Shop-girl power
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11:45AM
Wednesday April 09, 2008
By Noelle McCarthy
Zambesi retail assistants Jarrad Turpin and Briar Neville say the secret to success is building relationships with customers. Photo / Babiche Martens
Our Working Lives
- Money can't buy happiness - survey
- Happy Workers
We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls".
That's American author O. Henry pleading for a fair go for retail assistants back in 1906. He was wasting his breath. O. Henry was one of the first authors to attempt to document the experience of women who flocked to find work in the department stores springing up in the great urban centres of America - Chicago, San Francisco and, most of all, New York.
He illuminated the lives of this first generation of shop assistants, or clerks as they were then known; documenting their struggles, their lives and their loneliness with a wit and sensitivity that earned him the title "the little shop girls' knight".
He even developed a whole new form of literature in which to do it; the short story. O. Henry has long since left us (he died in 1910) and with him has departed one of the few champions of that most reviled of career women - the shop bitch.
