The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 2
In every city of any size the public schools are sending forth, at the end of each school year, hundreds of girls who must earn their living, or part of it, immediately, and yet who have absolutely no training for a business or professional career. Some of these girls graduate from the high schools, others go no further than the highest elementary or grammar grade. And none of them has either the time or money to take a special course or to serve a longdrawn, unpaid apprenticeship.
These girls have good health, a reasonable amount of common sense, ordinary intelligence, a knowledge of elementary English branches, willingness, and the desire to learn.
Where will this human raw material find a market?
In retail establishments, selling goods.
I hear a murmur of disapproval rising, from girls who already stand behind the counter, but despite their murmurings I propose to continue this practical talk on salesmanship for ambitious, inexperienced girls.
When I told an acquaintance that I intended to advise the untrained, unequipped girl in need of a position to seek one behind the counter, she gave me a glance which held both pity for my ignorance and scorn for apparent indifference to the fate of the girls who will read this article.
"Well, if you knew the work as I do you would never advise any girl to go into a store. I've been in this store seven years. I'm getting ten dollars a week, and I'll never get any more. It's just drudgery, cross customers, spiteful floor-walkers, and no appreciation or thanks from any one."
Now it just happens that I have stood behind the counter and know just what I am advising girls to do. Ninety saleswomen out of every hundred will echo the sentiments expressed by the girl quoted above. The other ten have either secured promotion or see it looming up joyously in the near future.
Any sort of wage-earning may degenerate into drudgery. We make our lives, in shop or store or office, drudgery or pleasure by the way we tackle the work. The secret of finding either drudgery or pleasure in work lies in ourselves.
Given average intelligence, good health and a brave spirit, and yoai can transform the drudgery of life behind the counter into success. But of course if, like the girl already quoted, you intend to lean back against the shelving and say: "Well, I have gone as far as I can go, so what's the use of trying?" you will not progress.
It is for the girl who must work that I am writing this article, not for the girl who wants to earn a little pin money; for the girl who must secure some sort of a salary from the very start of her business life, not the girl whose parents can afford to send her through an art school, a business college or a course in domestic science. This talk is with the girl who is face to face with the problem of clothing and food and a roof over her head.
We will start by assuming that you have a neat appearance, good manners, and a clear handwriting and are quick at figures. These are valuable assets.
If you live in or near a good-sized city, first make the round of the stores there. Study the appearance of the girls already employed, and the conditions under which they work. You will soon learn whether seats are provided behind counters, whether the counters and shelving are so arranged that the girls between them have room to work comfortably, whether the light and air are as good as one can expect to find in the modern store. In your inexperience these may seem like trifles, but once you get on the other side of the counter you will find that these very trifles have much to do with making your daily life livable. Many of the better stores have yielded to public opinion, or rather the pressure of their customers, and have installed stools or upturned boxes for the use of the saleswomen. Others still maintain the barbarous custom of expecting clerks to remain standing from morning until night.
It is very easy to learn whether the girls are well or ill-treated in a store. When shopping, start a chat with one of the clerks, and you will soon learn the character of the store's management.
This preliminary line of inquiry is important. No girl should rush blindly into a position. Managers are interested in the applicant who seems to know something about the store.
If you are a high school graduate, and have a mature appearance, you can apply at once for the position of salesgirl. If you are not over sixteen, fresh from the grammar school or even a lower grade, you must start as a cash-girl, a wrapper, or a bundle inspector. In all the modern, well-managed stores young girls are started in this way, and are trained for the work, and in a large auditorium theoretical instructions and lectures are given. The beginner generally receives three dollars a week, and is promoted as fast as she displays ability.
Trade is extremely dull in retail stores just after schools close in June, but it will pay you to make the rounds and meet the managers or superintendents of employees. These men have regular hours, which you will find posted over the employment-office door. Observe these hours. If the card states that women applicants are received between 8:30 and 11, and you happen to come in during the afternoon, when men applicants are received, go away and return the next morning.
Unless an unusual opening has occurred, this superintendent will tell you that he is hiring no one until the busy season opens, about three or four weeks before Easter; September 1st in the fall. Then ask him to take your name and address or give you an application blank. Tell him that in the meantime you hope to gain some experience in another and perhaps smaller store, but you want an opening with his firm when the busy season begins.
Fill out the application blank with infinite care. By your answers will he judge your accuracy, which is important in the saleswoman who must make out sales-slips. By its general appearance will he judge of your neatness. The average superintendent is on the watch for neat, business-like, intelligent-looking girls, and if you make a good impression on him and furnish satisfactory references, your name will not be forgotten. He will put a mysterious little sign somewhere on that application, meaning that you are to be sent for when clerks are needed.
When looking for work of this sort, dress suitably. Do not wear your biggest hat, your fanciest waist, your longest gloves, your shoes with the highest heels. Look at successful business women, and you will find them simply but well dressed in tailored effects, with hats of medium size. Be sure your petticoat does not hang below your dress skirt, that the heels* of your boots are straight, and the finger-tips of your gloves are all mended. The up-to-date superintendent watches his applicants from the tail of a sharp eye, and the girl who is slovenly in her appearance, he argues, will be slovenly in her care of his stock.
Now, we will take it for granted that yau have filled out your application blank correctly and have been told by the superintendent just when to come back to secure an opening for the busy season.
You have slipped in the entering-wedge. Go out and get experience of some sort, at some price. In any large city such openings are advertised daily in bakeries, candy-stores, five-and-ten-cent stores, shops where notions and dressmakers's upplies are sold. Such firms seldom pay over five dollars a week, some pay only three, but take the work and serve here the apprenticeship which will make you less awkward and "green" when the opening at the big store does come.
Your first difficulty, after securing the position, will be a purely physical one. You will suffer tortures with your feet, and perhaps with your back, as the result of standing.
Have shoes that fit you perfectly, with medium heels, and it will help some if you have an extra pair under the counter and change them during the course of the day. At night bathe the feet in tepid water. Some saleswomen find alum water most helpful. Others use baking soda or even ordinary table salt. Change your stockings frequently, and do not under any circumstances neglect your feet. As a saleswoman you depend upon them, literally and figuratively, for your bread and butter.
Now, supposing that you have served your apprenticeship in the small store, and the time for better business in the more desirable and bigger stores has arrived. Write to the superintendent with whom you left your application a brief, business-like note, recalling the date of your application and the fact that he bade you call later. He will probably answer this note if you enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope. Or, if you can do so, take an hour off and go to see him again. If you made a good impression, he will recall you, and nine chances out of ten he will give you work.
This brings us to the salary question. The superintendent will inquire whether you live at home with your parents. If you do, and there is a position behind the counter for you, six dollars a week will be the salary most probably offered. That may seem absurdly small, because you have planned on buying some pretty clothes and helping mother at home, in addition to paying carfare and buying lunches. But the superintendent is thinking not of what you feel you should have to spend, but what you will earn for the firm. You will not be worth more than six dollars a week at the beginning. Perhaps you will not be worth even that. Perhaps it will cost the firm money to train you for the position you imagine that you can fill without difficulty.
I will tell you just how to estimate your value to the firm. Your salary should never amount to more than five per cent. of your sales. That is, if your salary is six dollars a week, you should sell at least one hundred and twenty dollars worth of goods every week. You will have a record of your sales. Count this every night, and find the tatal at the end of the week. You need not be surprised if at first the firm pays you really more than you earn. If you are paid six dollars a week and your sales are only ninety dollars, then the firm will lose money on your services. When your salary is only three per cent. of your sales—that is, when you are paid six dollars a week and your sales amount to two hundred dollars on the week—you may feel that you are a fair saleswoman. When you can reduce that percentage to two per cent., by dint of studying the needs of your customers and your stock, you can approach the superintendent with an easy conscience and ask for a raise. You will get it.
The first engagement in a large store carries the understanding that you will be laid off after the holidays or Easter rush or during hot weather.
It is distinctly up to you to make so good a record as a saleswoman that when the dull season arrives again you will be retained.
In order to accomplish this, study three things—your stock, your trade and your buyer or the head of the department.
Early in the morning, when trade is light, go through your stock, learn what is in every box and drawer, and if it consists of goods with which you are not familiar, such as laces or ribbons, learn the names of the various varieties. Not long ago a shopper asked a very pretty but pert miss at a department store to show her Oriental lace two inches wide.
The girl asked:
"Oriental lace? What's it like?"
It was her business to know the name of every sort of lace on her shelves. She belongs in the class of girls who declare there is nothing in clerking.
The superintendent of a great department store told me that the reason he never received applicants until 9:30 in the morning was because he wanted to spend the time between 8:15 and 9:30 o'clock roaming through the store to find out which girls were arranging and becoming familiar with their stock, and which were telling about the play or the party they had attended the night before. Yet there are girls who say that you get no credit for being painstaking in a store!
Study your trade. Take an interest in your customers. Do not act as if the woman who wants to buy a new tie were a nuisance, and had no right to interrupt your conversation with your fellow-clerks.
A friend recently approached the notion counter of a very nice store, and asked for white elastic. The girl addressed was busy adjusting her puffs by the aid of a pocket-mirror.
"Kate," she murmured with her mouth filled with hair-pins, "come see to this woman, will you?"
"This woman" did not wait to be "seen to." And there is another girl who says clerking is a drudgery!
Study the buyer for your department. He has his little peculiarities and his fads. It is only tactful to respect the first and cater to the last. If he wants a special brand pushed, push it. It is the buyer who will decide, when dull days come, just which girls should be retained. He is the man who stands between you and the superintendent or manager. He can suggest your name for promotion, and when you feel that you deserve a raise of salary, he is the man who can get it for you.
There are women to-day in the retail or department stores earning twenty-five dollars a week as saleswomen. Most of them started at five, six or seven a week—and studied their stocks, their trade and their buyer.
There are women buying for millinery departments at seventy-five dollars a week who never learned to trim a hat, but they did learn what their customers wanted and what they refused to buy.
There are women buying laces and underwear and buttons and trimmings for New York stores at five thousand dollars ayear. They started as clerks. And they did not belong to the class who said that clerking is nothing but drudgery. They looked at their customers and not at their mirrors. They were respectful to the buyer or man in authority.
You expect to be trained for nursing, for teaching, for painting. Well, why not for buying goods in a modern store? Remember that when you sell goods at five, six or seven dollars a week you are being trained as a buyer, and at the firm's expense. That training ought to be one reason for gratitude. If you never become a buyer, if you remain in the class of store drudges, it is no one's fault but your own. The firm is ready to do its part, if you do yours.
Many of these suggestions apply also to girls from small cities or even country villages who wish to secure positions in city stores. There is no prejudice against country girls in the big city stores. Several superintendents have told me that, all things being equal, they prefer the out-of-town girl to the city girl, because she proves more earnest in her endeavors, largely because she has more at stake.
The out-of-town girl must expect a rigid cross-examination at the hands of her prospective employer. He will want to know with whom she intends to board, and what she will pay. This, because he knows just what salary he can offer and how she must make that stretch to cover nourishing food, presentable clothing and incidental expenses. If he is more than ordinarily impressed by her appearance, he may add a dollar a week to the salary he would offer the city girl who lives with her parents.
If the out-of-town applicant will be entirely frank with the superintendent in the matter of her finances, he will advise her wisely about ways of living. The question of living in a big city on a small salary will be taken up in another chapter. In this chapter I have tried only to advise girls how to go about the diffi cult task of securing a hearing. Once installed in a store, a girl who is really in earnest about her work will find chances for advancement in plenty. Some girls are too indifferent, too lazy, too shiftless, to seize an opportunity thrust upon them. They make up the great army of clerks that remain stationary behind the counters. The girl who moves on and up is the girl who sees or makes opportunities every day and every hour.
Salesmanship, once cultivated and trained into a business asset, need not confine a worker to the city department store. The woman who can sell goods will find many outlets for her energy. Real-estate, especially in suburban properties, offers splendid inducements to the woman with a gift for selling. Life insurance is a fine field of endeavor. Standard piano firms offer good commissions to women agents. The woman who can demonstrate foods and take orders in department stores and grocery stores, can work into a position as traveling saleswoman for a manufacturing concern. The thing is to get the training and develop your ability to sell on the right lines. The better and bigger openings will come.