Surveillance and retail work have long gone hand in hand. Putting my findings against the backdrop of historical research and more recent sociological studies of retail labor reveals how methods of surveillance tend to shift alongside the retail labor process. I’ve illustrated these general trends in table 4.1.
In early twentieth-century department store contexts, workers were trained to engage in skilled selling, and managers expected deep engagement with customers. Historian Susan Porter Benson describes department store sales-floor discipline as too often “all stick and no carrot.”26 Her book Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 includes archival photos from women’s magazines depicting salesgirls congregating in small groups, sharing gossip or grievances while a male figure—presumably either “store detective, spying floor manager, [or] undercover agent”27— lingers ominously in the background. Physical presence implied visual oversight and direct discipline.
Table 4.1
Retail labor processes and surveillance
Store model Labor process Surveillance method
Store model Labor process Surveillance method
Department store Skilled selling Managerial oversight Branded apparel Deskilled emotional labor Secret shoppers Fast fashion Just-in-time retail Digital surveillance
The shift from department store to the proliferation of branded apparel retail chains (such as the Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, and The Limited) led to deskilled affective labor. More important than knowing the product was providing a positive and formulaic interaction to customers.28 As I discussed in the previous chapter, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in this era to capture how corporations make money from the management of human feeling. Workers sold not just a product, but a service and an experience. Later, sociologist Ashley Mears applied the term “aesthetic labor” to how workers cultivate a specific look and way of being; they indeed embody the brand.29 Abercrombie & Fitch customers, for instance, may have easily identified the workers: not only are they greeted with standard phrases, but the workers also have a certain Abercrombie & Fitch–ness about them. Workers looked, sounded, and acted as if they belonged.
In those contexts, shopkeepers no longer visually tracked every worker, and interventions such as secret shoppers helped keep modern retail employees in line. These undercover customers could appear unannounced at any moment and were usually hired through a third party. After each shopping trip, secret shoppers produced quantitative evaluations based on the service they received, thus creating a threat of surveillance without constant supervision. Vicky Osterweil writes, “Mystery shoppers are miniature thought police, affective pinkertons, mercenary management to whom real management outsources the legwork of everyday psychic control.”30 Mystery shoppers ensured standardization of service, affect, and appearance of branded retail workers.
In recent years, however, big data, digital surveillance, and fast fashion have altered the terms of retail labor. Following my argument in the previous chapter, the primary tasks of fast-fashion retail work require more
“material” than immaterial labor—with carrying, folding, and sorting a constantly changing stream of stuff being of the utmost import. One former employee I talked to said, “I’ve shopped here for years. I have never really felt like I’ve ever once been, like, serviced here, to be really honest with you. Mystery shoppers would probably benefit their business, but at the same time I almost feel like this store is such a vehicle for money they almost just don’t care.” As customer service takes a back seat to the work of maintaining a nonstop flow of goods, the need for “affective pinkertons” in the form of mystery shoppers wanes. Worker behavior, like everything else in the store, becomes more easily tracked by technology. If mystery shoppers were the affective pinkertons of yesteryear, new technologies make up today’s digital pinkertons.
Surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic discusses how these trends in surveillance automation exist within a broader social shift from discipline to preemption.31 He writes, “If subjects cannot be relied on to discipline themselves, then surveillance must become as comprehensive as possible.
However, this level of monitoring requires automation of both data collection and data processing (and, eventually, of response).”32 Popularized in the blockbuster science-fiction crime film Minority Report, the idea of stopping criminals before they act is now commonplace. Law enforcement, for example, regularly relies on digital technologies to predict which geographic areas and populations are most “at risk” of committing a crime. These practices have been subject to much critique, including for how they deepen surveillance and criminalization of already heavily policed places and people.33 Similarly, Virginia Eubanks’s book Automating Inequality illustrates how automated data collection punishes poor people in everyday life, at child welfare agencies, housing organizations, and other social services that should ostensibly help, not hurt, the poor.34 Retail companies have jumped on this bandwagon, with significant consequences for their low-wage workers.
The National Retail Federation’s 2020 National Retail Security Survey, which collected information from sixty-nine retailers, reflects these shifts.
“Respondents say their organizations are devoting more resources to fight
shrink in the coming year, with a majority of those enhancements coming in technology investments.”35 One chart tracks “biggest year-over-year movement” in retail security. Mystery shoppers, secured display fixtures, and static observation booths or mirrors are waning. Tactics on the upswing include live customer-visible CCTV, point-of-sale exception-based interfaces (such as the cashier tracking I described earlier in this chapter), and internet protocol analytics. In other words, analog surveillance is out.
Digital is in.
In the new world of retail, technoscience helps normalize surveillance and exacerbate inequality. The growth of software used to automate employee schedules not only creates new norms of short shifts and fluctuating employee calendars, but also encourages employers to engage in additional forms of automated control. In settings where the employees turn over as quickly as the store inventory, the propensity to treat workers like potential criminals becomes amplified. Applicants might be screened out by databases before they are even interviewed. If hired, their managers might follow them on social media, further extending the reach of surveillance beyond the workplace. Biometric fingerprinting purports to provide objective time keeping for today’s “modern” (i.e., flexible) workforce by preventing time theft and buddy punching, while software that tracks and aggregates cash register transactions encourages employers to quickly pinpoint “exceptions” within a large pool of cashiers, exerting more pressure on an already stressful task. Meanwhile, loss prevention staff are encouraged to take their local police chiefs out to lunch.
The preceding few chapters document the nature of just-in-time retail labor, as well as how these spaces have become sites of everyday resistance.
In the next chapter, we’ll zoom out, looking at how social movements have engaged retail as a site for collective organizing.