UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Customer is Always Right
By JOHN DAVY (Trinity College, Cambridge) HERE are two great festivals in December each year. The first is celebrated by the Christian world and is known as Christmas ; the second is celebrated by the commercial world and is called Xmas. " X," although invariably gratifying to its disciples, remains an unknown quantity until the last handkerchief has been sold, the last till emptied, and the last accountant straightens up stiffly from her adding-machine on Christmas Eve. " X " is the total turnover, the net profit, the overall sales ; it is 300,000 pounds sterling ; it is the Festival of Consumer Goods. The cult of " X " brings with it frayed tempers, depleted purses, sore feet and traffic jams in Oxford Street. It leaves in its wake a jetsam of tin toys upside-down and, forgotten on the nursery-floor on Boxing Day, a brown and purple tie disposed of surreptitiously to the office-boy, a multicoloured mass of tired, spent streamers in the drawing-room. " X " is like the lion, a brave, brilliant thing in front, opulent and with a vulgar vigour, but its backside an anti-climax.
A number of us from various universities, conscious of overdrafts actual or impending, signed on as temporary assistants at a big store. Qn the first day we were sent to school, where we were initiated into the mysteries of bills, accounts and despatch dockets. We were introduced to the marvels of the Personal Export Scheme, and we acquired a healthy respect for thaLascetie and incorruptible indi- vidual the Kepe-Safe Auto Electric Cash Roister. We learned that stray children were not to be classified as lost property, but should be displayed on the counter nearest to which they were found until reclaimed. And in case of trouble we were told to call for the House S.S." We never in fact had occasion for such drastic action, but often, faced by a hostile and touchy crowd around midday, we got courage and fortitude from the knowledge that a word in the house telephone would bring the tramp of high black boots along the aisles, and the comforting thud of rubber truncheons courteously but firmly applied.
The second day we were duly ordained as High Priests of Goods, dedicated to Xmas, the crowning ceremony of the retail year, to maximum turnover and bumper sales, and to the consumer. As Assistant 2577, I was attached to department 1089 (ties and gents' neckwear). At the great gilt gates of the Temple of Xmas our congregation had begun to assemble at five to nine. After the doors had been opened, a swelling stream of customers flowed smoothly past our counter, to be caught up in the eddies and cross- currents of the book-department. After a while, as the further recesses of the store became congested, the current slowed, the aisles started to silt up, and the ground floor became a delta of meanders and sluggish streams. Officials in smart uniforms manned the pumps, and hoisted gallons of customers to higher floors ; but around midday the mechanism broke down and as many arrived back with the down-stroke as were transported by the up-stroke. A stray shopper, washed up against our counter, would start a rapid deposition until we found ourselves enclosed by a sort of sandspit of customers, and trade would become brisk. Gradually the current behind would erode this barrier until we were left again with a smooth shore-line. In such quasi-geological-cycles our trade was Conducted, and the calm intervals we could devote to folding our ravaged stock.
On the third floor is Toyland, Xmas's holy of holies, where Saint Nicholas, who evidently moves with the times, is embodied as Father Xmas, in a beard and gown by Nathan's Xmas Accessories Inc. He occasions some delight, but rather more scepticism, and his function is to commit parents to buying presents they cannot really afford. He is assisted by a character of nebulous background and no known family in fable or fiction known as Uncle Holly. He is general factotum and yes-man to Father Xmas, and also knows how to work the cash register. Our goods were remarkable more for their price than their taste, and at first we had qualms as to the ethics of, so to speak, foisting the tasteless on to the clueless. Should we be the agents whereby the sins of the Makers are visited upon the People, thereby becoming a species of bourgeois Fagin, assisting at the corruption of public taste and sacrificing aesthetics to the hard-faced deity of commission on sales ? But we remembered in the end our first commandment— that the customer is always right—and the spirit of Xmas prevailed. Our technique improved as our tempers deteriorated. No longer did our Kepe-Safe 'ring up £161 instead of 16s. ld., and the woman who wanted a bottle-green tie we could send away with a battleship- grey one and only slight misgivings. Personal Exports shed their glamour and became sordid episodes of deducting purchase tat We could discipline the vacant-faced and restless-fingered customer who was " just looking " and reducing our ordered trays to a frenzied froth of clumpled silks, and we would speak with assurance of " foulard," " French rayon " and " silk square cut." We found our- selves uttering odd jumbles of syllables in response to standard enquiries, like the men on tube stations who shout " Eindedors " and " Or Haing! "
Quietly dressed, and static behind a counter, we found that to the public we were no longer individuals, but embodied principles, local expressions of the archetypal sales-assistant, an ingenious appliance attached to the tie-counter. At times this was a remark- able experience, although common, I suppose, to other embodied principles like 'bus conductors and waiters, and was as though We wore a fairy-tale cloak of darkness. Until the magic spell " How much is this ? " evoked from us a response of paper bags and receipts, we were impersonal, invisible and deaf. In our case this cloak could be deliberately shed, however, and we could materialise as quickly and terrifyingly as any Slave of the Lamp by saying in a cultured voice any short sentence containing one or two polysyllabic words, such as " Frankly, madam, I consider that particular tie to suffer both from excruciating design and abysmal taste." Such sudden rifts in the established order of things smack of the super- natural, and our game of djinns and genies substantially bolstered our morale at times.
With Saturday came, so to speak, the Twilight of the Goods. The last consumer left replete with brown paper and string, and the doors closed behind her. A snowfall of dust-sheets, an off-)vhite Xmas, descended on empty counters and bare showcases. Uncle Holly and Father Xmas were off to Beckenham, and our cashier was going to stay with her son at Woking. The spell of goods was losing its grip as the lights of the temple flicked out one by one, and assistants shed their numbers as they clocked out. When we stepped into the bright cold night it was crisp underfoot, and in the distance we could hear church bells calling us to Christmas.
Previous page
