A Flow of Chaos” on the Sales Floor
M: Can you tell me how people do that? How do they get away with it?
Ryan: You know, you’ll just, like, fold the same sweater over and over again.
I once again thought of the interview games at Style Queen, described in the previous chapter. I quickly learned I could never fully please the manager, so I had to merely look like I was working.
At first blush, we might imagine employees like Jesse—who feel comfortable hiding clothes rather than seeking out their proper location—or Ryan—who might fold the same garments repeatedly—as fast fashion’s antagonists, refusing the demands of a sped-up, under-remunerated workplace. And yet, as with stockroom soundtracks, these subaltern forms of refusal simultaneously ensure the survival of both the worker and the employer. In fast fashion, a perfectly organized sales floor is an unattainable ideal, toward which managers push their team, but even without which the store can continue to flourish.
Customers have not completely disappeared from the equation, however.
In fact, there are probably more customers than ever, zooming in and out and around the store. McFashion and Style Queen managers repeatedly told us that our employment deeply relied on customers—one claimed to respond to customers by saying, “No, thank you—without you I wouldn’t have a job!” Yet on the sales floor, customers often felt more like a
distraction from, if not a direct threat to, the task of maintaining the order of the floor.
A few workers I interviewed told me they were trained to refrain from providing too much customer service. Zee said, “For instance, I was being kinda weird at first, in the beginning saying hello to everyone, and a couple coworkers found that annoying. So, they pulled me aside and were, like, you need to sort of chill out.” Zee discovered “being weird” meant actively approaching every customer. Elijah similarly became visibly frustrated during our interview, raising his voice as he explained his desire to help out at the cash register when the lines grew long: “[Managers] had certain people they would send for help. They would say, beyond that, we can’t spare anybody else. Which was a lie. I would say, screw that!” From the perspective of the manager, prioritizing the customer in this case distracts from the work of keeping the floor in order. While Elijah disagreed with this approach, there is some truth to it: ignoring the floor for even a few minutes could lead to frustrating messes and a backlog of clothes to be put away. At nonunionized stores, evening shift employees endure the consequences of this backlog, staying several hours after closing to put all the garments in their proper place.
Zee’s and Elijah’s urges to interact with customers was somewhat rare among interviewees and differed from my own experience. Associates commonly felt that shoppers got in the way of work, either asking questions that took away from the worker’s current task or messing up the clothes they just organized. I learned a cruel lesson, which I documented early on in my McFashion field notes:
In another instance in the girls’ section, a group of four or five girls, maybe around 12 years old, walked around the department. “This is so cute!” they exclaimed to each other. One of the girls knocked over a pile of denim shorts and walked away. I made eye contact with her friend, and though I managed to prevent myself from glaring, I must have looked at her sternly enough, because she picked up the shorts and put them back as best as she could.
Zarina, who worked at Forever 21 in Canada, said:
When I first started, I wanted to do things the right way and wanted to take my time. Make sure everything was organized, neat, folded properly. Then realizing it was a fast fashion store. So, people would see you folding and, like, come and knock the entire table over. [M laughs] And you’re just like, What the hell? I just spent fifteen minutes doing that. So, after a while I just learned that as long as it looked presentable and nothing was on the floor, it was fine.
In this context of customer as the enemy of order, worker shortcuts again became key. A manager might reprimand a worker if an entire table looks messy, so rather than folding every shirt—which shoppers tear apart in matter of seconds—the employee might instead fold only the top few shirts to provide superficial organization.
According to customers’ online testimonies, workers’ pressures to put things in their proper location as quickly as possible creates dangers for shoppers as well. One customer remarked: “Was all-but-bodychecked by people working the floor while I shopped. No one helped me reach an item that was high up, despite the fact that I was obviously trying for several minutes.” Another warned: “An angry little salesperson almost hit me with a clothing rack. Beware if you’re pregnant.”
While I never experienced or witnessed staff attempting to harm customers as the above commenters claim, the following comment felt incredibly familiar:
I walked around for 30 minutes trying to find a specific shirt. I decided to ask someone for help they sent me to the lower floor, walked around even more. Asked someone else, he wanted to send me back upstairs.
He then told me to look in their 90s section, I couldn’t tell where that section was supposed to be. So again, ask someone else, he points to the back and says it should be there. Well, I had already looked and nothing. I even had pulled up a picture to show them all. After the third person being very useless and not even bothering to help me look or at least navigate me to the correct section, I gave up and left without the shirt. I wasn’t even asking for them to search for it, just decent guidance.
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.