All Fun and Cool Clothes? Youth Workers’ Consumer Identity in Clothing Retail

Abstract

Retail offers notoriously bad jobs that exist at the nexus of work and consumption. Previous brand-based retail studies assert that youth workers see the stores’ coolness and the employee discount as compensating for the low pay and variable schedules. The authors use interviews with 55 former and current young clothing retail workers to examine how they experience retail work in relation to their consumer identities. The authors find that while some workers identify with the brand, all workers criticize the poor working conditions. Workers draw on their consumer identities to understand what good service entails and sometimes to resist managers’ orders that they interpret as bad deals for shoppers. This article concludes that youth retail workers’ consumer identities do not compensate for the low pay and poor work conditions but instead help them navigate the interactive aspects of service work and find fulfillment on the job.

Skill requirements in retail work: the case of high-end fashion retailing

“…For the 'desirable' high-end retail outlets we studied, our findings are similar to work by Besen-Cassino (2014) and Williams and Connell (2010) of employees seemingly having a dual identity as 'worker-consumers' (cf. Misra and Walters, 2016). Furthermore, in the manner that soft skills are sought at the point of entry in high-end service settings, there remain concerns about how this process may limit employment to those of certain backgrounds, such as those who are deemed to have appropriate aesthetic labour and the 'right' look, the innate confidence and personality required for the desired emotional labour and be university educated (Nickson et al, 2003;Warhurst et al, 2016;Williams and Connell, 2010).…”

Worker Power and Class Polarization in Intra-Year Work Hour Volatility

“…Suggestive empirical evidence for such polarization comes from the observation that precarious scheduling practices appear common for lower-class workers (Henly and Lambert 2014;Schneider and Harknett 2019). Qualitative research has documented that low-wage workers in the fields of health care (Clawson and Gerstel 2014), catering (Halpin 2015), retail and fast food (Carrillo et al 2017), general merchandise (Vargas 2017), and retail apparel (Misra and Walters 2016;Van Oort 2018) are subjected to practices that include, on the one hand, canceling shifts at the last minute or sending workers home early, and, on the other hand, asking workers to stay after their shifts or requiring workers to be "on-call" to come in when more workers are needed. In the world of catering, Halpin (2015:420) describes how management used last minute changes and over-scheduling to closely align staffing with demand, saving payroll costs for employers while leaving workers in "limbo with respect to their ability to predict hours of work".…”

“…In the world of catering, Halpin (2015:420) describes how management used last minute changes and over-scheduling to closely align staffing with demand, saving payroll costs for employers while leaving workers in "limbo with respect to their ability to predict hours of work". In retail apparel, workers similarly contended with short-advance notice and variable hours, against a backdrop of low-wages and hours scarcity (Misra and Walters 2016). In a particularly clear example, Williams and Connell (2010:361) describe how one respondent experienced work hour fluctuation of 9 to 32 hours per week in the context of effectively "random scheduling".…”

Making Over Poor Women: Gender, Race, Class & Body Size in a Welfare-to-Work Nonprofit Organization

“…In a review of current research linking service encounters to class hierarchies, Hanser (2012) described these interactions as "inequalityin-action," noting that gendered, racialized, and class-based power relations between workers and clients are legitimized through interactional displays of entitlement and deference (see also Gruys 2012;Kang 2010;Misra and Walters 2016;Sherman 2005;Williams and Connell 2010).…”