Here, as modeled in the group interviews of the previous chapter, the customer is merely a distraction from the real work, like a ball to be juggled and passed on to the next employee.
If I prepared any rote lines to say to customers, it was usually something like, “Sorry, I don’t know where that is.” An automated heart, coupled with global just-in-time supply chain, allows fast fashion to provide customers with more clothing options than ever before. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a human employee being able to offer much help to customers, even if they want to.
If customers had more than seven items, we hung the extras on a pony near the front of the fitting area. It wasn’t uncommon for those items to disappear or make their way back to the sales floor before the customer returned to claim them.
One woman I interviewed, Kya, who was in New York on a film internship, had worked at a Forever 21 in Ohio. She told me about a few especially tense moments after she accidentally returned a customer’s garments to the sales floor: “I remember [the customer] was yelling because her stuff was like [gone], and there’s no process for like, who knows where it could be, in the whole store.” Kya added sarcastically, “[Customers] got very upset about their Forever 21 clothes.” We both laughed at the absurdity of the shoppers caring about such poorly made goods, and their naiveté about the social contract of fast fashion, in which good customer service is rarely part of the equation. Negative online reviews of fitting-room attendants flourish, while others read like warnings:
Staff is always tidying up the floor/fitting room so maybe that’s why they’re not so pleasant (they seemed fine to me).
Normally there is zero service at [these stores] and the associates in the changing rooms are just futz-ing around.
I’ve had fine service here. It’s [fast fashion], I’m not expecting anything amazing but it’s been good.
While I was there, the dressing rooms were pretty crowded. . . . The workers there are also have that “I really don’t care” attitude, but who can blame them? It’s retail and they probably have to deal with more tourists than Ellis Island.
These reviews in some ways reflect the growing pains customers go through as they must relearn the price they pay for such cheap goods; some customers appear angry. Others ask, “What do you expect?”
Off the internet and away from keyboard, workers shoulder the consequences of these growing pains.19 During one particularly busy shift,
as I raced up and down the fitting room walkway, a petite, elderly woman peeled back her fitting room curtain, peered her head out, and asked politely, “Can you find this in a small?” I replied with a sigh, “I’m so sorry, I can’t leave the fitting room right now.” Store policy dictated that an attendant should always remain in the fitting room while customers were inside, though attendants made exceptions during periods of unusually slow traffic (a more common occurrence in the men’s section).
Sociologist Lynne Pettinger argues that retail employees do the work of making self-service possible: “Workers’ ability to give personal services to the few who demand them is posited on sales organised so that the majority of customers serve themselves.”20 The role of the fitting-room attendant is no longer to attend to every person trying on clothes, but to make sure rooms are available and clean so that a customer can attend to themself.
Although we instructed customers to return unwanted garments to us, we more often collected mountains of unwanted clothes from the fitting rooms.
These wads of inside-out, unbuttoned, unzipped clothes subsequently had to be “garment cared,” or made presentable for the sales floor, before being hung on the pony in the correct section. The term “garment care” is significant here. We are caring not for the customer but for the garment. A manager making her rounds in the fitting room once muttered, “Nobody garment cares” as she buttoned a blouse. Equally significant, never did she, nor any other manager, reprimand me for poor customer service.
Multiple workers I interviewed told me they were never assessed on their customer service skills because their stores were such “cash cows.” Rachel, who had worked at Zara in Los Angeles, told me:
I didn’t have to worry about [sales]. That’s what I liked [about]
working there. It was a cash cow, and we didn’t have to worry, we were always gonna go over our goal. It was easy and I didn’t have the pressure of most places. ’Cause I worked at Saks [Fifth Avenue] for a while after and we had commission. You know it’s such a pain in your back. It was sales, sales, sales. And at Zara, nobody really cared because we knew we were gonna go over our goal anyway.
Similarly, Jayla had worked in fast fashion several years ago. She told me her store used secret shoppers, who would roam the floors disguised as
shoppers, rating their experience and interactions. Jayla told me that even when they received low scores, not much happened. “They were pretty lenient about it. The store was such a cash cow that, like, they weren’t gonna close us down or anything, whatever. . . . It was the kind of thing like I said we had a fitting room with clothing to the fucking ceiling. Sorry [for cursing].”
Significantly, the fitting room served as a site of escape for sales associates and shoppers alike, one of the few areas throughout the store removed from the panoptic gaze. If stockrooms were the heart of the store, the fitting rooms were the release valve. There was no closed-circuit television and relatively little human oversight, except for the managers sporadically popping in and out. Filipe, a muscular sales attendant, regularly absconded to the fitting room, pulling his cell phone out of his khaki pants pocket as he looked at himself in the mirror. “What are you doing back there?” some coworkers jokingly shouted. “I’m sending a text!
What do you think?” Filipe shouted back, like an annoyed sibling. Filipe had no regard for clientele who might notice his behavior. Susanna, a former H&M employee, once rushed to the fitting room to cry after a distressing encounter with a homophobic customer.
Fitting-room attendants likewise had more leeway than the more actively monitored sales associates. Throughout one afternoon shift on the sales floor, I fetched go-backs from the fitting room attended by Dana, a middle- aged woman and one of the few full-time Style Queen employees. Dana regularly refused the imperative to rush, rarely performed “garment care,”
and often sent items back to the wrong sections. “This is completely against store regulation, but I don’t care,” she said as she slowly wrapped a silk robe around her torso and admired her full-length reflection. “I look good in this.” During a busier part of the shift, a gaggle of customers rushed at Dana with armfuls of unwanted clothes. “I only have two hands,” she sternly reminded them. Later, I watched a customer emerge from the fitting room and hold out her garments with her arms extended, looking at no one in particular. “I’m over here!” Dana shouted. “We’re invisible to them,” she muttered when the customer walked away. Sociologist C. Wright Mills might have called Dana an “old-timer,” who “is against [store] policies . . . and often she turns her sarcasm and rancor upon the customer.”21 I admired Dana’s demeanor, and the shadows of the fitting room allowed her space and freedom to demand dignity and respect.
The fitting room occasionally offered a means of escape for customers as well because it was one of the few places where shoppers could sit down inside the store. Exhausted patrons regularly took a moment’s rest on tables on the sales floor, but this was explicitly against store policy. More than once, I went to the front office to find a manager, only to be asked by the loss prevention specialist, who scanned security cameras from behind a closed door, to get shoppers off the tables. In the fitting room, people quickly snatched the chairs near the back, and on more than one occasion I encountered worn-out shoppers resting their eyes while slouched on a small bench tucked away in the corner. I made a conscious effort not to disturb them there. In those fleeting moments, I hoped this space of consumption and exploitation could also serve as a site of refuge—recalling what surveillance scholar Simone Browne calls “the productive processes of being unseen”22–a hideaway for all those not willing or able to incessantly work or shop.
Garment rooms in the era of the automated heart are not officially devoid of care. But here again, staff are told to direct their care first to commodities
—the garments—not the customers. An automated heart more efficiently taps into consumer desires, replenishing stores with an endless stream of things to buy, but also results in fitting rooms piled “to the fucking ceiling”
of unwanted clothing.
These tensions between the scale and speed of an automated heart and the limits of human labor became even more pronounced at the cash register.