the New York Daily News in 2006, she decided to apply for a job at the newly opened North Face store in a nearby mall.134 Over the course of two years, she worked one day a week at the mall in order to be able to continue her work as a freelance journalist. Two years after starting her new retail job she was able to quit to continue freelancing full-time, and published a book based on her experiences.135 Malled chronicles Kelly’s first-time experience working in the retail industry and includes interviews with other former white-collar professionals who were hurt by the Recession and forced to take low-paying jobs in the service industry.

One of the reasons these projects became books, despite neither starting out that way, was because both authors seemed stunned that so little was written on the subject.

The framing device of each book is their own experiences. Despite differences in genre, both include typical features of literary journalistic writing including interviews with experts, statistics, and analyses of larger social and economic trends. The language in each also suggests that both authors set out to expose what they felt was a largely underreported on, but surprisingly harsh, working conditions in the retail industry.

Class Tourism

Narratives about the working class can highlight issues they face in theory, although not always in practice. Diana Kendall, in her book Framing Class, which discusses media narratives of class, argues that “these narratives are organizations of

134 Kelly, Malled, 10-11 135 Kelly, Malled, 1. 88 experience that bring order to events. As such, these narratives wield power, because they influence how we make sense of the world.”136 However, when the storyteller is discussing issues from a place of privilege, and is unable to separate themselves from that privilege in relation to their connection to those they are representing, the results can be harmful. The results can overgeneralize the actual conditions of society’s most vulnerable and can Other the people they are supposed to be representing.

In both Ehrenreich and Kelly’s books, their own privileged status remains inseparable from the rest of the content. While it would be inaccurate to say their experiences were not real or informative, their methods for approaching these experiences demonstrate that they are participating in a form of class tourism in their attempts to understand the experiences of those who do this job every day. According to the BLS, the statistics regarding the position of Retail Salesperson demonstrate that the makeup regarding race mirrors almost exactly the country as a whole, while for the position of Cashier all racial minorities are overrepresented – with African-Americans at

40% overrepresented and Hispanics or Latinos 30% overrepresented.137 Both authors are from an upper-class, white background which affects the ways they approached their new locations and jobs. In choosing where to work and/or live, for example, they often use their privileged status to pick places that would make them feel the most comfortable rather than out of necessity as is the case for most members of the working-poor.

Additionally, the knowledge that their situations are temporary allows them to perform being working-class without fully escaping their privileged position in society.

136 Diane Kendall, Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers), 5 137 “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. 89

Their own knowledge of themselves as authors adds to this performative aspect in their narratives. Augusto Boal, in his book Theater of the Oppressed states that in

American theater “it is always good to show that there are people in worse situations than ours — this reassures the more sensible audience, whose members easily give thanks for the financial ability that made it possible for them to buy theater tickets, or who feel thankful for their little domestic happiness, in contrast with the characters tormented by vices, schizophrenia, neurosis and other illnesses.”138 Once both authors set about writing a book based on their experiences and decided the aim would be to expose the working conditions in the retail industry, they, consciously or not, determined who the target audience would be – not their temporary working-class colleagues, but those in a position of privilege like themselves. Even as Ehrenreich ends her book by addressing many of the myths about the working-class in a way that both abdicates responsibility of the middle and upper-classes to do more to help, and continues to create a melodramatic narrative about low-wage work by, for example, comparing it to a dictatorship.139 By treating this as entertainment both authors are simply reinforcing the status quo.

Taken together this makes them disingenuous representatives of those who work in retail regularly, while allowing them to present themselves as having had a real working-class experience. In paraphrasing Marx, Boal suggests, “knowledge… is revealed according to the perspective of the artist or of the social sector in which he is rooted, or which sponsors him, pays him, or consumes his work — especially that sector of society which holds the economic power.”140 As both journalists and members of the

138 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theater Communications Group), 1993. 139 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed ,210 140 Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, 53 90 privileged class, they are able to get away with this type of class tourism because they are supposedly exposing the harsh truths about working in the retail industry. Kendall additionally states that “framing is an important way in which the media emphasize some ideological perspectives over others and manipulate salience by directing people’s attention to some ideas while ignoring others.”141 In framing the narratives around themselves, both authors diminish the emphasis on the real issues facing the working- class, instead evoking our sympathy toward them and what they have gone through.

Kelly more obviously highlights her privileged status by stating early on that she has never worked in retail before: “Moving to the other side of the cash wrap… felt as disorienting to me as Alice might have felt when she slipped through the mirror into

Wonderland… By moving to the other side of the register, I, too, entered a new world, one I had only glimpsed in passing since I was little.”142 Despite needing a part-time job to supplement her income as a freelance journalist, she is unwilling to take on many traditional low-income jobs such as working for a supermarket or becoming a telemarketer. Seeing an ad for a newly opened North Face store located in a mall in an affluent area of New York City, she thinks this would be a good fit for many of the skills she has learned in her years as a journalist and through her extensive world travel.143

Michael Zweig in his book The Working Class Majority argues that “Advertising is based on getting us to identify a product with some characteristic we would like to have: sexiness, power, smarts, happiness, status. The ever more relentless introduction of advertising into every nook and cranny of our daily lives constantly reinforces a sense of

141 Kendall, Framing Class, 5. 142 Kelly, Malled, 2. 143 Kelly, Malled, 10. 91 identity through possessions that tends to crowd out other identifiers, such as class.”144 In choosing a part-time job, Kelly, uses the only thing she knows about the industry: the reputation of the brand based on advertising. She believes that working for an upscale brand at a high-end mall will allow her a feeling of status that she could not get by working at a supermarket or a gas station, despite the job itself being in the same industry. While she might be embarrassed to be seen working for the latter by someone from her previous life as a serious journalist, the feeling is lessened by working for the

North Face.

Later, during orientation with the other new employees, she learns that this method for choosing a low-wage retail job is uncommon, as many of her co-workers are coming to the North Face looking for a small step up the economic ladder, having worked in retail before. They have not chosen the North Face because of a presumed status about the brand, but because it offers similar work to the jobs they have held in the past while also being slight improvements on their previous positions, such as being out of the cold that comes with the meat department in a supermarket.145 She is also surprised to note that, for the first time in her life, she is “the visible minority” as “the only Caucasian in the room,” although she quickly glosses over this fact.146 Having never considered that this might be a possibility when she joined this industry, however, reveals just how out of her element she is. This clearly demonstrates both her upper-class status and the privilege that comes with being white. She is approaching the job from a prestige perspective,

144 Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 48. 145 Kelly, Malled, 21 146 Kelly, Malled, 20 92 while her co-workers are choosing it out of necessity. She has agency here, while her co- workers do not.

Although she begins her new job working two days a week, she soon cuts this down to one day.147 She chooses to only work Wednesday afternoons because it will allow her to maintain her freelance work full-time while continuing to have weekends off. The idea of a flexible schedule is particularly appealing to her as it lets her keep the job at arms-length, allowing her to consider it a distraction from her real life. “I was grateful for a break... I’d already achieved enough success in my chosen field that a part- time, low-status job I considered temporary wouldn’t exclusively define me.”148 Kelly’s book gives no indication that working one day a week is a common occurrence at the

North Face, nor does she mention any other employees who have such a schedule. This framing of the work, the distance in which she places the job from her other life and the ability to be so picky about where and how often she works, further illustrate the performative nature of her supposed representation of the lives of these workers. It creates the impression that she is neither serious about the work or presenting to the audience a realistic picture of what working in the retail industry is like.

While Ehrenreich dedicates more of her time to the project, there are a number of aspects to the way in which she conducts this research that indicate that she, likewise, is participating in a form class tourism. Unlike Kelly, she is not seeking work because she needed to supplement her income but taking on an investigative assignment to see what it is like to live as a member of the working-poor. Despite this, she is unwilling to completely dive into this assignment in the way many working-class people do every day,

147 Kelly, Malled, 13 148 Kelly, Malled, 50. 93 allowing herself both a buffer of cash up front and a car rented with a credit card in each new city because, “I just figured that a story about waiting for busses would not be very interesting to read.”149 By acknowledging this upfront she is prioritizing her own personal comfort and the read-ability of her choices above an accurate representation, while admitting that such buffers may not be common with those she is trying to represent.

More subtly, however, are her choice of locations. The first city she works in is

Key West, Florida, located close to where she lives, and which she chooses, “Mostly out of laziness.”150 This location she takes the least seriously of all the places she goes to work as she allows herself, “occasional breaks from this life, going home now and then to catch up on e-mail and for conjugal visits (though I am careful to ‘pay’ for everything I eat here, at $5 a dinner, which I put in a jar), seeing The Truman Show with friends and letting them buy my ticket.”151 The choice of the word ‘conjugal’ here further suggests the lack of seriousness with which she is taking on her new role, as it evokes the image that her ‘new life’ is a prison sentence.

Her second location, Portland, Maine was chosen because she thought it would be easy for her to find work because the demographic was largely white.152 She chooses

Minneapolis, her final location, because she assumed Minnesota was a liberal state,

“more merciful than many to its welfare poor” and only after discarding the idea of

California (where she attended college) because of the heat in the summer. About this last location she states “what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable

149 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 5. 150 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed ,11. 151 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 35. 152 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 53. 94 correspondence between income and rent, and a few mild adventures, a soft landing.”153

This idea of a ‘soft landing’ and a ‘mild adventure’ is further demonstrated by her ability to house-sit for an acquaintance for a period of time while she looks for work, rather than immediately jumping into the housing and job pools as she had in her other locations.

This purposeful choice of locations is notable for a several reasons: it illustrates that she is using her privileged status as a member of the upper-class to pick locations that will make her experience easier or more pleasant (an ‘adventure’ even) and demonstrates that she is unaware that racial minorities are often overrepresented the types of low-wage positions she is searching for. Choosing places that will make her the most comfortable because they are the ‘whitest’ or most liberal therefore adds to the performative nature of her narrative and works against any authenticity she is purporting to represent.

Othering

The questionable presentation of a supposedly realistic experience is seen much more starkly, however, in the ways in which the authors position themselves both in their narratives, and in relation to their co-workers. Neither is able to completely distance themselves from their privileged status, and constantly refer back to their real lives as a gauge from which to judge their new experiences. Their previous life experiences, likewise, lets each feel as if they are able to speak-up on matters in which their co- workers are remaining silent. Stuart Hall discusses this practice of holding yourself at a distance as ‘Othering.’ He states “binary oppositions have the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes, they are also a rather crude and

153 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 121-122. 95 reductionist way of establishing meaning.”154 While Hall is specifically talking about issues of race, his ideas can also be applied here in terms of class status. Both authors view their positions in retail and among the working-class as temporary, which allows them to feel separate from their co-workers and the larger system, even though to their co-workers they appear to be a peer.

The most clearly noticeable example of this is that neither Ehrenreich nor Kelly are able to completely let go of their other lives in devotion to their new positions. Hall claims that “stable cultures require things to stay in their appointed place. Symbolic boundaries keep the categories ‘pure,’ giving culture their unique meaning and identity.

What unsettles culture is ‘matter out of place’ – breaking of our unwritten rules and codes.”155 That is, both authors see themselves primarily as a journalist first, temporary member of the working-class second. In his article “Sponsored and Contest Mobility in the School System,” Ralph Turner states that “the elite aspirant must relate himself both to the established elite and to the masses, who follow different rules, and the elite itself is not sufficiently homogeneous to evolve consensual rules of intercourse.”156 Neither is able to acclimate to their new space, seeing it only as a temporary assignment. As such, they are still playing by the rules of the elites, unable to fully adapt themselves to the rules of their new jobs and temporary class status.

From the beginning, every new experience for Kelly is contrasted with her work as a serious journalist. Once she is hired at the North Face, she is shocked to learn that

154 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” in Representation, ed. Stuart Hall and Sean Nixon (Los Angeles: Sage), 225. 155 Hall, 226. 156 Ralph H. Turner, “Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System.” American Sociological Review 25, no. 6 (1960): 864. 96 they are going to train her. “I’d never been trained before” she states, before explaining that, in journalism, you are simply thrown into the job and expected to know how to do it.157 At first, many of her experiences in her new job are compared favorably to her previous work – she likes the fresh, clean layout of the brand-new store compared to the stingy offices of corporate journalism or lonely confinement of freelance work, for example.158 However, after a short while, it soon becomes apparent that she is in a whole new world, as when she receives her first name tag: “We were issued name tags... I’d never worn a name tag at work, only at conferences where I was an honored speaker whose words were taped and sold, sometimes even quoted back to me years later by a listener who found them helpful.”159 Kelly is constantly bringing up her pedigreed past – from her success as a journalist, to her ability to speak multiple languages fluently, to her frequent world travel. In this way she is unable to fully see herself in her new position as a retail clerk without elevating her previous, real, life. In many ways, she ultimately is unable to fully adapt to this new position where she must blend in instead of seeking the type of recognition she is used to.

For her part, Ehrenreich is often surprised that no one seems to sense that she is smarter than the typical applicant for low-skilled work (having earned a Ph.D.), and that people are rarely surprised when she reveals, before quitting each position, that she is really an undercover journalist. In her final chapter, “Evaluation,” she states “You might think that unskilled jobs would be a snap for someone who holds a Ph.D…. Not so….

Every one of the six jobs I entered into in the course of this project required

157 Kelly, Malled, 19. 158 Kelly, Malled, 32. 159 Kelly, Malled, 33. 97 concentration, and most demanded that I master new terms, new tools, and new skills…

None of these things came as easily to me as I would have liked; no one ever said, ‘Wow, you’re fast!’ or ‘Can you believe she just started?’’160 Unlike Kelly who views all of her new experiences through the lens of her previous life, Ehrenreich wants someone to notice that she is different from her co-workers. In the middle of a shift at Walmart, bored by the tedious nature of doing the same thing over and over again, she thinks, “Yes, I know that any day now I’m going to return to the variety and drama of my real… life.

But this fact sustains me only in the way that, say, the prospect of heaven cheers a terminally ill person; it’s nice to know, but isn’t much help from moment to moment.”161

By simply mentioning the fact that she has a Ph.D., Ehrenreich is unconsciously distancing herself from her temporary co-workers. It is unclear why she believes that skills she learned earning her advanced degree in biology might help her in low-skill work, as she also doesn’t likely use those skills in her regular job as a journalist who focuses on economic issues. She brandishes the degree as a reminder to the audience that her situation is temporary, and that she will soon be back to her regular position among the elite, contradicting the idea that she is actually experiencing what it is like to be a retail worker and a member of the working-class.

Additionally, neither is able to see themselves in their co-workers. Kelly seems unaware that she is thinking from a place of privilege when she remarks “I’d never spent time, socially or professionally, with anyone who had a visible tattoo… who traded the names of their favorite ink artists the way my friends mentioned that of a chic Kensington

160 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 194. 161 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 187. 98 hotel or a great West Village colorist.”162 Having initially applied for the position because of an assumed status of the brand and location of the store, she is frequently shocked to learn how vastly different her experiences are from those of her coworkers. Hall discusses this kind of stereotyping as “part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order. It sets up a symbolic frontier between… the ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable,’ what

‘belongs’ and what ‘does not’ or is ‘Other,’ between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ Us and

Them.”163 By pointing out that many of her co-workers bear the distinguishing signifier of a tattoo, Kelly is setting up a distance between them. Hall continues “[stereotyping] facilitates the ‘binding’ or bonding together of all of Us who are ‘normal’ into one

‘imagined community;’ and it sends into symbolic exile all of Them – ‘the Others’ – who are in some way different – ‘beyond the pale’… it classifies people according to a norm and constructs as the excluded as the ‘Other’.”164 Kelly is highlighting the spectacle, or the features of her co-workers that, in her view, distinctly separate herself from her co- workers. However, in a long middle section of the book, she attempts to demonstrate that she is not an alone in her plight by interviewing other former white-collar professionals who were forced to take work in the retail trade due to the Recession.

In contrast, in every location Ehrenreich works she finds she is frequently unable to understand the supposedly naïve dedication many of her coworkers have to their employers. At Walmart, when one of her coworkers confides that she was unhappy doing a task, not because it was tedious, but because she felt like she was wasting the company’s money by not accomplishing anything productive, Ehrenreich remarks “To

162 Kelly, Malled, 57. 163 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” 248. 164 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,”248. 99 me this anger seems badly mis-aimed. What does she think, the Walton family is living in some hidden room in the back of the store, in the utmost frugality, and likely to be ruined by $21 worth of wasted labor?”165 Through the implication that she knows something that her co-worker does not, she highlights both her privileged status and the temporariness of her situation, separating herself from those she is working with for only a short period of time. Turner argues “By thinking of himself in the successful future the elite aspirant forms considerable identification with elitists, and evidence that they are merely ordinary human beings like himself helps to reinforce this identification as well as to keep alive the conviction that he himself may someday succeed in like manner.”166 This is not to argue in favor of blind corporate loyalty, but rather that, because she has no long-term investment in the job as her co-worker might, Ehrenreich is unable to see the value in the work, and to understand why her co-worker might take pride in her job.

As the authors view their place in the retail world from a distance, both feel as if they are able to speak-up about issues when their co-workers are largely silent. Kelly states “I felt safe speaking up [in monthly meetings] because I worked only one night a week… So, while others examined their shoes or their manicures or giggled to one another during the meeting, I’d ask Joe about missing equipment or the lousy lighting in the stockroom. Most of my coworkers, it seemed, didn’t care or didn’t want to risk looking difficult.”167 Similarly, seeing that other service workers in Minneapolis have gone on strike, Ehrenreich goes out of her way to approach her co-workers on break to discuss the possibility of forming a union at Walmart. On doing this, she remarks “The

165 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 180. 166 Turner, “Sponsored and Contest Mobility,” 859. 167 Kelly, Malled, 172. 100 truth, which I can’t avoid acknowledging… is that I’m just amusing myself, and in what seems like a pretty harmless way… someone needs to flush out the mysterious ‘we’ lurking in the ‘our’ in the ‘Our people make the difference’ statement we wear on our backs. It might as well be me because I have nothing to lose.”168 With no real stake in the job, Ehrenreich is unable to see how something that amuses herself might cause backlash for her co-workers, particularly at a store as notoriously anti-union as Walmart. This inability to see themselves as a real part of the team at their stores, seems to give them permission to stir the pot in ways that they, from their place of privilege, see as being favorable to those they are working with. Neither is able to discern the importance or precariousness of the job for their co-workers, instead suggesting that the reason they are not standing up for themselves is out of disinterest.

In some ways, this distance which both authors keep from their co-workers and their temporary jobs taken in conjunction with the idea that each was attempting to write an exposé on working in the retail and service industries gives both works a voyeuristic feel. According to Turner “While mass esteem is an effective brake upon over- exploitation of position, it rewards scrupulously ethical and altruistic behavior much less than evidence of fellow-feeling with the masses themselves.”169 While on the job, both authors make attempts to relate to their new co-workers and their experiences. However, in writing about those experiences in the way they do, they demonstrate that they are class tourists, spying on the daily lives of the working-poor, while safely maintaining the

‘insider’/’outsider’ dichotomy. Their privileged status and the fact that each has a ‘real’ life to return to is inseparable from the authentic moments they experience on the jobs.

168 Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, 185. 169 Turner, “Sponsored and Contest Mobility” 860. 101

Conclusion

Representational narratives are important because in many ways it is how we filter our own experiences and the experiences of others. Kendall notes that

“understanding how the media portray the different social classes in our society is important, because studies have shown that the attitudes and judgements of media audiences may be affected by how the media frame certain issues.”170 When those narratives are guided by the process of Othering or a version of class tourism, however, it can lead to over-generalizing the experiences of groups like the working-poor. While

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Caitlin Kelly’s Malled may come from a place of good intentions, their inability to truly see themselves in the lives of their co- workers, and the performative nature with which they approach these experiences means that their books present a voyeuristic view of the working-poor rather than a deep exposé on the difficulty of retail work. In a society that highly values the idea that anyone can achieve upward mobility like the United States, the perpetuation of such disingenuous portrayals of the working-class experience only furthers the problems these authors claim to address because they are maintaining the invisible barriers between the classes.

170 Kendall, Framing Class, 4. 102

Chapter 5: Superstore: A Modern Working-Class Sitcom?

Some of the most famous shows in the history of television have featured working-class protagonists — The Honeymooners, All in the Family, and The Simpsons, to name just three popular programs from different decades. Yet while working-class families are standard fare, there is a lack of workplace-centered working-class sitcoms.

Most of these programs are domestic sitcoms featuring a working-class family at home, rather than workers on the job, while most workplace-centered sitcoms feature middle- class, or white-collar professions such as The Dick VanDyke Show, News Radio, and

Parks and Recreation, again, choosing examples covering a wide time range. Even fewer shows depict characters who work in jobs that are representational of the working-class in modern society, where retail salesperson, fast food employee, and cashier are the top three jobs in the country.171 This is an important point to stress: whereas once the standard impression of a working-class job might have called up visions of factory or work outdoors, today statistics show that the most common such position is in retail. The result of these persistent lack of televised portrayals is that there has been a lack of representation of the issues faced by working-class employees on the job.

In some ways, the NBC sitcom Superstore (NBC 2015-present) capitalizes on this by addressing issues not touched on by other shows today, and by very few ever before.

However, the program is far from a perfect solution to the problem of lack of on-screen representation. Too frequently the show undercuts its own message by maneuvering away from difficult and possibly controversial topics. Despite this excess of caution, the show

171 “OES Chart,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), accessed November 14, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_chart.htm) 103 has featured a unionization plotline twice in the first four seasons of the show, with varying degrees of success, something few other shows in history have done. This dissertation chapter will examine the evolution of the show Superstore in its first four seasons to demonstrate the ways in which it is an effective and thoughtful working-class sitcom, and the ways in which it could be a better representation of the modern retail employee.

Superstore

Superstore is a sitcom set in a fictional Walmart-type store called Cloud 9.

Although the show features an ensemble cast, the characters featured the most frequently are Amy Sosa (America Ferrera), the Floor Supervisor who in the fourth season has been promoted to General Manager, and Jonah Simms (Ben Feldman), the first-time retail employee who has dropped out of business school. Supporting characters include General

Manager Glenn Sturgis (Mark McKinney) who takes a demotion in the fourth season to spend more time with his family, Dina Fox (Lauren Ash), the strict Assistant Manager, and employees Mateo Liwanag (Nico Santos) who is an undocumented immigrant from the Phillipines, teen mom Cheyenne Thompson (Nichole Bloom), and Sandra

Kaluiokalani (Kaliko Kauahi) a frequently put-upon employee. Occasionally plots will revolve around retail-centered topics such as Black Friday, but more often the stories revolve around how the employees pass time on the job.

104

History of the working-class sitcom

The idea of putting the working-class at the center of the sitcom goes back to the early days of television in the late 1940s and early 1950s when The Goldbergs (CBS

1949-1951) and The Honeymooners (CBS 1955-56) made the transition from radio to television. These two shows in particular created the tropes that would go on to define the working-class sitcom for decades. In this early period, working-class sitcoms were defined by a bawdy and physical humor at the expense of the protagonists. Richard

Butsch in his article “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and

Gender” sees a connection with this representation and the real-life struggles of the working-class: “By the time television arrived, something had changed in America’s cultural discourse. From the 1950s on, the admiration of physical labor steadily declined.

No longer were construction workers, steelworkers, miners, and craftsmen represented positively. Manual labor instead came to represent stupidity and failure, the only alternative for those men who were not smart enough to be educated to achieve mental work occupations.”172 One of the most popular examples of this is the bus driver Ralph

Kramden (Jackie Gleason), protagonist of the sitcom The Honeymooners. Kramden routinely cooks up get-rich-quick schemes that largely serve only to embarrass him and his tagalong friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney). Audiences are meant to laugh at the buffoonish behavior of Kramden instead of identifying with him. Ralph’s long-suffering but tolerant wife, Alice, displays mingled skepticism and patience regarding his childish schemes, and, in the end, he invariably admits that she was right all along. In some ways,

172 Richard Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender.” in Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Brian G. Rose (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 113. 105

Ralph Kramden would serve as a model for future working-class protagonists for the future.

Arguably the heyday for this genre was in the 1970s, when Norman Lear- produced shows (almost all of which featured working-class protagonists) dominated the ratings. His first show, All in the Family (CBS 1971-1979), was so popular in large part because of the generational conflict it presented between lovable conservative bigot

Archie Bunker and his liberal son-in-law Mike Stivic. Despite Bunker being presented as a buffoon in the manner of Ralph Kramden, many real-world working-class people identified with him.173 Josh Ozersky, in his book Archie Bunker’s America, sees a connection between this particular television program and the reality of the time period in which it aired, much like Butsch. “The twilight of ‘the American Dream’ was no joke.

And what may have made Archie even more appealing was the lengths to which his makers loaded the deck against him.”174 In fact, both liberals and conservatives appreciated the show because they saw themselves represented.175 The popularity of All in the Family led to several spin-offs, including the working-class Good Times (CBS

1974-1980), which was notable for putting an African-American family at the center of the show.176

Working-class sitcoms had, during this period, moved away from making the characters the sole butt of the jokes to joking equally about the system which kept these characters down. That is, these programs had a strong element of awareness regarding

173 Josh Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change, 1968-1978 (Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 67. 174 Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America, 68. 175 Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America,70. 176 Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America, 73. 106 social inequities, if not systematic criticism of society’s underpinnings. Ozersky notes that “Lear felt that a genuine relevancy need not be laid on superficially, as a gimmick, but could work as the engine behind a comedy series, one that drew on conflict for its humor.”177 The tension and humor in a show like All in the Family comes from the divergent values between the aging Archie and Mike. However, instead of laughing at either character, the jokes come at the expense of the situations which are meant to keep the working-class down, and the way that values were changing with the times.

One way to address topical issues without being so heavy-handed as the Lear shows was to use an ensemble cast. Ozersky argues that the success of the ensemble- based The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS 1970-1977) set off a wave of other ensemble- cast shows. “It was television’s task in these years to rebuild mass audiences in the wake of those great moral movements [of the 1960s], and ensemble series were one way to do this on a structural level, without seeming to pander to politics.”178 Ensemble shows have the benefit of being able to represent a number of different societal groups, and in turn the issues they may face, without placing the burden on one character to always do the heavy lifting. Shows like Taxi (NBC 1978-1983), WKRP in Cincinnati (CBS 1978-1982),

Alice (CBS 1976-1985), and Welcome Back Kotter (ABC 1976-1979) exemplified this trend of urban-set, ensemble shows that were topical.

In 1975, however, the Federal Communications Commission instituted what they called the Family Viewing Hour. This policy dictated that networks only show “family friendly” content between 8:00 and 9:00 in the evening. When the policy was put into place many of the most popular working-class sitcoms dropped significantly in the

177 Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America,64. 178 Ozersky, Archie Bunker’s America, 132. 107 ratings, as they had to be moved to a later time. The shows that replaced these working- class sitcoms, such as Happy Days (ABC 1974-1984), often depicted nostalgia for the middle-class families of the 1950s-era sitcoms. Even new shows like Laverne and Shirley

(ABC 1976-1983), which was about two single, working-class women, were arguably conservative in their tone, and never sought to bring to light the issues of the working- class. Whatever misadventures the two brewery girls experienced, they remained friendly, smiling, and uncontroversial. The policy only lasted one season before it was found an unconstitutional violation of free speech, but the damage had been done. The shows that dominated the ratings in the 1980s largely tended to be in the more family- friendly mold, with less focus on political commentary.

While popular sitcoms of the 1980s did feature socially relevant commentary, that commentary was muted slightly as more sitcoms favored middle-class protagonists over those in the working-class. While this is likely a reflection of the direction networks had taken after the institution of the Family Viewing Hour, Gerald Jones in his book Honey

I’m Home: Sitcoms Selling the American Dream believes that this is also in-part due to the fact that television networks realized the money-making potential of selling sitcoms into syndication. “It [was] difficult for any sitcom writer or producer to develop a new comic vision that captures his social moment… truly pointed commentary invites controversy, and controversy [was] no longer considered a boon to family TV shows.”179

In this view, middle-class sitcoms became more prevalent during this period because they were easier to sell into syndication. A show that was too topical or relevant would not hold-up in the long run in syndication.

179 Gerald Jones, Honey I’m Home! Sitcoms Selling the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 251. 108

Instead of using the full-force confrontation model of the Lear sitcoms in the

1970s, these new middle-class sitcoms played with muted versions of socially relevant commentary. Shows like Who’s the Boss (ABC 1984-1992), Family Ties (NBC 1982-

1989), and The Cosby Show (NBC 1984-1992) played on the conservative, traditional, middle-class sitcom family with a socially-relevant twist. In this case, gender role- reversal with the woman working outside the home and the man as the homemaker, generational clashes between a young conservative teeanger and his aging Baby Boomer parents, and the upwardly mobile African-American family, respectively. However, the situations and characters were more reminiscent of what Butsch describes as the early middle-class sitcom where “both parents were intelligent, sensible, and mature. They were calm and affable, in stark contrast to the hysteria that typified the slapstick comedy of the working-class series.”180 These shows were meant to be feel-good and did not frequently address current cultural issues.

Even one of the most popular shows of the 1980s, Cheers (NBC 1982-1993) used this model. Despite being a working-class workplace sitcom, the show was rarely topical in the same way that Taxi or Alice was. Most of the working-class humor instead came at the expense of outsider Diane Chambers (Shelly Long), a graduate student who works as a waitress at the Cheers bar. Even then, Diane’s larger plot throughout the show is her will-they-won’t-they relationship with owner and bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson).

Similarly, the class status of other characters on the show was frequently used as a punchline. Middle-class mail carrier Cliff (John Ratzenberger) was seen as a buffoon for thinking of himself as above his station by frequently spouting off random, and often

180 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 117. 109 inaccurate, trivia. Likewise, upper-middle-class psychologist Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) used the bar as a refuge from his ‘shrewish’ wife and his attempts to ‘fit-in’ with the guys was often seen as a joke.

The genre made a comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the success of

Roseanne, which took over the #1 Nielsen slot from The Cosby Show. Other popular working-class sitcoms of the period such as Married with Children (Fox 1987-1997) and the animated The Simpsons (Fox 1989-present), were deemed “trash tv” by the media.

Popular early television impresario Steve Allen, in his book Vulgarians at the Gate, suggested, “When it was first introduced, the witless spectacle known as Married with

Children -- a deliberately vulgar situation comedy… was considered… daring… Instead, it turns out to have been the forerunner of an actual cultural movement.”181 These new shows seemed to intentionally push back against the feel-good middle-class sitcoms of the 1980s by being brash and vulgar.

Part of this was because of the creation of the Fox network, which was created to challenge the other basic television networks with content that rivaled cable television.182

The Fox network created shows that intentionally pushed the boundaries of taste -- and not towards refinement -- with shows like Married with Children and The Simpsons.183 A few years later, the ABC network began airing Roseanne, which featured an unapologetic working-class family that “did not aspire to cultural upward mobility” in the same way that many earlier shows featuring working-class protagonists did, such as The

181 Steve Allen, Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001) 35. 182 Denise J. Kervin, “Ambivalent Pleasure from Married… With Children.” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687897. 183 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 125. 110

Honeymooners.184 Married with Children and Roseanne (ABC 1988-1997) took the in- your-face Lear model, but instead of using it to address and implicitly critique cultural issues of the day, intentionally subverted the happy middle-class family sitcom with brash, vulgar language and behavior. This was known in other contexts as ‘The Attitude

Era.’ Roseanne further subverted the working-class family sitcom model by making a woman the lead of the show. This is not to say that these shows did not occasionally take on pressing issues faced by the working-class. On Roseanne the Connor family was always struggling to get by on low wages, and The Simpsons occasionally addressed issues like labor unions, albeit in satirical fashion.

Despite this, these shows continued to highlight the traditional gender tropes established in 1950s working-class sitcoms. Married with Children and The Simpsons continued the ‘immature and dumb’ husband trope. However, Married with Children is notable for its sharp deviations from the tropes of other working-class sitcoms.

Traditionally, while the husband is immature and dim, the wife and children are level- headed. Here, on the other hand, the whole family immature and dim, and the mother and daughter are over-sexed.185 There is no true figure of sane or balanced perspective in the

Bundy household.

Additionally, the family’s middle-class neighbors are presented as “naive, snobbish, and lacking in knowledge about how the world really works”186 instead of as the steady, morally superior middle-class families of previous sitcoms. The effect of this is that “the viewers who identify with the Rhodes’, and their own, assumed superior

184 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 126. 185 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 126. 186 Kervin, “Ambivalent Pleasure from Married… With Children,” 48. 111 position because the couple is often made to appear as… less conscious and critical than the Bundys of how the economic and social systems in which they are enmeshed really operate.”187 Like on Roseanne, the Bundy family does not aspire to upward mobility.

However, this dichotomy further entrenches the viewer in the working-class aesthetic of the show, and subverts what Christopher and Whitson, in their analysis of working-class literature, see as a trend for middle and upper-class scholars to want to “‘lift’ working- class people -- whom they conceptualize as culturally deprived, morally handicapped…

‘up’ to the middle class.”188 Married with Children, in this sense, gives working-class audiences something to relate to, without playing to the shame of living a working-class life by suggesting that those in the working-class should aspire to a kind of middle-class respectability.

It also furthered the stereotypes of what it meant to be working-class. It no longer simply meant the man of the house was stupid and a failure in his ability to provide for his family, but it also meant that he was symbolically emasculated. Butsch suggests that this “resolved the contradictory statuses of adult white male, on the one hand, and working-class, on the other.”189 So while the white male is supposed to be the breadwinner and head-of-household, there must be some justification for why he is unable to do that successfully. Demasculinizing him allows for this failure in the eyes of the audience.

This is possibly most emphasized by the fact that Al Bundy, the patriarch of the family in Married with Children, did not work in a traditionally masculine job the way

187. Kervin, “Ambivalent Pleasure from Married… With Children,” 48. 188 Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson. “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature.” Thought and Action 15, no. 1 (1999): 79. 189 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 129. 112

Ralph Kramden and Archie Bunker had. Bundy instead worked in a shoe store -- a traditionally feminine job. This is possibly where we start to recognize retail work as a working-class profession. Despite the brash, vulgarity of the show, it may be the most direct predecessor to modern working-class sitcoms like Superstore which is set in a big box Walmart-type store, and in which the main male protagonists are demasculinized in comparison to previous working-class male lead actors.

The early 21st century has seen sitcoms beginning to really push the boundaries of what it means to be working-class in terms of race, with shows like The George Lopez

Show (ABC 2002-2007) and the re-make of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time (Netflix,

Pop 2017-present) which both feature Hispanic families. While shows like Malcolm in the Middle (Fox 2000-2006) start a shift toward the professions represented in working- class sitcoms, where the mother works at a drugstore, these professions remain the exception, not the rule. However, some of the most popular working-class sitcoms have purposely highlighted the caricature of the working-class in shows like 2 Broke Girls

(CBS 2011-2017), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX 2005-present), and My Name is

Earl (NBC 2005-2009). These shows represent, in some ways, a return to the early days of the working-class sitcom in which the protagonists are seen as buffoons. This indicates that the major tropes of the working-class sitcom have largely remained the same over time and that sixty years after the first working-class sitcoms appeared on television, these shows still fail to emphasize the full experience of working-class life because they largely don’t show characters at work.

113

How is Superstore A Working-Class Sitcom?

One of the most prevalent features of working-class texts, according to Renny

Christopher and Carolyn Whitson in their article “Toward a Theory of Working Class

Literature” is that “they seek to portray a pace of activity that is controlled by machinery, supervisors, or a time clock. They attempt to reproduce the boredom of sameness of mindless repetition of humans acting as machinery. Their challenge is to portray a place where individuality is not only not valued, but suppressed.”190 While there are very few working-class sitcoms that are workplace -focused, this trope is seen prominently in major plotlines of many episodes of Superstore. Frequently, nameless and faceless executives will send initiatives, new store policies, guidelines, or promotions down the line which must then be implemented by the store’s employees. Even the store’s General

Manager for the first three seasons, Glen, seems to have little real power over the way the store is run. At best he manages to keep things together from day-to-day, but it is far-off corporate figures who actually plot strategy and make decisions. Two plotlines indicate this power dichotomy clearly. In the season one episode “All-Nighter,” Glen asks employees to stay late to replace a few old signs with new signs that have just arrived.

Unfortunately, the store’s locks are controlled not by Glen, but by those at the corporate office, and the crew who volunteered to stay are locked-in for the night. Another instance of this trope occurs in the season four episode “Blizzard” in which the corporate office will not let the employees close the store during a blizzard.

190 Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson. “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature.” Thought and Action 15, no. 1 (1999): 73-74. 114

In this vein, Christopher and Whitson similarly suggests that “the working-class aesthetic usually also involves a distrust of authority.”191 So, while the store seems to be run by faceless and nameless executives, who are only occasionally heard via a speakerphone for the first three seasons, the employees are twice seen attempting to take matters into their own hands by forming a union. Likewise, the characters frequently find ways to play pranks on each other or made-up games on the job, thus asserting authority within their store.

It is notable that Superstore is not a show that focuses around a single individual or family, but is, instead, an ensemble show in which storylines are built around varying members of the large cast. This group-centered focus is something that scholars

Christopher and Whitson have cited as defining features of working-class literature. They note that, while middle-class literature tends to focus on a single individual’s Horatio

Alger-like strive for success, working-class literature puts the focus on the group rather than the individual. “The middle-class literary aesthetic… focuses on the individual and promotes the individual’s sense of worth… [while] working-class literary aesthetic does not focus on individuality. Because working-class people… know themselves to be individually powerless, working-class culture, as a result, does not celebrate individuality. It instead recognizes the interdependence of units of people: family, community, friends, unions.”192 This is significant in that the show presents the workers as twice attempting to form a union. The first time they are unsuccessful because, in the end, individual needs end up outweighing those of the group. Each worker becomes

191 Christopher and Whitson, “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature,” 75. 192 Christopher and Whitson, “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature,” 76. 115 easily tempted by something else besides their cause, and ends up going back to work before they could win.

In the sense that they have a focus on one or two characters, the tropes that have defined working-class sitcoms in the past remain salient here. Butsch notes that the majority of working-class sitcoms in the past have been domestic sitcoms. That is, sitcoms that center around a family instead of the workplace. In these sitcoms, the head of the household is the father who plays the classic buffoon or fool, unlike his middle- class counterpart who is often measured and mature.193 Frequently the working-class wife is portrayed as smarter than her husband, and balances out her husband’s more outrageous tendencies. While Superstore does play around with these same tropes, it markedly subverts them in important ways.

One of the featured characters in the ensemble cast is Jonah. His role in the show in many ways mirrors the fool as Butsch identifies him, despite not being the patriarch of a family. However, one of his most prominent characteristics is that he is an outsider.

Jonah came to work at the superstore because he dropped out of business school - a typically middle-class pursuit. Within the environment of the store, he is the lone character with such a middle-class background. Thus, instead of being a fool in the typical manner (such as Ralph Kramden’s get-rich-quick schemes in The Honeymooners, or Homer Simpon’s general stupidity on The Simpsons), he is seen by the other characters as a buffoon for his snobby middle-class tastes in things like podcasts. In this way, the show has cleverly subverted traditional power dynamics.

193 Butsch, “Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms About Class and Gender,” 113. 116

Much like the middle-class neighboring Rhodes family on Married with Children,

Jonah is used to having a level of power or privilege in society because he is an educated, white, male. However, in the presence of their working-class neighbors or co-workers, they become the fool in not knowing the codes used by those neighbors or co-workers. In this new situation, Jonah is stripped of some of those privileges he is used to, no longer allowed to be the smartest guy in the room because those privileges do not translate to this new setting. He may know more about the world than his co-workers, but he does not know what it is like to be working-class.

Similarly, the character of Amy (Jonah’s girlfriend by Season Four), is often seen as a wet-blanket, and is treated as kind-of mom by the other characters. She is often far more sensible and mature than many of her co-workers, and embodies Butsch’s characteristics of the working-class family mom on television sitcoms. Importantly, by the middle of season four she replaces Glen as the General Manager of the store, solidifying her maternal presence over the other characters. Amy is unique in that she is also, statistically speaking, an accurate representation of who works in retail as a

Hispanic. According to the BLS, the statistics regarding the position of Retail

Salesperson demonstrate that the makeup regarding race mirrors almost exactly the country as a whole, while for the position of Cashier all racial minorities are overrepresented – with African-Americans at 40% overrepresented and Hispanics or

Latinos 30% overrepresented in the trade.194

194 “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. 117

Superstore Unionizes (Twice)

One of the most obvious ways in which Superstore presents itself as a working- class sitcom is by having the characters attempt to unionize – twice. The first representation of this device on the show was poorly executed, with the character’s own lack of self-awareness being the butt of the joke. Diana Kendall examines of how class is represented in the media in her book Framing Class. Kendall suggests, “For many years, the working poor and the activities of labor unions have been seen as problematic by media reporters, resulting in what some scholars suggest is an anti-labor bias deeply embedded in media culture.”195 However, in their second attempt presented this plotline more respectfully as the absurd situations the corporate office puts employees in becomes the joke, rather than the employees themselves.

Despite the working-class being represented on television since the 1940s and

1950s, labor unions and strikes as a plotline were not regularly used until the 1970s.196

William Puette, in his book Through Jaundiced Eyes, which examines union representation in the media, suggests that unions began their rise on television in network dramas and sitcoms just as union membership in the U.S. started to decline in 1975.197 By the 1980s, in particular, after Ronald Reagan broke-up the PATCO air controller strike as a way of demonstrating presidential ‘toughness’ early in his first campaign, only a few television shows portrayed unions in a positive light, with the majority casting a negative light on the representation of labor unions.198 This trend coincided with a diminution of

195 Diana Kendall, Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 142. 196 William Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor (Ithaca, N.Y: ILR Press, 1992), 46. 197 Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes, 47. 198 Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes, 56-57. 118 union membership and a rise across the nation – especially in growing Sun Belt regions – of so-called ‘right to work’ laws, which in effect embed union-unfriendly policies via state legislation. While Puette’s book ends its examination in the late 1980s, we can see the after-effects of this negative representation even today. Few shows in the 21st century have used unions or employee strikes as a plotline in television drama shows or sitcoms.

As such it is interesting that a show like Superstore has used this plot device multiple times.

The first attempt going on strike after the General Manager, Glenn, is fired for giving an employee six weeks paid time-off after she has her baby on the job because she could not afford to take time off. Although the plotline covers three episodes, we only see the employees on strike in one – the first episode of season two. In this episode, one over- enthusiastic employee tweets out that his followers should come to the protest at Cloud 9.

He fails to state what the protest is for, however, and many other people with their own causes separate from the worker’s show up. By the time the local news arrives, the message has been so muddled by the other protesters that even some of the workers are distracted. In the end, a strike-breaker from corporate promises all of the employees their jobs back if they stop the strike, and the employees easily give in.

In this season one and two plotline, two employees, Amy and Jonah, further fail to articulate their demands when they go in for a meeting with a representative for the company and the store’s Assistant Manager, Dina, who has not gone on strike with the other employees. Amy and Jonah show up to the meeting dressed provocatively; she wears a bright pink pantsuit, and he sports a three-piece suit with a fedora respectively as a means of “dressing for success.” This may have been a subtle joke about the fact that

119

Ferrera previously starred on the show Ugly Betty about working at a fashion magazine, and Feldman previously appeared on the 1960s-set drama Mad Men. In the meeting, they fail to articulate their demands and the event turns into a series of petty snipes with Dina.

This is a clear example of what Puette describes as “A persistent theme... is the portrayal of the collective bargaining processes as simplistic or foolish.”199 In putting the characters in funny costumes, and allowing the meeting to turn into a series of attacks at one another, the writers have made the characters themselves the joke in this episode. By not focusing the humor on the absurd situation the employees have found themselves in due to bad corporate policies, for instance (an employee had a baby in the store because she could not get time off, and the manager who gave her time off was fired), the writers of the show are undercutting the potential for a serious message among the humor about a real-world situation that many people face regularly, and how a union and a strike could benefit them.

One reason why the first storyline dealing with unionization undercuts its own message could be because the show was still relatively new, and the writers and producers may not have wanted to be too controversial, endangering the possibility of getting picked-up again for future seasons or alienating potential advertisers. In an interview with The Wrap that was printed on the day the season 1 finale aired, then showrunner and head writer Justin Spitzer expressed that he had not yet heard whether the show was going to get picked up for a second season, and that he would regret it if he had not touched on the subject.200

199 Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes, 53. 200 Tony Maglio, “‘Superstore’ Showrunner on Why Jonah and Amy are no Ross and Rachel,” The Wrap, February 22, 2016. 120

Given that the functionality of network television is predicated on advertising as its main source of income, most major networks are likely disinclined to produce sitcoms that deal with controversial subject matter. In his scholarly work, Television Culture,

John Fiske suggests “Television is a conventional medium — its conventions suit both the audiences with their needs for familiarity and routinization and the producers, for established conventions not only keep the costs of production down, they also minimize the risks in the marketplace. The economic dimension of television gives it a conventional form, even when its content is more progressive.”201 Because the ratings were steady in the first season, and because the demographics of the ratings indicated that upper-class audiences were the primary viewers of the show, the writers and producers of the show are likely disinclined to present any storyline as being too radical or controversial, even when they touch on controversial topics.202

Another potential reason for the way the first unionization plot was portrayed could be that Spitzer’s own background is actually upper-middle class, and not working- class.203 As such, his exposure to issues such as unionization and strikes is likely limited.

Additionally, Superstore’s audience viewership for the season one finale skewed to those with an income $100,000 and above.204 Christopher and Whitson note that this is fairly

201 John Fiske, Television Culture, (London: Routledge, 2010), 38. 202 “Ratings - ‘Superstore’ Equals Its 18-49 High Since Jan. 25,” Ratings - "Superstore" Equals Its 18-49 High Since Jan. 25 | TheFutonCritic.com, accessed November 14, 2019, http://www.thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2016/02/23/superstore-equals-its-18-49-high-since-jan-25- 301115/20160223nbc01/) 203 Caroline Framke, “The Creator of Superstore on ‘Will They/Won’t They’ Relationships and Hopes for Season 2,” Vox, February 22, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/2/22/11093900/superstore-nbc-interview- season-finale 204 “Ratings - ‘Superstore’ Equals Its 18-49 High Since Jan. 25,” Ratings - "Superstore" Equals Its 18-49 High Since Jan. 25 | TheFutonCritic.com, accessed November 14, 2019, http://www.thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2016/02/23/superstore-equals-its-18-49-high-since-jan-25- 301115/20160223nbc01/) 121 common for working-class literature to be marketed toward the middle and upper classes.205 Thus, authenticity of unions and strikes may not have been the goal of writing such a storyline.

The show’s biggest issue in their representations of the working-class and retail workers in particular, is their inability to see any plot through to its full potential. Time after time the show highlights real world issues faced by retail employees, only to undercut the issue by turning the focus away from it to a different absurd situation. In the season three episode “Lottery,” for example, the show attempts to satirize the 2013 discovery that McDonald’s had created a website to help its employees budget their expenses without taking into account food or gas for the employee’s car in the budget.206

In the episode, Amy asks for a raise, which triggers the corporate memo about budgeting.

However, the memo is only addressed in a scene that is under two minutes long before the plot continues with Amy and Jonah stalking the District Manager at her golf outing, hoping to get her to approve a raise for Amy.

In other instances, the show shifts the focus away from the real issue by failing to properly represent the power dynamics at play in a retail store. For example, in the season one episode “All Nighter” the show appears to address the issue that both Target207 and

Walmart208 managers lock their overnight employees in the store, causing some employees who became sick or were injured to delay getting proper treatment. However,

205 Christopher and Whitson, “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature,” 77. 206 Jordan Weissmann, “McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/mcdonalds-cant-figure-out- how-its-workers-survive-on-minimum-wage/277845/. 207 Josh Eidelson. “Workers Tell OSHA They Were Locked Inside Target Stores Overnight.” The Nation, June 29, 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/workers-tell-osha-they-were-locked-inside-target-stores- overnight/. 208 Steven Greenhouse, “Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins By Wal-Mart,” The New York Times, January 18, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/us/workers-assail-night-lock-ins-by-wal-mart.html. 122 in an attempt to create pathos for the General Manager Glenn, the store on the show is presented as having the doors lock automatically by corporate at night – causing the employees to get locked in when they stay late to put up new signs. As Glenn is a regular character on the show, it makes sense that they would not want to make him a villain by locking his employees in the store overnight. However, in order to avoid making him unsympathetic, the power dynamic is shifted to the faceless villains of the corporate office.

Fiske notes that incorporating small radical or progressive elements into television and other cultural content by the producers of that content is a common technique.

“Television news will often include radical voices, spokespeople from trade unions, from peace demonstrators, or from environmentalists, but these will be controlled doses whose extent and positioning in the news story will be chosen by the agents of the dominant ideology.” Doing so “rob[s] the discourses of their radical qualities.”209 On Superstore we get small snippets of real-word issues being addressed within episodes, but they are frequently undercut or neutralized by the progression of other plotlines, or are addressed in ways that put the blame elsewhere.

This is precisely what makes the second attempt at a unionization plotline, which is carried off more thoughtfully, so notable. The fourth season of the show slowly builds up to several important plotlines over the course of the season, culminating in the worker’s intent to unionize. Unlike earlier attempts at topical humor, where the show failed to highlight pressing issues by quickly moving away to an unrelated plotline, this season manages to hold on to important issues throughout entire episodes.

209 John Fiske, Television Culture, (London: Routledge, 2010), 39. 123

In this season, Amy is promoted to General Manager, and we follow her through each step of this process. This includes taking a weekend training course as well as dealing with District Managers and other higher-level bureaucrats. The corporate office is no longer an unseen faceless, collective villain. Once she is promoted, she attempts to stop the corporate office from cutting her employee’s hours by creating fake Twitter accounts with her boyfriend Jonah. The two use these accounts to publicly shame the corporate office into allotting the store more hours for its employees by making it seem as if customers are tweeting about the store’s lack of cleanliness. When the corporate office sends in someone to find out who was doing this, another employee, Sandra, initially and pliantly takes the blame before threatening to unionize. At this point they are unable to fire her because it would be illegally seen as retaliation. In an attempt to get her fellow employees interested in unionizing, Sandra brings in a labor organization who talks about common misconceptions about unions and helps them properly organize, including getting the employees to sign union cards. Initially, the corporate office threatens to close the store,210 before eventually sending in Immigration and Customs

Enforcement to take an undocumented worker, Mateo, into custody and to threaten the other employees. The season ends with the employees (including Amy) agreeing to unionize. While this last threat is not something typically used by large corporations seeking to intimidate workers, Walmart is well-known for their (often illegal) tactics used to intimidate workers who talk about unionizing.211 212

210 This is something that happens in the real world. Aimee Picchi. “Union: Walmart Shut 5 Stores over Labor Activism.” CBS News, April 20, 2015. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor-activism/. 211 “Group Accuses Wal-Mart of Illegal Anti-Union Tactics,” Reuters, May 1, 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-labor-idUSN3024398620070501. 212 Danny Feingold, “Walmart's War Against Unions -- and the U.S. Laws That Make It Possible,” HuffPost, August 5, 2013. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/walmart-labor-laws_b_3390994. 124

Similar to the ways in which producers of content incorporate small amounts of oppositional voices in order to neutralize them – that is, effectively diffusing their effect rather than concentrating it -- Fiske notes that there is also a way in which those voices can incorporated in television that allows them to be heard:

The progressive text [is] where the discourses of social change are

articulated in relationship with the metadiscourse of the dominant

ideology. The presence of the dominant ideology and the conventional

form of realism through which it works are necessary to ensure the

program’s popularity and accessibility, but do not necessarily deny the

progressive, oppositional discourses a space for themselves. Rather they

provide a frame within which such oppositional discourses can be heard

and their oppositionality made part of the substance of the drama.213

By showing the many levels of bureaucracy, especially at the corporate office, that exist within these types of superstores, the program allows the employees to fight against a real, tangible system. By showing how decisions that affect employees at the bottom level are made through the many levels of bureaucracy, the audience is given a frame of reference for what the employees face. This allows for more care to be taken with the real-world issues faced by many retail workers (including unpredictable scheduling and hours reduced, and unrealistic expectations to keep up the same quality of work with fewer employees). It additionally allows the show to address the union issue in a way that does not unintentionally shame retail workers for not knowing what they want or how to organize. It shows the real-life process by which these things often happen. Instead of the

213 John Fiske, Television Culture, 47. 125 employees being a joke, the joke is put on the absurd situations in which the employees find themselves, and which motivates them to unionize.

It is unclear why the writers and producers chose to re-do a plotline that they had already done. It is possible that, after three seasons the writers and producers were confident enough in their standing with the production studio that they were no longer afraid of being controversial and taking on current issues. The show had steady ratings in the third season, and had been picked up for a fourth season while the third season was still airing, not after all the episodes had aired, as it had in previous years.214

Additionally, Superstore was a part of NBC’s revived “Must See TV” campaign215, a phrase the company coined in the 1990s to promote the Thursday night lineup that included the popular shows Seinfeld, Friends, and ER.216 While much has been written on the immigration raid that takes up the last half of the episode, little has been written on the workers’ attempt to unionize. It is notable, however, that the fourth season’s finale episode in which this plotline occurs garnered the lowest ratings the show has ever had.

Conclusion

With so few working-class sitcoms on the air today despite the plethora of channels and more viewing platforms than ever before, any that manage to stay on the air for longer than a season can be seen as notable. What makes Superstore notable, however, is that it not only depicts the working-class, but does so in a workplace setting -

214 Denise Petski, “'Superstore' Renewed For Season 4 At NBC,” Deadline, February 22, 2018. https://deadline.com/2018/02/superstore-renewed-season-4-at-nbc-1202298552/. 215 Alison Herman, “NBC's Must See TV Is Back (Again),” The Ringer, February 1, 2018. https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/2/1/16960398/ap-bio-great-news-good-place-must-see-tv-2018. 216 Josef Adalian, “The Architects of NBC's Must-See TV Lineup on How Friends and ER Became Legends,” Vulture, September 18, 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2014/09/1994-friends-seinfeld-er- warren-littlefield-transcript.html. 126 something rare in the history of television. Even more significant is the fact that it does so by depicting the modern reality of the working-class workplace by setting the show in a retail superstore. While the historical tropes of the bumbling male protagonist and shrewd female protagonist are still present, they are cleverly subverted on this show in thoroughly modern ways. Most important is the willingness of the show to take on real- world issues faced by the average working-class retail worker today. Even when the show fails to handle these plots in a thoughtful manner, just the fact that they are acknowledging these concerns should be seen as meaningful. The most notable of these plots, of course, is the choice to have the workers unionize, twice. The fact that the show chose to go-back and re-work a plot that they had already done, and to do it in a more thoughtful way, shows some consideration to the working class. For these reasons, it is a show that will likely be discussed in the future among the other influential working-class sitcoms in television history.

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Chapter 6: I Hate My Job (But I Love Tweeting About It): Deconstructing Short-Form Narratives About Retail Work in Internet Spaces

One of the most interesting things about working in retail is the wide variety of people one works with at any given time. People of various ages, economic background, gender, race. When I find my own background so widely different from those I work with, I have discovered one thing that crosses these boundaries is the universality of the stories we all have, that are able to cross from one retail job to another. Nothing can facilitate conversation better than a discussion of bad customers, crazy bosses, and unnecessary corporate policies. Everyone who has worked in retail has a story about that one customer that was worse than any other, or an uncaring or dimwitted boss. It makes for great storytelling, in the manner of folk tales, and plays into a long tradition of workplace narratives, as anyone who has read (or watched an adaptation of) Dickens’ A

Christmas Carol, or enjoyed Dilbert in the Sunday comics section of the newspaper can attest. Today, retail employees are expanding their community further with the help of the internet via social media sites like Twitter, and through the use of memes like the

Retail Robin. This paper will look at the usage of these spaces in exchanging stories and narratives about shared experiences in a hyper-condensed, humorous manner. It will use as examples two prominently used sources of dissemination: the Tumblr blog and meme the Retail Robin, and the Twitter #retailproblems. It will rely on several frameworks: narrative construction theories from Harold Scheub, ideas about how workplace communities interact with one another from Michael Owen Jones, and theories about how ideas are disseminated from Stuart Hall and Henry Jenkins.

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The Retail Workplace as a Community

Before we examine the condensed narratives that appear online, it is important to first understand the nature of the workplace as a community group. Workplace communities, and retail workplace communities in particular, are unique in that the workplace itself may be the only thing the employees have in common with one another.

As such, these workers must develop their own workplace culture in order to maintain some sense of stability within that specific space. In his book Studying Organizational

Symbolism, Michael Owen Jones discusses the ways people act within specific organization groups. In particular, the work examines how social norms develop within workplace settings, as a culture develops among employees in the specific setting, which includes normative behaviors, informal social structures, and specific ways of talking about the job. This will be helpful as a way to look at the common, or reoccurring narratives happening between my primary sources, as well as a way to look at the culture retail workers are creating.

One of Jones’ most prominent theories is that, while people may behave as individuals when examined on their own, within a cultural group, they begin to behave similarly. “In human society, individuals are connected by social relations into an integrated whole like a living organism. The function of any recurrent social activity is its contribution to maintaining structural continuity.”217 This means that, when people come together they tend to act in a similar manner, despite individual differences. Similarly, he says that, “Traditional symbolic forms validate culture, educate members of a group about values and behavioral norms, and ensure conformity by applying social pressure

217 Michael Owen Jones, Studying Organizational Symbolism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Save publications, 1996), 12 129 and exerting social control; all this adds up to a single function – that of preserving the stability of culture.”218 When things are enacted over and over again, they serve to inform new members about the culture of the environment, and ensure stability. As the new members pick up on this, the actions further become norms within the workplace. This can include not simply how the job is done, but also what is and is not acceptable to talk about, and the use of jargon as code in job-specific discussions. Within the context of the workplace culture, this helps to demonstrate the idea that similar narratives develop as a way to deepen the group dynamic, and strengthen the specific culture that has developed.

Jones further expands on these concepts about organization symbolism in his discussions about the use of storytelling within workplace settings. He says “organization members narrate throughout the day about their experiences. Storytelling is symbolic behavior, because the accounts are not the events themselves but representations of them created by the narrators and audience through process of communication, interaction, and feedback.” 219 The idea here is that workers use storytelling about the job itself as a way to connect with one another over similarities. He continues, “further, storytelling shapes the organization and the member’s understanding of it.” In telling stories about the workplace itself, the employees not only connect with one another, but are able to develop a deeper understanding of their working environment. Again, this can be seen in workplace environments, and specifically in retail working environments, where the demographics of the employees can vary wildly, with large differences in age and gender to ethnicity and background.

218 Jones, Studying Organizational Symbolism, 13 219 Jones, Studying Organizational Symbolism, 2 130

This carries over into what can be seen in online spaces where customer or workplace events are reenacted. In these spaces, however, the storytelling takes on a different meaning. In the workplace itself it is meant as part of a performative act, or a means for comradery between people in close contact with one another on a regular basis who may have different backgrounds or histories. In online spaces, these stories are meant more for their entertainment value. While they can be used to form a bond between those within a single company or industry, they are meant more to validate one’s own experiences while simultaneously creating a sense of kinship. Additionally, because they are told online, these stories may also be enjoyed by those outside of the discourse community.

Sites of Online Narratives: The Retail Robin and #Retailproblems

The internet has made it easier than ever to pass these stories along in general terms, and to form a community of those with similar backgrounds, interests, or, in this case, workplaces. Even if you don’t like your coworkers, for example, the internet still provides a way to feel a part of that larger community. Because anyone can post how they feel, Twitter feeds, Tumblr blogs, regular blogs, memes, and articles on popular click-bait sites such as Buzzfeed all validate and legitimize feelings about anything, including the inanity of retail work, by allowing the authors and readers to express how they feel about their positions. It is partially the ease with which anyone can post these things that make them so popular and widespread. For example, on Twitter there are a number of handles specifying that they are dealing with common retail experiences:

Retail_Troubles, Retail_Hellz, The Retail Explorer, Retail Side-Eye, Retail Prison, The

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Retail Rant which has over 2,000 followers, and Dear Customer which has over 4,000 followers, as well as the #retailproblems, which is also regularly used. Additionally, the

Tumblr/meme Retail Robin has been prolific with its posts since July 2011. The first ten results from a Google search of the words “Retail Buzzfeed” (a site anyone can post on) yield articles with titles like “26 Faces Every Retail Employee Will Understand,” and “45

Things You’ve Experienced Working in Retail.”

Patrick Davison describes how memes operate on the internet by comparing them to jokes told outside of internet spaces. The biggest difference, as he sees it, is the speed in which they can move “While not all Internet memes are jokes, comparing them to offline jokes makes it clear what makes Internet memes unique: the speed of their transmission and the fidelity of their form.” While a joke can only travel as fast as people who remember it can tell it, memes on the internet can transmit much faster. “Time is overcome… A joke stored on a website can be viewed by as many people as want to view it, as many times as they want to, as quickly as they can request it.”220 Functionally, however, jokes, memes, and Twitter hashtags serve the same purpose: entertainment of a group of individuals who share a similar sensibility, which can only be seen in the way it has manifested itself online and through the replication of its image for context.

Likewise, in order for memes or Twitter hashtags to gain traction, they must be both easy to replicate and malleable enough for a wide audience to understand it. “A piece of media being replicable makes it easier for that media to gain influence through views. A piece of media’s being malleable makes it easier for that media to gain influence through use. Engagement with a meme, then, takes the form of either use or

220 Patrick Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 123. 132 viewing or, more in keeping with the terms of malleable and replicable, of transformation or transmission.”221 Part of the reason for their popularity, thus, comes from the fact that they are easy enough for even those who may not be well-versed in other internet spaces.

Each of these spaces provides a place where the retail workers can form a larger community group to pass along common, short narratives that have developed within their individual workplaces. While working in a small shop in the mall may be different from working at a superstore, certain elements remain the same between them. These are things that cannot be avoided in this particular industry such as dealing with customers in a short and transactional way, for example. Despite differences in geography, or culture, there remain some inalienable truths about the work itself. These short narratives are effective, because of the similarity of much of retail workplaces, and so those participating in these online spaces are familiar with the norms of these workplaces as well as the shorthand that has developed as these workers come to better understand their own workplaces.

Within these spaces, there exists both short-form narratives (like those on Twitter, and used in memes), and the possibility for more widespread recognition of specific, longer stories. For example, the online magazine The Awl posted an article from someone who wrote about being fired from his job on a food truck for using Twitter to shame a large group for not tipping.222 And there are entire blogs dedicated to posting similar examples of such specific outrage. Among them: re-tales.net, a blog that posts links to articles about such issues as a recent decision by Walmart to raise employees’ wages, and the trend of scheduling employees to close and then open the next day so that companies

221 Daivson, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 126 222 Brendan O’Connor, “Millennial Fired for Tweet,” The Awl, (2013) 133 can keep the number of employees down to a minimum; and retailhellunderground.com, which purports to posting anonymous stories from users on the front lines on the job, mostly about bad customers. Such sites posting longer, more detailed stories provide a slightly more personal take on the work than that found in the short-form spaces such as

Twitter. While readers may be able to identify with the generalities found in such stories, these sites also allow for unique, individual stories to come through.

However, the focus of this chapter will be on the short-form narrative spaces, which purport to provide more universal narratives recognizable to those within the retail working community. Both the meme the Retail Robin and

#retailproblems are designed to provide small sound bites of a narrative. They are often humorous and spell out situations in as concise a way as possible. Twitter only Figure 4: Example of the Retail Robin meme. allows 280 characters to be posted at a time, and so anything said must be brief and to the point, while the meme the Retail Robin shows a picture of a robin sitting on a perch surrounded by words above and below it, which are meant to be read in a self-deprecating manner. For example, “Pays for $15 worth of things in all change… in the drive thru,” and, “You must upsell… to regular customers who come in every day.”223 These sound bites are like a set-up and punch-line to a joke.

Someone can read it, laugh, and move on to the next one quickly, in the most effortless way possible. Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins states that, “Content creators can endear themselves to a particular audience by showing they understand its sensibilities… Humor

223 “Retail Robin,” Tumblr (blog), Accessed March 9, 2017, http://fuckyeahretailrobin.tumblr.com/. 134 is not simply a matter of taste: it is a vehicle by which people articulate and validate their relationships with those with whom they share the joke.”224 In this case, then, the creators are using humor as a way to fill in that gap. It is particularly effective when used in such short-form narratives as memes and Twitter hashtags, and may be another reason why they become widely popular. This simplicity is meant to convey a universal feeling of understanding. They aren’t made as long, drawn out tales with specific details unique to the author’s own experiences. They are common and predictable experiences, simply put.

How Do These Narratives Function, and How Are They Understood?

Now that we have established how workplaces function as a community group, and that retail workers as a community are using internet spaces such as Twitter, we can look at why these short-form narratives are effective. In order to do this, we must first examine how they function by breaking them down into their individual parts, and put them into the context of larger storytelling techniques. First, we will establish the use of pre-existing images in these short form narratives, then we will look at how they use tropes, and finally we will discuss the ways in which they can be seen as palimpsests as ways to invite readers to also become participants in the storytelling.

As Jones stated, workplace communities develop their own narratives about their jobs as a way to both maintain the culture of the job itself, but also to help shape the workers' understanding of it as well. As such, the short-form narrative storytelling we see in the memes of the Retail Robin and via the #retail problems could not exist without

224 Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media, (New York: New York University Press), 204 135 some sort of feeling of shared experiences had by these employees. In his book Story,

Harold Scheub calls such conventions images. He says that images are “the fundamental building blocks of storytelling, are felt actions or sets of actions, evoked in the imaginations of the members of the audience by verbal and nonverbal elements arranged by the artist, requiring a common experience by both artist and audience.”225 As they are told in such a short format, it is essential that both the creators and the audience of these narratives have a feeling of shared experiences in order for them to be effective (in order to understand the joke being told). That is, a collective knowledge of bad customers, ineffective bosses, or any of the other common notions about what it is like to be an employee in a retail environment. Without this, the humor would fall flat, or the meaning would be misinterpreted in some way. However, with such shared experiences, the audience of these short-form narratives are easily able to fill in the blanks with their own, known experiences.

Knowledge of the images produced by the language allows one to understand the humor in the short form narratives being told through memes and with the aid of hashtags on Twitter. This knowledge alone, however, is not enough to allow these short narratives to function effectively. In order for this to happen, both audience and creator must also be familiar with the codes implied in the language itself. Stuart Hall explains that different cultures create different words (signifiers) for the same physical objects (signs), and that learning these signifiers is part of how we learn to be a part of a culture. “To belong to a culture is to belong to roughly the same conceptual and linguistic universe… To share these things is to see the world from within the same conceptual map and to make sense

225 Harold Scheub, Story, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 23 136 of it through the same language systems”226 While being a retail employee does not necessitate the usage of these particular memes and Twitter hashtags, understanding the humor in the short narrative does imply that one is a member of this community. If, as

Jones says, workplace communities develop their own way of speaking about the culture of their jobs, then creation or consumption of these particular memes and hashtags implies that one is a member of this particular community (retail workers).

This becomes especially important within mediums, such as Twitter and in memes, that limit the amount of space a creator has to tell the story. As such, the audience themselves must also understand the way these mediums function in order for these narratives to have any meaning. They must know, for example, Twitter’s cap of 280 characters per post, how to read the text in conjunction with the image on a meme, and that in both of these cases the narratives are meant to be taken as a set-up and punchline to a joke. Scheub calls these tropes or, “repeated images that can be manipulated to communicate a theme.”227 Audiences or consumers must be familiar with not only the shared experiences and images, but how the mediums themselves function for the humor of the narrative to truly come across. In speaking specifically about memes, Davison says, “what is replicated from instance to instance is the set of formal characteristics. We are able to identify each instance as part of the larger… meme because of the similarities in form and regardless of the differences in meaning.”228 So that, as the audience becomes more and more familiar with the structural function of a tweet or meme, “even if the verbally [narratively] expressed images are not the same as those of earlier

226 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation, ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), 8 227 Scheub, Story, 130 228 Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 130 137 sequences… because it now has built into a memory of the earlier pattern and hence a structural anticipation of the same rhythm, will react in the same way to this identical structure underlying different image sets… making possible the establishment of timeless forms crucial to message.”229 That is, even if the image in the narrative shifts from being about a bad customer to a boss who just doesn’t get it, because of the rigid structure format of both Twitter and on memes, the audience will understand the narrative conventions at play.

Indeed, the usage of these particular mediums can become a shorthand for being a member of the community by creating a context from which the short narratives can be understood. Due to limited space, the creators do not have the space to set-up the narrative with backstory. As such, the hashtag and meme themselves serve this purpose.

So, if the text of the Retail Robin meme says simply “Credit or debit? Yes,”230 creators can rely on the consumer’s background to understand that this is a question by a cashier, and a familiar answer from customers. The meme or hashtag themselves serve the purpose of supplying that context. Hall states that, "The underlying argument… is that, since all cultural objects convey meaning, and all cultural practices depend on meaning, they must make use of signs, and in so far that they do, they must work like language works, and be amenable to an analysis…”231 Once consumers understand the narrative tropes at play (how a meme or tweet works) they are then able to understand the implied, but unspoken, context or background. This particular meme or hashtag serves as a shorthand for what the narratives that follow will be about (retail work).

229 Scheub, Story, 128 230 “Retail Robin,” Tumblr (blog), Accessed March 9, 2017, http://fuckyeahretailrobin.tumblr.com/. 231 Hall, “The Work of Representation,” 21 138

Broken down even further, once the audience becomes familiar with the structural tropes of twitter and memes, they can, themselves, become participant creators of them.

Because both mediums, Twitter and memes, utilize such rigid structural narrative tropes, the audience is able to simply insert their own short-form narratives into a pre-made formula. As long as they have their own foundation of shared experiences, or images which, “form the basic repertory of the storyteller,” and which the creators, “build her story around,”232 they are able to join in the narratives themselves, leaving the audience role to become a creator. This, in fact, becomes a part of the function of the mediums within the community, and as such, work as a palimpsest.

How Are These Narratives Produced and Understood?

In order for these memes and hashtags to work, the consumers of them must be familiar with the shared images of retail work, the tropes present within mediums like

Twitter and on memes, and must be able to apply the missing context by understanding how memes and Twitter hashtags work as short form narratives by using the shared language of the community to fill in the background missing from the joke. Hall argues that before things can generate any sort of meaning, they have to be decoded by the audience, which can only happen if the audience understands the meaning within the codes being presented. “If no ‘meaning’ is taken, then there can be no ‘consumption’. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect.”233 While we have laid the groundwork for how these memes and Twitter hashtags function and are understood, we

232 Scheub, Story, 185 233 Hall, Stuart, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Rev. ed. Vol 2, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham, and Douglas Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 165. 139 have not yet addressed the key component of how they are produced and understood.

However, the production of these short form narratives would not be possible without those background understandings.

As established earlier, workplace communities function as their own cultures, with their own way of speaking about their work. It has also been established, however, that the demographics of those who work in the retail field vary widely in age, ethnicity, and gender. One way in which retail employees bridge this difference in the workplace itself is through discussion of common topics specific to these positions, such as bad customers. Hall suggests that, “Before [a] message can have an ‘effect’… satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to ‘use’, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded.” In essence, these discussions are being decoded in a way that indicates that what is being discussed is not simply bad customers, but the fact that these employees have shared experiences that demonstrate that they are not so different as our lives outside of the workplace may suggest.

Outside of the workplace, these discussions, of course, happen on the internet through the use of things like memes and Twitter hashtags. As discussed earlier, understanding of these short form narratives necessitates that one be a member of this community. This is something creators of these short form narratives must keep in mind when producing them for their audience. Hall states that, “the production process… is framed throughout by meaning and ideas… institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience… the production structure of television originates from the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw… ‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations

140 within the wider socio-cultural… structures.”234 While Hall is discussing television in particular, we can see something similar happening here with the use of memes and

Twitter hashtags. The meme the Retail Robin and #retailproblems are being created with built-in knowledge of how retail jobs are performed, and that their audience will also know these things. So, while they are the ones creating the content of these short form narratives, they are drawing from the culture established by these employees as a community.

It is partially because of this production process that the consumers are able to read these short-form narratives in the way that is intended. “In a ‘determinate’ moment the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment the

‘message’, via its decoding, issues into the structure of social practices.”235 For example, while the image of a robin by itself does not necessarily carry an implied meaning of retail work, when put into this particular setting it does. The image of the Retail Robin and the #retailproblems serve as a code indicating that the text surrounding them will be a short form narrative directed toward those who are members of the retail work community within these particular internet spaces.

How Do These Narratives Spread?

The internet has, of course, changed the ways in which we communicate with one another. It allows us to connect with others like ourselves all across the globe in ways never before seen. Similarly, it allows people to actively search for others with similar interests, backgrounds, or experiences. Members of communities can now communicate

234 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 165 235 Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 165 141 with one another, even if they live on opposite ends of the country. Henry Jenkins, in his book Spreadable Media puts it this way: “the affordances of digital media provide a catalyst for reconceptualizing other aspects of culture, requiring the rethinking of social relations, the reimagining of cultural… participation.”236 The rise in popularity of digital media means that we must rethink how we define communities and cultural groups.

Previously, working communities were thought of as those with whom you work in the immediate, or those at your individual workplace. While it was possible to conceive of others who worked for the same company at a different location, it was much more difficult to feel that those were members of your same community. So, while the internet has not expanded the number of retail workers in the country, it has allowed them to communicate with one another despite both location and company. In doing so, it has helped these workers to discover a larger community through the realization that, despite company or location, there are a certain number of shared experiences held by those in the industry.

Part of what allows digital media such as memes and Twitter posts to become popular is that they are building on communities that already exist. “we may share material as a way to grow or activate a community… Content spreads… when it acts as fodder for conversations that audiences are already having.”237 As discussed earlier, retail workers had already established a way to communicate with one another despite diverse backgrounds through the use of similar stories specific to the retail workplace. Things like stories about bad customers had already become well-tread means of discovering shared experiences. As such, this may be one reason why memes such as the Retail Robin

236 Jenkins and Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 3 237 Jenkins and Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 199 142 and the #retailproblems were able to gain prominence online: they were simply building off of existing conventions.

Hall established that the creation and production of these memes and hashtags was only possible with knowledge of the community, and their specific ways of communicating. Jenkins argues a similar idea in discussing how these short-form narratives are able to gain popularity and spread. “Openness, loose ends, and gaps that allow viewers to read material against their own backgrounds and experiences are key… such openness allows people to convey something of themselves as they pass along content.”238 Due to the constraints placed on them by the mediums in which they are produced, these narratives must purposely eliminate backstory and context, and instead rely on the consumers to fill in those gaps with their own shared knowledge. In the case of these memes and Twitter hashtags, however, this missing content actually serves a purpose in allowing people to see themselves in these short-form narratives created by others by projecting onto them their own experiences.

Additionally, the mediums through which they are disseminated is important in how they become so widely popular. Part of the popularity of these short-form narratives comes from the usage of popular social media sites. They are easily accessible to the general public, and already help communication easily between a wide range of people.

Twitter, for example, “facilitates the types of resource sharing, conversation, and coordination that communities have long engaged in.”239 While the use of memes within these social media sites, “serve as themes for ongoing conversation and fodder for creative activity, with each variation demonstrating and requiring particular cultural

238 Jenkins and Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 201 239 Jenkins and Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 30 143 knowledge.”240 In both cases, the mediums themselves serve to highlight the conversations that are already establishing communities as groups with their own shared culture. Because the mediums are, themselves, popular forums, they allow these short- form narratives to gain traction and to facilitate the conversations to a wider audience.

Conclusion

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two most commonly held jobs in the country continue to be Retail Salesperson and Cashier. Despite this, little research has been done on this group of workers specifically, or the community culture they have created both in the workplace and outside of it. Michael Owen Jones, an ethnographer and folklorist, suggests that workplaces constitute their own community, and as such, create their own culture specific to that workspace. This includes the ideas that workplaces enact their own traditions and rituals over and over again as a way of stabilizing the community, which includes ways of speaking about the job itself. Building off of this, he suggests that within a workplace, employees often use storytelling to reenact events from the day, as a representation of the event itself, as a way to connect with one another. This can be seen prominently in retail workplaces where the only thing the employees may share in common is the workplace itself. Workers frequently use stories of their own experiences with bad customers, for example, as a way to bond despite outside differences in things like background and upbringing.

With the rise of the internet, these stories have moved from the workplace themselves to wide ranging spaces online, where they can reach a new, larger audience.

240 Jenkins and Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 28 144

This has allowed the community created by retail workers to expand further, moving beyond just an individual workspace to a global community made up of workers with shared experiences. These reenactments of workplace stories is seen on social media sites like Twitter, both with handles promising a focus on the experiences of retail workers, and through hashtags such as #retailproblems, which can be used by any user on the site.

Likewise, the Tumblr blog the Retail Robin features a meme dedicated to the experiences of retail workers, that is created by those who own the blog, but can be contributed to from consumers of the blog via replication of the meme for suggested posting.

Patrick Davison suggests that memes become popular because they are easy to use, and easy to recreate. Because the basic structure mimics a joke told outside of such internet spaces, consumers and potential creators are able to discern the meaning and create their own as they mimic something they are already familiar with. Similarly,

Henry Jenkins suggest that the use of humor can allow creators to prove they are a part of the community by demonstrating they share a similar sensibility.

In terms of how they function, we can see through the use of concepts from Stuart

Hall and Harold Scheub’s ideas of how storytelling works. These memes and Twitter hashtags can only be effective if both the creators and consumers have shared experiences, in this case, retail work. This creates the use of images, which are implied and which form the backbone of the short form narratives. Without these shared experiences, the images in the narratives would fall flat and not hold such meaning.

Knowledge of these images, thus demonstrates that the reader is a member of the community because they have demonstrated knowledge of the culture itself.

145

However, this is not enough, creators and consumers must also be familiar with the narrative tropes of the sites themselves. That is, they must know the constraints placed on a meme (limited space), or in the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter when posting.

When these are known, the creators and consumers will understand the rhythm to the narratives themselves.

This becomes particularly important in looking at how these memes and Twitter hashtags are created and spread. In order for these narratives to be decoded, the consumers must be able to fill in the missing context in the short-form narrative. In this way, the memes and Twitter hashtag themselves serve this purpose. The image of a robin surrounded by red and black triangles signals to the reader that this meme will be about and for the retail working community, it is the Retail Robin meme. Additionally, the consumers must be familiar with the culture of these workers in order to understand the humor present in the meme or Twitter hashtag.

It can be argued that these memes and Twitter hashtags spread so widely is partially because they are building off of conversations that are already being had outside of these internet spaces. The shared stories of bad customers serve as a bonding mechanism inside the workplace, and as a form of entertainment outside of it in internet spaces. As such, these sites must also be effective at creating and maintaining the community and its conversations. The popularity of a site like Twitter demonstrates this idea clearly.

While these memes and Twitter hashtags are, in themselves, very simplistic and humorous, it is not enough to leave the analysis there. The reason they are popular is not only because they are simple and funny. The entertainment factor is important, but they

146 are also building off a long tradition of storytelling and community bonding already present. In essence, they are able to resonate with a particular community, spread widely and expand the community. As such, more study should be dedicated to examining how communities are sharing their experience wider than ever before thanks to new technology.

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Conclusion

Sadly, at the writing of this dissertation a debate is happening regarding who should be first in line to get a vaccine for the Covid-19 pandemic that has ravaged the country for over a year now. When the pandemic started to spread and lockdowns began in March 2020 many news outlets lauded retail workers as “unsung heroes.”241242243

Today, however, many are fighting to restore the extra “hero pay” that was given to them in the early days of the pandemic,244 and more are fighting to be able to be first in-line to receive the vaccine.245246247 The owners of major retail outlets bet that a year into the pandemic the general public would be so tired of being in quarantine that they would not notice that they had taken away benefits like the “hero pay” to their employees. They bet correctly; as the media narrative shifted away from the essential-ness of those workers, the public stopped thinking about them that way. Perceptions of these workers has

241 Andrew Hay, “'I'm Going to Keep Working': Grocery Clerks Unlikely Heroes in U.S. Coronavirus Fight,” Reuters (Thomson Reuters, March 20, 2020), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health- coronavirus-usa-workers/im-going-to-keep-working-grocery-clerks-unlikely-heroes-in-u-s-coronavirus- fight-idUSKBN2173BY. 242 Owen Jones, “The Undervalued Heroes of the Coronavirus Crisis Need Our Thanks – and Our Support,” The Guardian, March 21, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/21/undervalued- heroes-coronavirus-crisis-cleaners-supermarket-workers. 243 Emily Stewart, “Essential Workers Are Taking Care of America. Are We Taking Care of Them?,” Vox, April 23, 2020, https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-explainers/2020/4/23/21228971/essential- workers-stories-coronavirus-hazard-pay-stimulus-covid-19. 244 Michael Corkery and Sapna Maheshwari, “Virus Cases Rise, but Hazard Pay for Retail Workers Doesn't,” The New York Times, November 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/business/retail- workers-hazard-pay.html. 245 Duncan Agnew, “Nearly a Year into the Pandemic, Grocery Workers in Texas Are More Fatigued than Ever as They Await Vaccine Access,” The Texas Tribune, February 4, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/04/texas-coronavirus-vaccine-front-line-grocery-store-workers/. 246 Allison Gens, “Grocery Store Workers Wait to Get COVID-19 Vaccine,” WDTN.com, January 14, 2021, https://www.wdtn.com/news/local-news/grocery-store-workers-wait-to-get-covid-19-vaccine/. 247 Pamela N. Danziger, “NRF Calls For Retail Workers To Get Vaccine First. Is It To Preserve Workers' Health Or Industry Profits?,” Forbes, December 19, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2020/12/19/nrf-calls-for-retail-workers-to-get-vaccine-first-is- it-to-preserve-workers-health-or-industry-profits/?sh=7715b1a479d1. 148 returned to the status quo, despite the pandemic continuing to rapidly spread as fast as ever.

Because of when it hit, I was unable to really integrate the Covid-19 pandemic into this dissertation, even though the retail industry underwent some staggering changes during this period. There were other things that had to be excluded for less dramatic reasons, but which merit further consideration in the future. I limited my scope to media in or about the United States, with the exception of the discussion of turn of the century advertisements for Selfridges Department Store located in London. In my view, though, that chapter is more about how the United States changed traditionally held views about consumption, and how those ideas migrated overseas during that period via Selfridge.

Unfortunately, this limitation also led me to exclude a beloved television show created by the BBC in the late 1970s, Are You Being Served. The show is set in a failing London department store in the 1970s and early 1980s, and is a fascinating look at the beginning of the end of the large department store. This, likewise, could be something worth examining in the future. Finally, I chose to exclude the fast-food and restaurant industry from this project. I chose to do this because I felt it was outside of the definition, I had established for what a “retail worker” constituted. That said, the creators of the shows

Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul created a unique “extra” for their fans – a series of fake training videos set in the fictional Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant, which plays an important role in both series. These short videos also merit further exploration.

There are also areas examined in this dissertation that could be explored further.

Since Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 expose Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in

America was published, there have been a wealth of rebuttals and imitators, include some

149 recently which explore the new world of “gig” work with companies like Uber. A comparative analysis of such works should be explored, and should take into consideration the effects of the 2008 Recession on such works. Similarly, as of this writing the NBC sitcom Superstore is airing its final season. An updated look at that show should be considered, exploring the ways in which major plotlines involving issues like unionization have unfolded. In a different vein, an analysis of internet memes that focus on larger issues faced by retail and service workers such as the minimum wage

(particularly ones which compare these jobs to other professions such as paramedics) should be more closely looked at, as well as the ways in which viral internet videos can create memes. Finally, a closer examination of the lack of diversity in representations of retail work should be explored. This could include shows such as Atypical (Netflix 2017- present), which includes scenes featuring a young man on the autism spectrum working at a Best Buy-type of store, as well as Lovecraft Country (HBO 2020 – present), a science fiction series that features a woman of color who turns herself white and goes to work at a department store.

This project was organized in roughly chronological order as a way to show the ways in which media narratives about retail workers has shifted and evolved over time.

The job itself has changed dramatically in that time as it has been deskilled and mechanized, and media narratives have typically followed suit. In the first half of the 20th century, when the job was somewhat skilled and represented a legitimate career for adults, it was one of several go-to settings for films. As many of these were made during or around the Great Depression, they frequently feature a wealthy man learning to value the working-class retail worker (often by falling in love with a shopgirl). They regularly

150 highlight the grandeur of the early department store and all of the goods it sells, as the shopgirl achieves a sort-of Cinderella narrative where she no longer has to sell the goods, but is able to purchase as many of them as she likes.

When distrust of major institutions like government and big business reached a peak in the 1970s after a series of scandals, culturally relevant shows could touch on such issues. A show like Little House on the Prairie was able to cleverly do this by simply framing the show as a struggle between the poor-but-happy Ingalls family and the wealthy-but-selfish Olesons. Notably, the Oleson family in this show were not simply a wealthy family, but they owned the mercantile, and thus controlled the goods sold to those in town. This would have resonated with audience feeling the crush of stagflation – inflation of prices and stagnating wages.

Today, as the job has become deskilled and mechanized television shows and films use the setting as a narrative shortcut to indicate something is lacking in the workers: ambition, education, maturity. Supposed exposes about how unexpectedly tough it is to work in the retail trade, like Nickel and Dimed, nevertheless treat those who work these jobs as an “other,” and certainly not someone as clever as the author. Films like the

40-Year-Old Virgin promote the idea of the lazy and immature salesperson by linking working in retail to other immature traits of a protagonist, such as owning a collection of action figures as an adult. Even shows like Superstore, which occasionally touch upon current issues faced by retail employees, fail to regularly give any of those issues enough screen time to resonate with its audience.

Much has been written on the general history and evolution of the retail trade over time, but very little of it has covered how popular narratives have followed these changes. 151

Even books that supposedly cover film representations of working like Working Stiffs,

Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Extended Guide to Films About Labor fail to include even a single film about retail. Additionally, while there are several Labor Studies and

Working-Class Studies programs in the United States, their focus tends to be on deindustrialization and the loss of a manufacturing economy to places like the Rust Belt, or on the history and importance of labor organizing via unions. Even though Retail salesperson, fast food workers, and cashiers are the three most commonly held jobs in the

United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it continues to be a profession that is largely ignored by the media, and especially popular culture.

Retail workers face many very real challenges: low pay, inconsistent scheduling, forced part-time hours, lack of benefits such as health insurance to name just a small few.

Today those issues have been compounded by health concerns regarding a deadly pandemic. When the media frames these workers as essential to the function of our society, we all take a second look at them. But when the news cycle changes or the plotline shifts after a single scene highlighting an issue, so goes the audience. The media and popular culture help us make sense of groups and issues that might otherwise be outside of our normal purview. These are people we interact with on an almost daily basis, and yet are ones that we barely thing about. My hope is that this dissertation helped in some way to illuminate this idea.

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VITAE BRITTANY R. CLARK Education

Ph.D. American Studies May 2021 Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg. Middletown, PA

M.A. Humanities May 2015 Writing Instruction Specialist Certification Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg. Middletown, PA

B.A. English December 2008 Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI

Publications

Bryan, Peter and Brittany Clark, “#NotMyGhostbusters: Adaptation, Response, and Fan Entitlement in 2016’s Ghostbusters,” The Journal of American Culture, pending June 2019.

Clark, Brittany R., “I was a Retail Salesperson: Memoirs About Working in Retail.” Journal of Working-Class Studies 2, no. 2 (2018). https://workingclassstudiesjournal.com/

Awards and Honors

Attendee: PCA/ACA Summer Research Institute June 2018 Bowling Green State University. Bowling Green, OH

Recipient: Pennsylvania State University Board of Advisers Fellowship 2016 - 2017 Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg. Middletown, PA

Other Work Experience

Shift Manager May 2019 – May 2020 Colonial Park 4 Cinemas. Harrisburg, PA

Floor Staff and Part-Time Manager September 2013–April 2019 Regal Cinemas. Harrisburg, PA

Cashier/Photo Technician Walgreens. Dover, PA January 2011 – September 2013