Bloggers I love are mocking the hell out of Peggy Noonan’s miserable new edition to the “you can’t get good help these days” genre. She has a series of complaints about overly pushy and underly pushy servicepeople and salesmen, but she is vague and doesn’t really want to commit to anything but blaming the little people for being insufferably and irritatingly alive.
That said, she does have one thing mildly right—the increase in aggressive sales tactics over the past couple of decades has made shopping or even obtaining customer service or leaving your house a miserable experience.
Here’s a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .
“Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.
“Mmmm, actually–”
“We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!” Her style is aggressive friendliness.
In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, “How are you today? How can I help you?” Those dread words.
“Oh, I’m sort of just looking.”
“I like your bag!”
“Um, thanks.” What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage–”Um, thanks”–you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it’s easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.
It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy’s, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.
There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: “Leave me alone.” But they’ll think you’re a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: “Thank you, if I need help I’ll ask.” But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: “Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson.” But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.
Of course, Noonan chalks this up to a generalized rudeness and weirdness of our time, but this little interaction and ones like it are an ongoing misery of daily life. You can’t go to the grocery store without the clerk trying to upsell you. You can’t deposit a check at the bank without the teller pushing a bunch of crap you don’t want on you. You can’t call for a routine service on your cable or cell phone without suffering a hard sell. Life in the American marketplace increasingly resembles living with a toddler full-time, with the endless repetitions of, “No no no no no.”
To understand it, it helps to have worked retail and to have lucid thought processes, two requirements that defeat our bubble-living Peggy Noonan. Luckily, I meet the requirements and can tell you that the cause of horribly pushy salespeople isn’t a general rudeness. The twin causes are the increasing corporatization of our economy and the legalization of loan sharking.
Corporations aren’t like small businesses. If you run a small business, your financial goals will probably be the same as a person working for an employer—to make enough to live on, preferably expand your wealth, retire, and leave something to your children. With that in mind, growth is nice but not necessary. If you sell the same number of widgets day in and day out, you can achieve your goals. You can, in other words, make a living meeting the sort of natural market demands (as much as I hate to use the word “natural”). That’s not really as true of big corporations. They live and die by the stock market, so their eye is towards making their companies grow faster than any other companies, to get the highest return for their investors. Once they hit market saturation and people are buying as many widgets as they want, then the company has to start employing more aggressive tactics to keep growing.
With retail, this becomes a serious issue, because people are disinclined to spend money they don’t have on shit they don’t need. So the corporations have responded by bullying. The idea behind aggressive sales tactics is that a certain percentage of people will be so desperate to get out of the store and out of the clutches of your miserable sales person that they will spend money they didn’t want to spend. The sales people are made more miserable by being bullied by their managers who are being bullied by their managers. It creates this vortex of misery that makes the salesperson so hard to be around that you will do anything to get away from her, and she’s on you like flies on shit, because if she doesn’t bully you, then she will get bullied. Eventually, a certain percentage of people will just buy something they don’t want to relieve the misery of the situation momentarily. It’s the grown-up version of giving the bully your lunch money.
Add to the whole situation the deregulation of credit and the tightening up of the bankruptcy laws. A certain percentage of the people who cave to the hard sell really can’t afford what they’re buying, but since credit is deregulated, they can charge it. And now with the new bankruptcy laws, you’re shit out of luck if you can’t pay it back.
What you have, in other words, is a set of corporations who have run out of legitimate ways to make money and are now robbing from the poor to pay their stockholders. Noonan is right that the pushy salespeople are a symptom of the Gilded Age. But she won’t admit that they exist because we’re living in an era where there’s a massive wealth transfer from the rest of us up to the hyperrich.
131 Responses to “Blood from a stone”
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I hate to say this but I’ve gotten particularly good at sales in the past year, and the secret is not divulging all the options available to the customer. The only package I’ll tell you about is Package A and it costs $X. When customer balks at $X you offer something slightly less OR keep trying to sell them on the features of the options. What makes it worse is that I work in an industry that most people know dick about and one for which almost never examine their itemized bills.
It’s really slimy and I hated doing it until the Big Corp I work for started offering huge sales incentives. Stick and carrot, progressive ideals suffer death by thousand cuts.
You know, in our rush to ridicule La Noonan over her staggering lack of awareness, none of us has yet read the OPJ comments:
Or this:
But the latest commenter longs for the relaxing life of a European, which is a good opening for anyone who wants to point out the differences between the American and French economic policies.
1. It is obvious Peggy Noonan has never held a service job of any kind, simply because she portrays the salesclerk as “gum-smacking”. Any retail veteran can tell you that chewing gum or food of any kind is never allowed on the sales floor, even in a life or death situation. Though I have to say I cannot imagine a situation wherein chewing gum might save someone’s life.
2. I wish Noonan would cop to the fact that it’s not because salespeople are naturally rude, it’s because they’re required to do that stuff in order to keep their jobs. There were times I was almost fired for not meeting a sales quota, or scolded by a manager when I was witnessed actually letting customers browse on their own rather than follow them around relentlessly trying to force them to buy anything they so much as glanced towards. When a checkout clerk tries to sell you a membership plan, or a customer service rep tries to talk you into a bigger plan or a new feature, it’s usually because they’re required, on pain of losing their jobs, to sell a certain number of these items each month. Haven’t read the whole article, maybe she does in fact admit this eventually?
3. Oh, grow up. So someone actually acknowledges your presence and asks you if they can help you find anything. If this is your biggest problem in life, omg, can we switch PLEASE? It is not a capital crime for you to take a moment out of your day and say, “Just browsing, thanks.” Not to mention if that common courtesy wasn’t taken, she’d assume she was being “ignored”.
4. I would put money on Peggy Noonan being one of my all-time worst retail customers: museum members who think that because they gave our institution $50 this year (or worse, some other totally unrelated institution they think ought to be associated with ours), they are entitled to red carpet treatment, all the free stuff in the world, etc. Yes, I used to work in a museum bookstore, and while I loved it, if I’d eventually gone postal, it would have been on said members.
Haven’t read the whole article, maybe she does in fact admit this eventually?
No, she ends with a wistful lament that while the poor are very rude, the rich are also not showing her proper deference.
I think your post is spot-on. I’m glad you called it bullying because that is really what it is. I hate the tactics sales reps use. A good bully makes you feel guilty for being assertive and saying “no” and also makes you feel guilty and diminished if you give in.
The shark-infested “free market” makes our culture harsher, too. When something is always for sale and loan-sharking becomes the norm, it’s hard to trust the sincerity of others in general. I guess this is the Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest society that conservatives and libertarians have always dreamed of. Congrats, assholes, you win.
It is amusing to note though, her admission that in the larger, more established stores the salespeople leave you alone. A week ago I was in a “Bay” (for Yanks: the a large Canadian department store chain that once owned pretty much every bit of Canada from Hudson’s Bay to the Rockies). I was going nuts trying to find a sales clerk. A snippet from the Forsythe Novel The Devil’s Alternative kept running through my head [quote from memory]:
“For western spies in Moscow, the great advantage in meeting one’s Russian agent in a department store was this: one was guaranteed to be absolutely free from any notice by the salespeople.”
You don’t have to bully the rich to spend money, because they have not strong incentive to hold their wallets close.
six-oh — yep.
often, when I go into a shop actually looking for something, I’m happy when a salesperson approaches me and asks if there’s anything I’m looking for. Because, yeah, as a matter of fact, there is. The only problem comes when they don’t listen to what I said I was looking for and then try to sell me something I’m obviously not looking for “Oh, a bathing suit with a bottom that doesn’t tie at the sides? Yeah, we definitely have some of those. And did I tell you we’re having a sale right now on hoodies? Ah, here’s women’s swimwear - oh, look, this little string bikini with the ties on the sides would look so adorable on you…” Grrrrr!
I think the general offense at a salesperson who dares to actually try to help you find something you’re looking for is a product of either a society where browsing in shops without buying anything is considered a legitimate social activity, or a group that is so affluent that they spend money for the sheer pleasure of it rather than going to a store to buy a particular thing they actually want or need. They get worried by questions about what they’re looking for today because they’re not looking for anything, and they realize deep down that there’s something strange about being in a store without either planning to buy anything or looking for any particular item.
I hate to say this but I’ve gotten particularly good at sales in the past year, and the secret is not divulging all the options available to the customer.
When I was telemarketing, there were things I was specifically instructed to lie to the customer about, and things that the company lied to me about so that I would pass this misinformation on until corrected by an irate customer. Plus, the “do not call this person again” option didn’t seem to work so well, so sometimes I was the third or fourth person who called a guy who’d already requested, as was his right, to be left the fuck alone. A computer did the dialing and I had no access to this list, so it’s not like this was my fault.
I began to love the customers who just hung up on me.
That was my very first thought — a salesperson snapping her gum? In a Madison Avenue boutique? No, Peggy, that just didn’t happen. You made it up. You’re lying.
People who complain about this sort of thing without realizing, or knowing, or simply ignoring that this is an obvious result of the corporate capitalist based free market, should quite frankly just shut the fuck up. Because quite frankly, I hear this often, about how “pushy” the salesperson is, no the salesperson is NOT pushy. The company is pushy. The salesperson probably hates what they’re doing.
The reality is that the corporate investment structure is simply not sustainable. Full stop. The culture is simply not sustainable.
I’d rather the other side of the coin, the huge department stores where it’s hard to find somebody. But even they still do the upsell. Even though it pisses people off. And you know something? First impressions are important. Final impressions are vital. And when someone’s last impression is a hard sell when they’re trying to pay for their product and leave, or wait in line to have their receipt inspected, that’s a bad final impression.
The ones that piss me off the most are those cellphone kiosks in malls where there are 12 reps in a 5x5 cage, and if you so much as turn your head so the kiosk is in your periphial vision then they start screaming at you to sign over your life for a piece of shit free cell phone. I hate those guys.
When I go in a store, I just want to be left the fuck alone. There’s rarely any situations where I need a lot of help spending money, so I’m perfectly happy if the salespeople just greet me and then leave me to my own devices.
I sent two years working at the mall, in an outpost of a giant clothing corporation, and the first manager I worked under trained us to distinguish between customers who wanted or needed a lot of help or employee contact, and those that didn’t. I vastly preferred people who shopped like I did, to say the least. Then she got promoted, and a muss less competent manager was hired. To him, the only acceptable approach to selling things was to overwhelm the customer with your presence. No wonder I just walked out on the job one day, never to return.
“the legalization of loan sharking”
Where I live I see a lot of those loan stores, which always seem to feature big slanted dollar signs, as if the money were rushing to you. Or away from you.
I can tell you with some confidence that God hates those places, along with the more respectable-looking loan-sharking that goes on with credit cards.
Of course, Noonan chalks this up to a generalized rudeness and weirdness of our time…
Ok, Noonan is an ignorant, provincial woman who hasn’t gotten out much and never moves beyond the rich assholes in the Beltway she hangs out with.
Go to any middle eastern city, and you’ll have people coming up to you, and their approach is always to ask you a question, in order to provoke a response so you’ll be engaged with them, and then they’ll have an opening to keep you as a captive audience. Yes, it’s annoying, but the reason they do this is because they’re trying to make a living. This has nothing to do with the poor being rude and not knowing their place. They need to make money, and they make money by selling people stuff.
Now, maybe if people had better job opportunities, they would have something to do other than get hired by cheap employers paying all their employees on commission, but they don’t– these are the most accessible job opportunities that people have. The fact that this is a phenomenon more appropriate to a 3rd-world country than the united states is something that doesn’t cross Noonan’s mind, and she doesn’t explore this issue.
Noonan should indeed shut the fuck up. The ‘unfettered free market’ system that the Republicans have been saying will save our society is being unleashed. Just like they wanted, people are now clamoring over each other in a dog fight for every crumb they can get.
Employee’s paychecks are whittled to nothing to encourage the necessity of hard selling, not to mention quota pressures and management bullying.
I never begrudge a salesperson or clerk, I know its hard work and I also am aware that with the way the construction industry is looking, I just might be joining them soon.
Of course, methinks also that Ms. Peggy’s main gripe (and that of those like her) is that when service personnel attempt to connect with her personally, it creates painful cognitive dissidence; she must suddenly recognize that they are sentient beings. The horror!
the opoponax, have you never heard of the great MacGyver? He who saves the world with gum on a daily basis!
Personally, I detested being required to upsell and stress my life away at McDonald’s, and thus quit after three weeks. I later found out that they were going to fire me, so obviously it wasn’t a good fit.
The thing is, I don’t understand how more people didn’t crack up laughing during the “sales classes” at that place. I mean, here we have grown men being deadly serious about something I found to be some of the silliest shit I’d ever seen.
Of course, I suppose a lot of people don’t have that luxury.
Anders, that’s it exactly. Even the “silliest shit” becomes deadly serious when you’re in the only job you could find. (Ask me how I know.)
I don’t roll my eyes when my boss asks me to please write the date just a little farther to the right in the date box on the sales slip; I don’t laugh when customers ask me for things that don’t exist. This is not because I have no sense of pride or sense of humor. It’s because I really need this job and I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose it.
Just like the salesgirls in Peggy Noonan’s article. They know they’re pissing off some of the customers, but sadly it’s not their job to increase business or to make people happy. It’s only their job to do what their manager says. And it’s the manager’s job to do whatever Corporate says, and if the people at Corporate have decided that 2+2=5 or that fake perkiness is how to sell widgets, then no one below them in the hierarchy can do a damned thing about it without risking their jobs. Not many people have the moral fiber to take a stand that could mean losing their paycheck.
Eventually, a certain percentage of people will just buy something they don’t want to relieve the misery of the situation momentarily..
Really? Wow! How about just walking out the door? Look, I know the bankruptcy laws just ratified were written by the credit card companies and corporations are pushy, and I don’t want to sound like I’m out of some Republican convention, but not once was personal responsibility mentioned. I mean, come on? I’m a guy who wants not to be bullied so I buy something? The consumer, in the situation shown, holds the ultimate sway. You want to blame the corporations for shitty sales training and over aggressiveness, I get that, but to blame the corp. for my spending habits…..really?
Yes, it’s sad that the elite 1% are miffed about underpaid clerks not recognizing royalty in their presence.
However, I have to take exception with:
When barely a hunt on teh google finds,
http://www.crisismagazine.com/september2004/morse.htm
Sure, a fluff piece but it would seem stupid to lie about something like that.
Not that she’s any less an odious scold in my eyes…
Amanda, your post is spot-on, but something I want to add is how hard department stores and other like companies are now pushing consumer credit cards. You mention credit in general, but the Macy’s card (or like card) is a big one.
I worked at Macy’s for six months, and we were basically told that we needed to sell at least one new credit line a day (or be subject to managerial bullying), and one way we were instructed to do this was by informing the customer about the great! 10%! discount! they get on all merchandise within the first business day of opening their credit line. So if a customer insists they don’t actually want that handbag because it’s expensive and they just don’t need it, no problem! I can give you a new shiny line of credit (with an insane APR) and you’ll get 10% off that lovely new bag! (Of course, the company will make that and more back in interest and other penalties when you can’t pay the bill, but that’s not my problem).
The company went so far as to give us anywhere from $1 to $5 per credit line we sold. That may not seem like much, but I was struggling pretty badly during those dark days of college, and I do remember making enough to eat lunch some days with the money I made selling credit to people who didn’t want or need it. Which seems like another insidious side to this… making $7 an hour isn’t exactly a living wage, and dangling lunch money in front of your employees as a reward for being a pushy salesperson is pretty underhanded.
Why do I get the impression that Peggy Antoinette would have been furious if the situation had been reversed: if she had wanted service right away and they were preserving a decorous, respectful distance. Answer: she would have hated that too. She’s rich and famous, and therefore right. You’re poor and a nobody. You’re wrong. Her perfect world.
@ Dan — I would guess that many people who feel so “bullied” that they make purchases they don’t need do this because they can afford to. Some weird notion of “pride” is more important to them than saving $50 or whatever. Whereas I, on a tight budget, don’t really give a shit about it and don’t feel bullied. I just say “no thanks”, or hang up, or disengage, or whatever. Sometimes I’ll just point-blank tell them I can’t afford it today, or it doesn’t make sense for me for whatever reason. People who would honestly rather just spend the money to shut them up must either have the money to spend, or be colossally stupid in a way that you just don’t get to be if you’re really honestly broke. I guess credit might alleviate some of that, but only in the middle class “credit enables us to feel more affluent than we really are” sense.
Andrea–Good point on the store credit cards. When I worked retail the most important thing to sell was not the clothing, it was the credit cards, because that’s where companies make a lot of money. We were instructed to offer the card at least 3 times to the same customer. 3 times! On top of that, as an employee I was required to have one of those credit cards myself, which I deeply resented as I despise credit cards. That card had a 25% APR.
In comparison, though, that job was decent. I know a few stores where they cut your hours if you don’t make your daily credit card sales. Not merchandise sales, credit card sales.
I just have to say, though, if you don’t like the way a store’s salespeople treat you then don’t just put up with it, don’t cave and buy something just to get away, stop shopping there. It’s the only way to prove to the company that their tactics don’t work.
This is rich, from the original article:
Oh, how dare we little people actually speak to the Grand High Peggy Noonan in public!
Christ, when you go into a restaurant, yes, usually you’re going there because you want to eat something. It’s the job of the people running the place to figure out what you want to eat, prepare it, and serve it to you, so that you can eventually be satisfied and on your way. This means that here in the world of normal people, the first thing you usually do when you are seated in a restaurant is to find out what’s being served, put in a drink order, make decisions about what you’re going to have, etc. so that the people who are going to be feeding you can start preparing your food.
I love how she thinks she’s the polite one, and others are just being rude to her when they don’t read her mind and make themselves aware of her ridiculous expectations.
But that wasn’t the worst of Noonan’s column; the worst was the part where the Billionaire-God runs his glorious magic hands through a heap of gold lying upon a table, and through his incomprehensible virtue and his superhuman power, the heap somehow, supernaturally, grows.
When, as we all know, the way it really works is that the Billionaire-God Moloch plunges his grasping claws into a great basin of working people, and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until the gore overflows the brim and splashes on the floor; then he inclines his monstrous head and guzzles his belly full. All the while, the Moloch-worshippers ululate insanely in vicarious exultation.
Eh. I read Noonan’s essay and Amanda’s and didn’t discern much difference, other than Noonan is where Amanda’s likely to be in 40 years, in terms of power, money, readership, and perhaps attitude, for power, money, and readership are all seductive. This time I wonder, Amanda, how much of what you write is a young gun gunning for an old gun.
By the way, when the person on the phone begins that sales pitch for some product or service you will never, never, never buy, the right thing to do is to let them get at least the first few seconds of their routine out, and then say, “Thanks, but I’ll pass on that today.” Usually then the telemarketing serf will begin a second try. Again, give them a chance to say their little speech for a few seconds, then politely but firmly decline again. At this point, their script usually allows them to disengage. End by saying “Have a nice day.”
Do these things! Don’t be a dick! When you curse or otherwise harass these poor phone serfs it’s like slapping your kid after the traffic cop writes you a ticket; not just mean and stupid but idiotically misdirected. The poor sucker you’ll be abusing is just trying to make a buck to live on at a God damn lousy job, and all you’re doing is pointlessly piling on the misery. If you rush rush rush them through the “no”s, then that just speeds up the time when they have to move on to the next call. In this kind of operation the down time between calls is never more than a couple of seconds. They’re not trying to bust your ass but they’ve got to ask you twice; if they depart from the script they’re liable to get reprimanded by their drivers or even fired.
Did anybody realize, on reading this piece, that it’s basically “Our Economy Totally Rocks The Hizzouse And No Actually We Are Not In Any Sort Of Downturn Or Recession Or Anything And Everyone Is Very Wealthy Now, KTHXBYE” propaganda?
Especially the way she kept being like “Weird, I mean, usually when people are acting like desperate beggars, it’s because the economy is bad and they’re starving. Except, of course, c’mon, we all KNOW that couldn’t possibly be the answer, because the economy is good and everyone is prospering like we’ve never prospered before! How weird is that, eh?”
Shorter Holly Capote:
People on the left lose their principles the second they get some money.
Shorter 6079 reponse:
Read Orwell. Watch Moore.
W. Kiernan:
I disagree with the method. I have had great success by cutting them off early in the first sentence, and saying, “I’m sorry for interrupting, but I never, ever buy anything via a telephone solicitation, and ask that you take me off your list right now.” It hasn’t failed yet (in stopping that particular call at least).
Didn’t we cover this in the dating thread a week or so back?
Now that I think about it, the above bit might be the salient part of the article. The salesperson was young! HISsssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!! Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!!!!!!! I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate you and will write an article to put you in your place! You have youth but I have the power and the platform. Ssssssssssssssssss!!!!!
I work in a movie theater where both the threat of write-ups/lower raises and the promise of $50-$125 bonuses (and other prizes*) for getting Mystery Shoppers have us rather aggressively upselling. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think we just decide to upsell of our own free will with no pressure from above what so ever.
There is a bit of truth to that though, when I first started I thought upselling was stupid and wasn’t consistent about it. Then:
Customer: I’d like a small.
Me: *gets them a small*
Customer: Oh, that’s a small, I didn’t realize it was that small, make it a medium.
Me (thinking): wtf the size display is *directly* in front of you. *throws away small, gets medium*
Repeat multiple times. Now:
Customer: I’d like a small.
Me: *points to small* That’s a small, would you like a medium for [price difference] more? *points to medium*
I don’t really mind upselling since, for us, it just saves time, trouble, and spoilage, though for people with less clueless customers it may not be as useful.
I supposes it helps that (whether we aggressively sell or not) our customers are very rude and I don’t like them. You can only get yelled at over prices you didn’t set so many times before you stop caring how annoying your upselling is.
*Last month I got a cooler/AM radio, a hat, a t-shirt, 2 disposable cameras, and an MP3 player and was entered to win a portable DVD player (that a coworker ended up wining). Just because I suggestive sold Twizzlers to a Mystery Shopper. On top of the $50 dollar bonus for getting the Mystery Shopper in the first place.
At the supermarket where I shop, there’s always a bottle or box of some “special” or other on display at the cash register, and the cashier invariably asks if you want some. I always resisted the urge to snap, “You don’t see it in my cart, do you?!” but it annoyed me.
Then a newspaper columnist revealed that not only is this required by store policy (which I already guessed, of course), but that they get their pay docked if they forget to say it to the customer! In other words, annoy the customer or lose pay. Whenever I feel self-pity coming on about my job, I try to remember shit like this.
w. kiernan, that’s kind of the silliest thing i’ve ever heard. i completely respect not screaming at the telemarketer on the phone, but regardless of what i’m doing, i guarantee you it’s more important than helping someone run through their script until their corporation lets me hang up my phone. if i know it’s a telemarketer, i hang up without saying a word. volunteers for the red cross and the democratic party tend to be complete douchebags, though, i must say. i don’t feel too bad about losing my shit on them since i know as a volunteer myself, i don’t remove someone from the list until the person on the phone is extremely mean and rude.
i’m a jerk when i go shopping. i feel bad for it but i can’t seem to stop myself. i’ll walk into the limited or whatever and they’ll go on with their spiel and i stare at them and kind of fade out until they’re done talking. i’m not really sure what else i’m supposed to do. i need a pair of pants. you can talk to me until your tongue falls out about the new skirts and the credit card and the sweaters but … i need pants. please stop talking so i can buy pants. and no, not those pants. i’m buying the cheapest pants you carry.
I remember several years ago there was one store I kept going back to. One reason was that it had clothing that looked more expensive that it was and didn’t make me look fat. The other, really important reason was that the clerks, when told I was just looking, would tell me their name and ask me to ask for them if I needed anything later.
They trusted the customer to respect their need for a commission just as they respected our need for space. Attempts to upsell were likewise done nicely– they might point out accessories that would go well, but if you said you were on a budget, the most they’d do is maybe point out something that was deeply discounted. It was a sane strategy, and I don’t know if it was corporation wide or just a well-managed branch.
Unfortunately, the store went under. Bad luck, I think, and not bad selling technique.
I think one of the primary reasons this happens is that the policymakers are effectively insulated from the consequences of their policies. The salesperson who’s doing it is just doing his/her job, as defined by higher-ups. But the most senior person you’ll be able to complain to at the store is a manager, who probably doesn’t have much discretion either. The demand to upsell is made by people in a corporate office who try to stay unreachable by mere customers.
Really? Wow! How about just walking out the door?
Well, yes. And stomp on their feet while you’re at it, moon them and otherwise flip them off. But that’s not the point. Even if 95% of people can muster the rudeness to run off the bullying salesperson, the other 5% that gives in is enough to make that much more money. You think the beancounters wouldn’t endorse bullying tactics if they didn’t work?
As usual, the rape victim’s short skirt, the unlocked door on the stolen car and the unwillingness to flee every store on the planet because of pushy salespeople are examples of how victims maybe fell short in protecting themselves.
Doesn’t make rape right or stealing cars right or bullying people into buying things they can’t afford right.
You want to blame the corporations for shitty sales training and over aggressiveness, I get that, but to blame the corp. for my spending habits…..really?
What part of “it’s wrong to terrorize your customers on the theory that a certain percentage will cave to the bullying” do you not understand? The part where I didn’t make sure to carefully remind people that victims are to blame for their own inability to protect themselves? I don’t need to blame the victims, when everyone else is eager to do so.
Shorter Amanda: requiring salespeople to bully customers is the American equivalent of the Nigerian email scammer tactic. AKA They Wouldn’t Do It If It Didn’t Work Often Enough To Be Profitable.
Eh. I read Noonan’s essay and Amanda’s and didn’t discern much difference, other than Noonan is where Amanda’s likely to be in 40 years, in terms of power, money, readership, and perhaps attitude, for power, money, and readership are all seductive. This time I wonder, Amanda, how much of what you write is a young gun gunning for an old gun.
Wow, that’s incredibly insulting. But I’m not all that insulted, because it’s so off-base as to be laughable. Wow. Just wow.
Wow.
I defended the poor working schmoes who are terrorized by big corporations, and Noonan said rich people make everyone richer by magic and you can’t get good help these days. We couldn’t be more different.
But I suppose having a minor blog that makes less money than I could ever live on=being a rich bitch who’s never had to work an honest day in her life.
Did you catch the part where I mentioned I understand the retail tactics because I worked retail? I guess “having a miserable service job” is just a shade to the left of “being a millionaire pundit apologist for robber barons”.
I’m glad you think I’ll make money someday. I hope so. But don’t ever think that I’ll be rich; I don’t get to take advantage of wingnut welfare, and have to work for anything I make.
6079 wrote: “Shorter Holly Capote:
People on the left lose their principles the second they get some money.”
Well, yeah, there’s that danger. It’s likely that if you don’t think you can be seduced, you’re more likely to be seduced. However, there are class issues in this thread and as Amanda just wrote, age issues. Amanda is considering the age issues from her self-flattering perspective, which we all do, but it runs both ways. And class is forever huge and generally under-discussed, for whereas poor folks/less powerful folks often loathe rich folks/more powerful folks, those poor and less powerful folks often want to be those rich and powerful folks.
Holly, you must think I’m about 10 years younger than I am. I’m unbelievably insulted you think that I’m somehow one well-paying career away from giving up my principles. If you only fucking knew how wrong that was.
I’m purty, but I’m also, um, well, going to be 30 in a month. So no, not the sweet young idealist who’s going to toss her principles out the door the second she gets a leg up. I’ve had jobs that paid middle class wages. I did not turn into Peggy Noonan. I turned into Emma Goldman, at least in attitude. The more I work, the more I see that socialism is the only fair system and middle class people who do well are not necessarily brighter than the person doing your dry-cleaning. Exhibit 1: Noonan the peabrain millionaire.
Seriously, what’s your damage?
Amanda wrote: “Wow, that’s incredibly insulting. But I’m not all that insulted, because it’s so off-base as to be laughable. Wow. Just wow.”
It wasn’t my intent to insult. I’m your fan. However, there are significant similarities between what you wrote and what Noonan wrote. You’re both perturbed by sales tactics. Specifically, their common aggression annoys the two of you. You diverge when you allege, by dint of your experience, compassion for the worker bee. You seem to suggest, by dint of Noonan’s wealth and power, that she couldn’t possess similar compassion. Amanda, you’re telling a self-flattering story and I don’t need to hear it to be impressed by you. As bright as you are, and you’re enormously bright and a gifted writer too, when you fix an older female writer in your crosshairs, you should consider the possibility that you have motives other than making the world better for worker bees.
Your scrutiny should be checked by self-scrutiny.
Listen to your self here: “…a rich bitch who’s never had to work an honest day in her life.”
There’s more than abstract ideology at play in your essay. This is very personal for you and you’re likely confusing your feelings for facts.
It’s my guess, Amanda, that you’ll be a rich woman some day. You have the talent and the grit. And it’s my guess that one day, some much younger woman will assume that you’re “a rich bitch who’s never had to work an honest day in her life.”
Amanda, I figured you for 30: I’ve seen your photo. But you’re human and therefore susceptible to seduction. I know I’ve been seduced at various times in my life and become the antithesis of what I alleged and believed my self to be. So, I suppose that’s my damage. I learned I was a phony. And I’m still a wink away from being a phony again and am wary of my self.
You’re writing a book and when that’s published, that alone will shift things for you. Seduction is coming.
That you can’t tell the difference between Peggy “people are so RUDE” Noonan and Amanda “the workers are oppressed” Marcotte pretty much shuts down conversation. I agreed she had a point that salespeople are annoying. I also agree with her that they are carbon-based life forms. That HARDLY makes us alike in any substantial sense.
And yes, that I’ve been that miserable, cringing salesperson who has to be rude against her will does make a fucking difference.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ.
I wish someone would seduce me with money and fame. Seriously. But most people tend to view me, with good reason, as something of a firecracker who won’t be bought.
You’re human and apparently subject to a very silly form of jealousy. You don’t want my life; I promise. Envying me is a serious case of “grass is greener”. I hope the book changes my fortunes, but the very notion that writers make a nice living as a general rule is, well.
I’m just glad my beater truck is paid off and I pray that it never breaks down.
I wish someone would seduce me with money and fame.
I’d settle for good non-fat chocolate, but I’m easy.
I learned I was a phony. And I’m still a wink away from being a phony again and am wary of my self.
We’re all hypocrites in some way or another. That’s part of the price of being progressive at a time when we still have to work towards a world where it’s possible to live up to our own ideals.
It’s a waste of energy to get melodramatic over it, especially since Amanda is only guilty of hypothetical hypocrisy that she may commit if her book turns into a sufficiently successful writing career. Surely we can wait until that actually happens before we castigate her for it when there are probably so many other ways she’s failing the Good Progressive Purity Test right now.
Holly, what the hell is your point? Is it just that you think it is way-too-bourgeois for one writer to criticize another writer?
Honestly, if “Bob Smith” had written the same essay, Amanda would likely have written the same response. And you, Holly, would not have written, “I read Smith’s essay and Amanda’s and didn’t discern much difference.” Most of us here are quite familiar with Amanda’s writings and can detect patterns on our own, and her track record tells me that your issues with this post say more about you than they say about Amanda.
I only disagree with Amanda when she writes:
I don’t find that to be true at all– people (including myself) are inclined to spend money on shit they don’t need. The problem is that they don’t spend enough money on shit they don’t need, and the rate at which they spend it doesn’t increase fast enough on its own, so salespeople are told to push harder.Those prayers are going to be in vain, I’m afraid, but you probably know that already. Start saving up for that new truck now.
Shit. I composed a reply and it disappeared. Well, here’s a short version:
Constantine, if you’re thinking that I’d have reacted in the same way if Bob Smith wrote Noonan’s essay, you missed the class implications in what Amanda wrote.
2 words: “rich bitch”
My point is that Amanda’s normally clear thinking is made murky by her projecting into those who’ve served Noonan…and disappointed Noonan.
Constantine: “Most of us here are quite familiar with Amanda’s writings and can detect patterns on our own, and her track record tells me that your issues with this post say more about you than they say about Amanda.”
You betcha. Don’t we all work out our issues by proxy? I resent rich people.
However, I don’t envy Amanda’s book deal. I’ve written books and am writing others, which are already under contract. And like Amanda, I drive a beater, as most writers don’t get rich. However, there are perks and those perks are seductive, such as being paid to stand before an audience because you’re a writer and oblige expectations if one wants to be paid another day.
So, Amanda, the firecracker, might wet her wick one day.
And maybe not.
I can’t see any of the responses. They are all blank.
Eventually, a certain percentage of people will just buy something they don’t want to relieve the misery of the situation momentarily.
It doesn’t even have to be like this. I was in a store one day, buying pants. The salesperson brought me a shirt to try on with them, and I bought the shirt because I liked it and I hadn’t seen it. She wasn’t aggressive about it at all, but I did buy it.
Another time I was looking for a jacket, and when I walked in the store, the salesperson started pushing jackets on me, so obviously I bought one. That’s why I was there.
In both cases, I would have bought all three items without the sales tactic. (I would have walked around the store a little more, and seen the shirt on my own.) But corporate doesn’t know that, so they make people’s lives miserable.
I worked at the front desk of a hotel once, and it sheer misery. On one end, customers give you a rough time because you can’t let them stay in the hotel for free. On the other hand, the owner gives you a hard time because you’re not selling enough rooms or selling at a high enough price. What’s great is when the owner comes in and tells you about the $500,000 house he just built when he’s not even providing health insurance.
It’s the grown-up version of giving the bully your lunch money.
Well, but you still get to eat your lunch. In the high-pressure sales scenario, you walk away with something. (Maybe that’s why it works — it’s an interaction akin to bullying, but with an outcome that feels at least like a tie, rather than a humiliating loss.)
I have to say, I don’t find it that annoying. I figure that when I walk into a store, the function of the whole enterprise is to get my money. Is there perhaps a gender component to this kind of retail interaction? Does it push buttons related to coming across as aggressive and rude rather than docile and polite?
“…get their pay docked if they forget to say it to the customer!”
We get written up if we’re observed not hitting all the points on The Shop. The whole managerial staff (including Head Cashiers, I think, who aren’t salary) and the person who made the mistake get written up if it happens on and actual shop.
I end up going into a bank about two-to-three times a year. Each and every time I end up thanking the godhead for direct deposit and ATM machines.
And there are only two chains I shop with any regularity where I get good, non-pushy customer service: Whole Foods and Nordstroms.
FlipYrWhig — I’d guess that there’s a subtle distinction here between Noonan’s ranting OMG How Dare Teh Plebs Speak Before They’re Spoken To and the real fact of outlandishly pushy sales tactics, which is a beast of a slightly different color. It’s normal and acceptable for a salesperson to greet me and ask if there’s anything they can help me find (and even, to a degree, offering up info about specials they have going on and stuff like that). It’s over the line for the salesperson to keep bugging me about applying for the store credit card after I express a lack of interest, show me things I’m obviously not interested in, or use even more egregious tactics to try to convince me I need something when I don’t.
Amanda:Well, yes. And stomp on their feet while you’re at it, moon them and otherwise flip them off.
You’re right that’s not the point. You know I meant if you find sales people at a particular store/chain too pushy, you have other options, the first being to say something politely like “No thank you” or “fuck off”, whatever.
Amanda:As usual, the rape victim’s short skirt, the unlocked door on the stolen car and the unwillingness to flee every store on the planet because of pushy salespeople are examples of how victims maybe fell short in protecting themselves.
My waiter suggested a bottle of wine with the salmon I had for dinner last night and the summer fruit for dessert. That bastard was just trying to increase his tip!I was a victim and I didn’t even know it.
” it’s a profit deal, takes the pressure off” Steve Martin-The Jerk
Yeah, I know the bean counters endorse it because it does work but most likely on those inclined to buy anyway. I don’t think Jimmy at the Gap is using Jedi mind tricks.
I find you writing insightful, intelligent and you can make me bust a gut but to even allude to the idea that my comment was akin to blaming a victim of rape, go fuck yourself.
Can I sort of split the difference between Dan and Amanda here and agree with them both? If I want or need to shop, and the pushy sales clerk at one place irritates me, I can turn on my heel and walk out the door without exchanging another word past my tolerance level. I’ve done it. So Dan is right.
BUT, when it happens three stores in a row, I have to either decide to let the pushy sales clerk I encounter next waste a lot of my time before I can actually get to what I want, or I can’t shop at all. And that’s with me being unbully-able. Not being able to shop doesn’t give me what I want, and it’s not fair I have to put up with a talking shadow while I try to browse the racks. A more pliant and suggestible person might well cave in to pressure to buy. So I agree with Amanda, too.
Once they hit market saturation and people are buying as many widgets as they want, then the company has to start employing more aggressive tactics to keep growing.
Didn’t read all the comments so I don’t know if this got covered, but this isn’t entirely the way it works. I mean, I see where you’re going with this, but it isn’t true of all industries and not entirely true of retail. There are many ways in which companies increase their revenue and selling more product is just one of them. Making new products that replace the old is one as well as expanding the product line with accessories. Restructuring the pricing schedule on products and accessories is another. Laying off workers is another (and often used when a company begins to lose ground and the CEO wants to squeeze out a better bottom line in order to get that contractually agreed upon bonus…think “Bob Allen”, for all you old Bellheads who remember the late eighties and early nineties). Another way is to increase productivity/efficiency. Not all of the ways to improve profitability are benign (not all of the ones I listed are benign), and I am not saying they are any better than anything else, but simply quibbling with a minor point in an otherwise good posting.
Yeah, but I think Amanda was trying to make a larger point of corporations constantly intruding in our lives, from Enron all the way down to the pushy sales person acting at the behest of corporate management. My point was that although I have little recourse against a CEO inflating a stock price, I’m certainly in control of my spending habits and whether or not I let a sales person bully me into buying something. In that situation, I have the ultimate control. I just don’t buy the victimization here and I think the idea of that is infantalizing.
DBK, while I agree that there are obviously a great many “growth strategies” for business, look at it this way: bullying the lower management and sales staff into just plain old Selling More Crap is much, much cheaper and easier than developing a new product line, reorganizing the price structure, or completely replacing everyone, because all you have to do is issue a few memos to put it into place.
I suppose I’m probably an extreme case, but I tend to value any human “engagement” I can get, even from salespeople. (I draw the line at telemarketers though–I do claim the right to choose when to expose myself to sales pitches, and when to take refuge from them, and talking to someone I don’t know who doesn’t know me and I can’t even see face to face has had the appeal bleached out of it. But nowadays I don’t answer my listed phone number at all, so that problem is solved for me.) I suspect that while most people probably aren’t as desperate for human contact as I am, that we all suffer from living in a society that has commodified pretty much everything and made all public spaces to speak of into “marketplaces.” So when I’m dealing with a smiling, inquisitive sales person, I tend to smile back and go ahead and engage them.
When I am in a position to, I tend to be happier to pay somewhat more if I think the extra cost is buying some kind of real quality; certainly with computers and the like, some if not all of those unfamiliar added features come in handy eventually. These days I’m so short of cash (and have zero credit) that I only enter stores with a definite and limited purpose, and generally only the kind of stores where you have to search the place to find any service if you need it. (Like purchasing razor blades for instance–lots of the places I try to buy blades in these days have them locked up and you need a clerk to come unlock the rack to get the one you want.)
For all my sincere and heartfelt and (IMHO anyway) well-reasoned rants against capitalism as a system, I don’t hate people for participating in it. We really don’t have an effective choice after all, and the majority of what most working people do would be necessary (and ought to be appreciated) under any kind of system. Even Messrs The Capitalists themselves wear many hats as individuals and do a lot of necessary work. What is objectionable about the ideology supporting capitalism is the way that it tries to subsume this creative and supportive work into the role of Capital itself, as some kind of eternal norm, as though no one was ever visionary or capable of rational planning or enforcing necessary work discipline or observing and responding to social needs before capitalism evolved–the ideological purpose, of course, being to discourage anyone from envisioning ways to employ these human capabilities without creating and perpetuating an economic aristocracy. The pervasive compulsions of our system similarly twist and force people serving other roles into painful positions; this hurts them and us in general but does not in fact make them “nothing more” than their roles, any more than Capital, as some kind of Platonic ideal, is creative or visionary or efficient. I find that sales people are human too, and my judgement of them varies with their individual approaches and attitudes; on the whole, I sincerely wish most of them a nice day.
As a consumer, I figure it’s my responsibility to know what I want, and have some notion of a fair price for it, and haggle with the sales people more or less politely, eliciting from them the information that I need. Their interest is to sell as much crap, and as much of it gold-plated, as they possibly can–but it’s a negotiation, and this generally keeps things within reason.
As for Amanda’s characterizations of Noonan–I figure Noonan has earned them. If anyone ever wants a sample of the kind of “bubble-gum blowing” mentality that Noonan attributed to the salesgirl, try reading What I Saw at the Revolution, Noonan’s memoirs of her years as a Reagan speechwriter. Well, I can’t ask anyone to try any harder than I did–I tossed the book across the room about 1/10 of the way in, when she was describing the hell of going to college in the ’70s, when the campuses, according to her, were just crawling with stupid liberal hippies who didn’t Love America the way she did. I forget her background, and as much else about this twit as I can, but whether her childhood was modest or affluent, whether she came from connections or “made it on her own,” the moment she legally “matured” she signed on as full-time reactionary flack and has obviously been amply rewarded for her services–which included, if resistant memory serves, writing the infamous “Morning in America” speech. She combines the intellect of a Paris Hilton with the ethics of an Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.
And so Holly, I’m just gobstopped that you’d compare Amanda to her. Knowing you as a long-term Pandagonian, I can only suppose you actually think our society is flexible enough that 20 years from now (I know you said 40, but come on, Noonan was doing her Reagan thing 20 years ago and would have been Amanda’s age about then, and would have been perhaps 12 40 years ago–an age she doesn’t seem to have surpassed mentally to be sure) someone of Amanda’s values-of ours generally–would be mainstream.
Well, that’s one positive vision, for sure! We can only hope for such a world; I certainly don’t think we’ve collectively earned it and it seems way out of the bounds of possibility to me short of an actual revolution. Well, maybe we’ll have to have one by then, or be corpses or miserable survivors of nuclear and environmental Armageddon.
But you seemed to mean only that people sell out and buy in eventually, and depending on how you look at it that gives Noonan either too little credit or too much. Too little because that woman has been consistent and stuck to what she has for “principles” all along; she was the same sycophantic brat of power and privilege as a youngster as she is today.
Too much, because at no time in her life has she ever shown any sort of integrity beyond that typical Republican team mentality, nor accomplished anything of substance beyond telling mendacious and flattering fairy tales.
I rate Amanda’s value much higher than that, and I bet you do too. We all must compromise with the system on some terms or other, but there are ways of doing it with some integrity and dignity, and plenty of examples of people who have done it, like for instance the lamented Molly Ivins.
Having calmed down, I realize that you forgot that I’m a unique person, Holly, and you were just trying to assert bland verities about the inevitability of corruption. But the inevitability of “seduction” is just way too pat. And you forget up front that a lot of people have power because they were corrupt in the first place. Peggy Noonan didn’t have ideals and sell out. She was a Reaganite from the get-go; she didn’t have ideals to sell out, which is why she’s a millionaire today. Power corrupts, but corruption leads to power.
If I was gunning for Noonan’s career, I’d, you know, gun for her career. By being a fucking Republican, which is basically mandatory if you want that sort of career.
Those prayers are going to be in vain, I’m afraid, but you probably know that already. Start saving up for that new truck now.
My tactic is to drive it like once a week and bicycle/walk the rest of the time.
And Dan, you have no idea if you think a waiter suggesting a wine is what we’re discussing. Maybe you’re just unused to the tactics I’m talking about; they tend to concentrate them on socioeconomic groups that can least afford it. A situation where a waiter suggests a wine to someone who can afford it is a much different situation than one where a person who lives on credit is trying to get a charge on their cell phone disputed and they are basically not allowed to speak to a customer service representative until they buy something. In some shops and neighborhoods, you literally cannot escape the hard sell. And it’s definitely class-based. Sometimes I shop at the more yuppiefied grocery store, because the longer distance away gives me time to walk/bicycle and clear my mind. Sometimes I’m in a hurry and I run down to my neighborhood store, which is working class.
Which one do you think makes it impossible to check out without having to tell the poor, cringing salesperson that you won’t be buying the sale item today, even though you know that her ability to make it home without being screamed at by her manager depends on a certain percentage of yeses? Luckily, it’s not a really hard sell, but I can say from my days when I was working in bank branch management, the hard sell we were instructed to give the minimum wage check cashers at our mall branch was beyond the pale.
I also believe it’s wrong to allow credit card companies on campus to prey on students, even if it’s nice and pat to say that the students should be smart enough not to take out credit cards.
Your right that my rhetoric was a tad overheated, but the point remains. Corporations use bullying tactics on lower and middle class customers, because they’ve found that by making it nearly impossible to shop quietly or get reasonable customer service without a hard sell, they can convince a percentage of those people to part with money that they wouldn’t part with. Should people learn to be bigger assholes? A lot of us already have, and the asshole level in the world rises.
But the blame lies squarely on those who started it. The customer who’s put in a situation where she has to scream or spend money to get a salesperson off her ass is in a lose-lose situation. Taking down the level to a reasonable level, let’s compare the mandatory salesperson bullying (which has a different level of aggression than your waiter calmly suggesting a wine and taking no for an answer without coming back at you 15 times, which is what we’re talking about) to the regular street harassment women suffer for the high crime of leaving the house. That harassment creates a no-win situation for women—leave and you get harassed, stay home and you’ve lost some freedom. It’s not right to make people have to scream at customer service people or spend money they don’t have just to get an opportunity to buy a T-shirt or dispute a charge on their cell phone, and the blame does not lie with people who fail on occasion to muster the energy for the former escape method instead of the latter.
The people at the cell phone booth at the mall have started to talk to me as I’m going past, like it’s a carnival or something. And because I’m moderately polite, I stop to talk to someone when they start talking to me. I think that’s the part that I hate the most–either I have to break a social norm by ignoring someone talking to me, or I have to get sales-pitched on crap I have no interest in buying. I’d like to follow around the jerk who thought that policy up for a day, loudly attempting to sell him penis enlargement devices and bubble mortgages.
A friend of mine takes telemarketer calls and lets them go through the entire pitch. He compares features, prices, delivery times. Asks lots of questions. When the marketer goes for the close he says, “No thanks, I was just wasting your time.” And hangs up.
Another ploy he uses is to say, “I won’t buy anything from someone who has not accepted Jesus as their personal savior.” He claims he’s gotten several of them to pray with him (he’s an atheist, BTW…)
I’m trying to figure out if your different experience from mine might be a gender thing, or perhaps because my recent (post-Natasha, d October 2004) very limited shopping experience (lack of both money and inclination to go to marketplaces) has spared me exposure to very recent trends, or perhaps it’s regional or something. When I did spend a lot of time in stores, it was in the company of Natasha, who was very much head of our household, and very fond of shopping, but also very shrewd about what she wanted. And perhaps the interpersonal dynamics were radically different when it was one salesperson (usually a woman) approaching a pair of customers acting as a unit (we had some good-cop/bad-cop dynamics going in difficult interactions too, which I mostly noticed in political or medical situations). That Natasha was a wheel-chair using waif may have affected things too; perhaps we were routinely suspected as potential shoplifters, which was something I never twigged to and therefore did not notice to resent. Vice versa she could be a real charm artist.
But anyway, what seems to work to me is to take the offered “engagement,” however synthetic, at its word as a human interaction. This might be annoying to the staff since they are paid to process as many “marks” as possible and under pressure to do so–but that puts the onus of getting down to serious business or moving on to someone else on them. We enter their premises, which they have every right to exclude us from if we violate reasonable norms of behavior, but they need us to go on operating, and this means they want to attract us in and not toss us out arbitrarily. So if they perceive our behavior as timewasting and unproductive but within bounds of civility, they are on the spot to figure out how to pleasantly seduce us into buying something. And I feel that quite often, sales staffers, being locked into an inhumane system themselves, sometimes welcome the chance to procrastinate and socialize on the company dime with an impeccable excuse, even if it costs them some potential commission money or the like. Or maybe that was just me sucking up synthetic charm cluelessly and they all hated us, but I rarely got that vibe–and it would result in the staffer moving on to greener fields.
It would be nice to have some money to experiment with my own shopping style, as opposed to being part of the Dynamic Duo as I was, and find out whether I do like to pig out on useless crap and how salespeople treat me when I walk in with serious money and serious intentions to possibly buy something. Lacking those things, I stay out of stores, which as I say leaves the whole landscape of any American town pretty void of places to legitimately be.
It occurs to me that my formula might waste a lot of one’s own valuable time, but it seems to me that’s a perfectly acceptable excuse for being brusque and to the point–”Sorry, I want a new purse but I’ve got an appointment, have you got [insert description of desired purse here], gotta run soon…” then either they get to the point and help you find what you want or you take your money and time elsewhere without having to look like an SOB.
I absolutely adore it when the whole “bankruptcy is bad-people need to take responsibility for themselves” argument comes into play.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0202-08.htm
Yes, yes, if only those stupid middle-classers hadn’t gotten sick, they wouldn’t be in this position.
Amanda, I read more of your latest comment, and it occurs to me also that if the success at certain salespeople at getting under your skin is based on your sympathy for their plight, knowing from your own experience just how much pressure they are under and how little they might like what they are doing, it may have also helped Natasha and I that we were always so near the bottom of the food chain that that ploy just didn’t work on us. It sort of does, or did, before I got really desperate, on me–I always figured I was better off than perhaps I deserved to be, and would typically tip high, give money to beggars, etc. Natasha often tried to rein me in on the grounds that we were poor too; she was probably right about the beggars (but not the wait staff; they really do need the tips to survive, generally–it is really the mainstay of their “pay.”)
Vice versa, if you do wind up giving stores more business in sympathy and solidarity with their workers–well, that’s good karma anyway, if perhaps bad economics. The trick is to get the money to stick to their fingers and not their corporate overlords’.
Well, and I think there’s different levels of what’s going on. Some upselling is very casual and non-intrusive. But in a lot of cases, the bean counters decided that bullying is better. You simply are not allowed to go about your business without being harassed and “no” isn’t good enough. You’re going to be countered and countered again and countered again. If the waiter offers you a bottle of wine and you say no, that’s one thing. If he camps out at your table and won’t leave until you buy some wine, that’s another.
In my life, it’s mostly not a big deal. Austin is very intensive on the small business front so I almost never patronize corporate places that upsell. But when I do for whatever reason, it’s appallingly oppressive. And yes, my heart goes out to the service people, who were usually not hired to be hard salesmen but thought they were getting jobs as cashiers or bank tellers.
It just occurred to me that that should be balloon mortgages, not bubble mortages. Although I suppose that could work as well.
Anyway, all this stuff is why I buy my stuff on the internet. ‘Cause I’ve been privileged enough to do so, I had no idea it had gotten this bad. Count me out of ever making a major purchase in person. Yecch.
The answer is easy: Look like a surly bastard and salespeople will leave you be. If they persist, bark “I’m a very crude man!”
It works. If you’re a woman, you of course have the option of barking “I’m a very crude woman!” instead.
BTW, the kindest way to deal with telemarketers is to interrupt them after three syllables, say “Sorry, not interested, have a nice day,” and hang up in their face. Why waste their time if you’re not going to contribute to their quota? The snivelling pisants have enough grief in their day of jaded toil. If their feelings are hurt, they ain’t gonna last too long. Alternately, you could say something like, “I’m a man who married a penguin!” They will see the absurdity in this.
The cruellest thing you can do is engage them for a full minute-and-a-half and then hang up. It’s fun and it costs nothing!
We should send these guys to Victoria’s Secret.
Seriously, I spend more time in that store explaining politely to the sales staff that I don’t want to take out a credit card specifically for underwear, that I go into their store like once every 2-3 years and thus would have no use for such a thing, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum than I do actually shopping for underwear. And that is aside from the time I spend trying to steer the one who’s been appointed my shepherd away from the Uber Super Wonder Tittification Of The Goddess Bra section, which has a buy 4 get 1 half off special this week (and this week only!) and towards that nice table of simple cotton panties I came in for.
Amanda wrote: “Having calmed down, I realize that you forgot that I’m a unique person, Holly, and you were just trying to assert bland verities about the inevitability of corruption.”
Amanda, I don’t know you at all. I only know your Internet persona, so, of course, I can only guess generally, or in what you dismiss as “bland verities.”
And I didn’t assert that corruption is inevitable. I assert that it’s possible.
But my greater point, and one that’s being conspicuously avoided, is that class envy has corroded your self-awareness in this instance, and that, to some degree, you’re mimicking the thing that you both hate and envy. You agree with Noonan that those clerks are pesky, but you allege that you embody overarching compassion, by dint of your stint behind the counter, and that’s fine, but you strip Noonan of any possible empathy partly because she’s rich. So, both Noonan and you assume that someone is lesser because of where they’re located, financially and socially.
I agree that the wealthy are less likely to be compassionate. They are swaddled and many live behind actual walls and vacation on the pretty side of walls, so that they won’t have to witness the costs that their profligate living incurs. I also assume that their indifference is due to ignorance and that if society swaddled me for a few days/weeks/months/years, I too would become blissfully ignorant.
Mark, I am a longtime poster and my discomfort in this thread and in many other threads is my sense (and I might be utterly wrong) that Amanda and some Pandagonians believe that they are pure, whereas a “rich bitch” like Noonan is pure evil.
I’ve raised this concern in the past and it’s always been rebutted with something like this: “Well, sure, I’m a sack of shit, BUT I’m not….”
And it’s that kind of cockiness that has had me seduced, never mind that I did social justice work for a quarter century, doing work where most people last for 3 years, and gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars, which meant that I’ve never owned a new car or a house or even a new appliance. I know that at times I’ve been a phony and I’ll be a phony again and it’s delusions of my purity that promotes my phoniness.
Issuing a few memos isn’t all that much cheaper. You have to monitor and manage any changes in policy, or continuation of an existing policy, as it were. But businesses don’t do any one of these things, so I kind of don’t get that idea at all. They push all the levers at once to improve the bottom line. That’s why you have lay-offs at companies where the revenues are growing and the product line is expanding and they are opening more stores.
Oh, I forgot to mention new markets. Like opening stores in countries that may or may not have the infrastructure yet to support them and so on.
Anyway, I acknowledge that it is a minor quibble.
Ah, too much effort. Much better to say, “oh, hold on, I’ll be right back, let me get my credit card!” then set the phone down and go read a book.
I suppose that’s a dick move to play on the wage slave making the call. Maybe ask to speak to their supervisor, then say you’ll be right back?
Wow. I can’t believe that the comments have gotten so far and no one’s really dressed the primary importance of customer contact that most of these sales strategies address: loss and shrinkage
Or at least, that’s what was drilled into me at Border’s and Musicland over 3 years of retail hell. one of my bosses even remarked, “you could have the personality of cabbage and still do this greet work and not sell a damn thing, but still increase the profits of the company by 50% because you’re constantly dogging customers who are potential shoplifters.”
Dirty phone tricks can go both ways. Piss off the wrong telephone boiler room resident and it might become their quest to make your life even more miserable.
If I answer the phone (usually by mistake because I have and use Caller ID), I just politely say “I’m not interested” and hang up.
Quick, clean, simple, and minimally rude…
“Wow. I can’t believe that the comments have gotten so far and no one’s really dressed the primary importance of customer contact that most of these sales strategies address: loss and shrinkage”
“Loss and Shrinkage” - a condition requiring the use of certain meds?
Or the name of a legal or accounting firm?…
:)
***
OTOH, my non-white friends tell me they frequently get a lot of (unwanted) close personal attention in many stores. I guess that’s just ‘cause they’re special…
The answer is easy: Look like a surly bastard and salespeople will leave you be. If they persist, bark “I’m a very crude man!”
It’s tough for me, because no matter how you say no, they have to stick to you or get in trouble, possibly fired.
No, Holly, I don’t think Noonan has any empathy because she broadcasts it from every pore of her being. If you can come up with evidence that Noonan is an empathetic being (say maybe evidence that she didn’t write speeches for Reagan) from the alternate universe where there’s no real difference between me and Peggy Noonan, then maybe we’ll reconsider the asinine assertion that my problem with Noonan is that she’s rich, not that she’s evil.
That or you could admit that in your eagerness to say something clever, you shot yourself in the foot. Now you’re backtracking and pretending there’s no real difference between someone who actually gets that working class can suck balls and someone who simply thinks that the help is grumbly for no good reason. There’s no reason to think I’m just agitating out of class envy and I hate all rich people. Bill Gates, for instance, is a cool cat in a lot of ways. Not that there’s anything wrong per se with begrudging the rich for having so much when most people have so little. From a certain perspective, that’s plain old justice.
“Bill Gates, for instance, is a cool cat in a lot of ways.”
ZOMFG!!!
Now you’ve REALLY gone too damn far!…
Having worked retail for many a year, I can confidently say that one of the reasons shoplifting losses are so high is that the suits endlessly whittle down the number of people on the sales floor as a means of cutting costs. More eyeballs on the floor, fewer opportunities to shoplift.
Repeat after me, suits: False Economy.
You have to monitor and manage any changes in policy, or continuation of an existing policy, as it were.
Yeah, because new product lines and massive staff changes and complete reconceptualizations don’t require anything like that at all…
(Sighs. Rolls eyes.) The nonracist equivalent of “welfare queens” and “urban youth”.
Listen, Holly. In a society where class is increasingly set in stone, where the upper classes are increasing their share of the national income and wealth and pushing more and more people out of the middle class into lives of perpetual uncertainty and debt slavery, where the laws are increasingly rigged to ensure that the wealthy never lose their wealth no matter how badly they screw up (Donald Trump went bankrupt, remember? Yet he still manged to own buildings etc.), “class envy” is just another cheap, pejorative cliche which blames the victimized classes for feeling upset about being screwed.
There is nothing wrong with “class envy” when that so-called envy is merely well-placed and accurate anger at those who function within the parasite class and who do their utmost to kill whatever elements of meritocracy are left within the system. Guess what: I don’t believe in “class envy”, I believe in “class anger“. Do you know why? Because I’m a believer in capitalism, not modernist quasi-feudal monopolies and oligarchies.
Noonan’s article was a screed against the irritating proles. Nothing more, nothing less. Welcome it for what it was: an open, overt sign that the privileged classes are becoming more open and more brazen in their disdain for us. Why? Because they are getting so secure that they don’t even have to bother to lie.
But you go on using words like “class envy” if you want. Just don’t think that I will pretend that you aren’t seven different kinds of fool when you do.
Oh, and one thing I forgot to put in Post 84. Not only are the number of wage slaves on the floor whittled down to next-to-nothing, they are paid less and less. And then a very capitalist dynamic sets in: the bosses get exactly what they pay for. They pay minimum wage, they get minimum effort. The people I worked with for years didn’t give a damn about shoplifters because, quite simply, they were being paid badly and treated worse and it simply defied human nature to have them leap to the defense of their employer’s property. You want me to be a security guard as well as a store clerk? Fine. Pay me the wages for both. Until then, fuck off.
(Emphasis added.) I was going to get annoyed at my own typo then I remembered that I do think of Donald Trump as being on pretty much the same level as a diseased dog, so I’ll let it be.More eyeballs on the floor, fewer opportunities to shoplift.
YES!
I once almost got fired because, while I was the only sales associate on the floor of our bookstore during a busy holiday shopping day (that means the only one helping customers, the only one at the registers, etc), someone managed to slip $500 worth of extremely heavy art books out the door.
There was even suspicion that it was an inside job. I’m not sure why they kept me on (probably because it was the holidays and good replacements were scarce), but holy Christ…
“Yeah, because new product lines and massive staff changes and complete reconceptualizations don’t require anything like that at all…”
Never said that. Now you’re fighting straw men. I’m just pointing out that there are costs beyond the ones originally stated.
I can recall a specific instance where a certain CEO presided over the “downsizing” (firing) of 10,000 people. There are enormous costs associated with doing that, but it makes for a healthy bottom line at the end of the year, and also resulted in, what was it, a $6.3 million bonus for that CEO because the profit margin was so healthy and they met their goals. Which is kind of what I am talking about. You can arrive at a predictable margin gain in a number of ways, not the least of which is the staff change. Not so with a new policy of having a more aggressive sales staff.
Implementation of Six Sigma is very costly for a company, but there is likewise a predictable increase in productivity. Acquiring a new product line by buying out a smaller company is expensive, but there is a predictable increase in revenues.
Coupla things:
1. Noonan is talking about Manhattan botiques. They make their money on “personal attention”. Ya don’t want personal attention, ya go to a Walmart in Jersey.
2. The attention she’s getting looks to me like they’ve got her fingered as a shoplifter.
You would think employers would catch on to this, but they never seem to. I go to a lot of MLS games. If you’re bringing a bag into the stadium, you have to open it up so the stadium security people can peek inside for contraband (food, drinks, smoke bombs). It’s ridiculously easy to get food and drink inside the stadium anyhow, even if the security person sees them, because - as I have long maintained - they simply don’t pay these folks enough to give a shit.
6079, whereas I admire your alleged dedication to poor folks and agree that more and more middle class folks are being pushed into perpetual servitude, if you’re writing from some cushy university or dining in lovely restaurants where poor folks shuffle for you or living in a neighborhood teeming with white, middle class folks, with all due compassion, perhaps you should run a value systems check.
Amanda wrote: “I don’t think Noonan has any empathy because she broadcasts it from every pore of her being. If you can come up with evidence that Noonan is an empathetic being (say maybe evidence that she didn’t write speeches for Reagan) from the alternate universe where there’s no real difference between me and Peggy Noonan, then maybe we’ll reconsider the asinine assertion that my problem with Noonan is that she’s rich, not that she’s evil.”
Amanda, I don’t know Noonan, just as I don’t know you. I do know that what doesn’t persuade me are hyperbole and invective like, “…where there’s no real difference between me and Peggy Noonan, then maybe we’ll reconsider the asinine assertion that….”
I never compared the two of you. I don’t know either of you. I compared your essays regarding the folks who serve you. I expect that Noonan is antithetical to my values and you seem congruent with my general values, but right now, you seem a 9th cousin, twice removed, when you employ invective and hyperbole. I know you’ve got more than that. I’ve read enough of your writing to know that you’re wicked smart.
You’ll soon be published and when you’re standing in front of a crowd and some woman in an expensive suit challenges you, will you respond, “That’s asinine, you rich bitch.”?
Or do you save such responses for the public record that is Pandagonian?
Change of tack: I rarely enter corporate owned stores, but when I do, I’m usually wearing the clothes I’ve been wearing for 4 days, which are usually paint-stained and garden-smudged. Looking riff-raffy discourages hard selling.
Zero for three, darlin’. But you seem to have picked up a superb Rethug trick, which is to make a pejorative assumption, ask it in a pejorative fashion and hope that everybody assumes that the insult(s) are true.Looking riff-raffy discourages hard selling.
No it doesn’t. Maybe if you smell bad, or if you’re also raving like an escapee from a mental institution. But otherwise, it really doesn’t matter how you dress or how clean or rich-looking you are when you go into a store. That whole Pretty Woman bit is a complete lie.
I once worked at Tiffany’s.
Yes, the Tiffany’s. 57th and 5th, Manhattan.
We were told repeatedly, over and over, that you NEVER assume based on the way someone looks, acts, smells, dresses, etc. that they are not there to spend money, cannot afford what you are selling, or that you shouldn’t waste time giving them your pitch.
And I have to say that they were right. You would really be surprised who would end up spending $5000 on a pair of cufflinks, or who your speil would be a waste of time on.
So basically, Holly, you simply don’t believe that any human being can have sincere opposition to economic injustice?
Fascinating. Well, you’re wrong. I don’t know how else to put that.
Also, I have to say this was interesting (though I might be cherry picking):
AKA, I am better than you because you might occasionally indulge in your privelege, but, I, I, the queen of all that is moral in this world, almost never shop in corporate owned stores, and when I am forced to enter them, it’s OK because I dress in the uniform of either a stereotypical prole or a hobo. Therefore I am a member of Teh Good Guys, while you fools are mere pretenders from your cushy ivory towers of elitism…
Haven’t run into this that much that I’ve noticed–maybe I’m unconciously broadcasting “keep away!” signals.
My problem is FINDING a salesclerk when I want one….
If horseshit could look like typeface, it would look like the above extract. It is neither hyperbolic nor invective. It is accurate. You vever compared the two? Take, just for example:And those are the two easiest quotes. Your posts themselves are long ones purporting to be on how easily we can be seduced by wealth and do so by direct comparison between the situations of Amanda Marcotte and Peggy Noonan. As has been said elsewhere on this site before (by the Biscuit Deity, I believe): the people on the site can read, and can go up and see what you said, so it’s kind of pointless pretending that you didn’t say it.
I shouldn’t be too hard on you. You are honest enough to be one-third-right:
First sentence: Correct.First half of the second sentence: incorrect; you’ve winked yourself back and you’re a phony again.
Second half of the second sentence: incorrect. Quite the contrary, in fact. You’re smugly satisfied with yourself and critical and wary of others, sure that they are “self-flattering” and deceiving themselves. Look at your pious self-notation about your years in social justice work, for example, almost side-by-side with your assumption that I’m sitting on my ass in some senior common room rudely making the proles fetch me drinks before I go home to my middle-class enclave.
Really, such comments on your part smack of the pious bile that one hears from sanctimonious religious types: I know that I was once a disgusting sinner, that makes it so easy for me to understand that now that I’m no longer a disgusting sinner it naturally follows that if you deny that you are a disgusting sinner then you must not only be a disgusting sinner but a self-deluded one as well!
Its one of the dirtiest tricks in the godbag’s book: if I can remind convince you that, underneath, we are both sinners together then I can distract your attention from the fact I was doing something wrong and you weren’t. It’s a morally repellent tactic, and deserves no place here, where we do our best to engage intellectually and not by impugning each other based on what we magically guess to be inside.
Marcotte called Noonan out on a blatant bit of elitist class prejudice. Your response, in essence? “Yeah, well, you’re a shitbag too, and if you aren’t now you undoubtedly will be when your book is published”. Noonan was wrong, Marcotte was right. You can wiggle your pious fingers into the air, hold a flashlight under your chin in a dark room whilst saying look to the darkness of your own soul, whoooWHOOOO! all you want, but you ain’t conning anybody but yourself. But that may have been the whole point.
The whole back and forth between Amanda and Holly brings up an interesting phenomenon that I don’t think was covered sufficiently in my sociology courses, which is class distrust of the wealthy.
I get the whole point of class conciousness and the middle class being aware that the capitalists disdain them and so forth, but the general distrust and suspicion of the wealthy is never really addressed.
I have a theory, and I base it largely on Chris Rock’s distinction between rich and wealthy. Long story short, people like Bill Gates because he’s rich. He got his money through effort and his own work, rather than, say, a member of the DuPont family, who hasn’t worked and none of their generation have worked, and none of their parents and grandparents generations have worked in the last several decades, because they’re living off someone else’s income-producing properties that they inherited. In short, working people are suspicious of people who don’t work for a living, because it means that a whole bunch of working people probably got cheated in some fashion in order for this small group to enjoy such opulent privilege. That’s a pretty clear manifestation of class conciousness if you ask me.
I think it’s got a whole lot to do with the Protestant work ethic, and I am really not too hesitant about saying that when the Revolution comes, capitalist-sympathizers like Peggy Noonan are going to be among the first ones up against the wall, largely due to that undercurrent of distrust of the wealthy.
Mezosub and Chris Rock have it correct. Amongst other things, it is easier to get rich if you start secure, it’s easier to get richer if you’re already rich, it’s easier to get wealthy if you are richer, and it’s damned near impossible to stop being wealthy if you are wealthy because the entire system is set up to ensure that you stay wealthy.
The work-and-talent component is key. If those are there, there is little resentment. MI worked once for a lawyer who was already a wealthy developer, whose start in that business had been the inheritance from his father of some prime properties. I never resented his riches. Why? Because I watched the guy for years and concluded that if I took every penny he had and dropped him in a park dressed as a hobo he’d be a millionaire again in five years. I can never bring myself to resent talent.
As for Noonan going to the wall? I’m rather more inclined to note that people hate the successful toady of the tyrant more than the tyrant himself.
Amanda, this is more hyperbole: “So basically, Holly, you simply don’t believe that any human being can have sincere opposition to economic injustice?”
Amanda, if you’re going to employ “any,” you might as well stuff your sentence with more absolutes, like “never,” “always,” and “forever and ever.”
I believe that we’re compromised. You. Me. 6079. Molly Irvins was too. And refusing to recognize your fallibility and where you overlap with those you loathe makes you more susceptible to more hypocrisy.
This doesn’t convince me:
Noonan = pure, rich ee-veel-ness
Marcotte = poor purity
So, it seems you think I’m thinking in absolutes and I think you’re thinking in absolutes. Hmmm.
6079, you seem gleeful that I was wrong. I’m glad I was wrong. It gives a spine to your assertions. And sure, sure, sure, compare me to a Republican. Blah, blah, blah. I’ve given you data you’re not using and I don’t know if you’re lazy or malicious or whatever, but such a comparison and such an attack reveals more about you than me.
And now I see that you compare me to a Godbag.
Invective, invective, invective. Slur, slur, slur. Ad hom, ad hom, ad hom.
And 6079, those 2 quotes you cited prove my assertion that I was comparing essays, not people.
And what you dismiss as “pious notation” is what matters to me…and to people who struggle in inequity.
Now, I’m disengaging from the two of you since it seems that you’ve got is are ad homs.
Amanda, I was being a wise ass, if not a haughty with my waiter story so I’ll take the slap because it was deserved.
I have to be honest, I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes crafting a reply to your last post. I agreed and disagreed, added anecdotal evidence to back up my assertion, went into a working class background and struggles blah, blah and gave as good as I got.
But I erased it all when I saw your response to Holly, that,”you simply don’t believe that any human being can have sincere opposition to economic injustice?”
I realized that I’m dicking around with particulars or even a broad statement I saw you make.I’m sure that my arguments would be included in your final result and yours mine. Our conclusion is the same end so I’m going to stop tilting at windmills.
I’m telling you, not matter what I get here, I always come away thinking.
A friend of mine takes telemarketer calls and lets them go through the entire pitch. He compares features, prices, delivery times. Asks lots of questions. When the marketer goes for the close he says, “No thanks, I was just wasting your time.” And hangs up.
Funny - I was a telemarketer, and I’d have people occasionally do this. After they hung up, I’d say to myself “well, that’s fine, asshole - except I get paid 11/hour whether or not you actually buy the thing, and you just wasted 15 minutes of your own time for free.”
I mean, hell. The worst part of my job was sitting there, not talking to anyone - waiting for the “click” that meant the wardialer had just connected you to someone you didn’t know anything about. Not to compare it to people who have real jobs that put them in real danger, but the sense that something you don’t like is just about to happen a few seconds from now gives you a little bit of the same traumatic stress syndrome of war veterans. I was jumpy for weeks on end after doing that job.
I guess what I’m saying is - somebody polite who wastes my time for 15 minutes was a blessing every time it happened. Not exactly revenge, except maybe on my employer.
(Laughing loudly.)
You come in here and piss on Marcotte’s moral honesty, pjoratively assume that I’m some spoiled academic lounging in privilege and mistreating those around me, and lie (about not comparing Marcotte and Noonan), you deliberately obfuscate between specifics and context, you ignore linked comparisons to incorrectly take things standing on their own to continue the insults, and you have the gall to talk about me engaging in ad hominems? Oh, that is too rich for words.
By the way, ad hominems are a valid tool of argument when somebody is acting in a manner which requires that attention be drawn to it. Put more colloquially, if you act like a smug and insulting little shit it is a valid rhetorical device for others to note that you are acting like a smug and insulting little shit. You don’t get to argue badly then retreat to some magic Children’s “T!” where you can’t be touched for it.
By the way, “I’m disengaging [et seq.]” is rather obvious code for “I’m losing this argument, I’ve been called on my insulting bullshit, I’ve got no answers for many of the points raised against me (and I’m pretending that they aren’t there) so I’m flouncing off”. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before.
@18, villiers: “Not many people have the moral fiber to take a stand that could mean losing their paycheck.”
In some cases it doesn’t take “moral fiber” (of which I’ve never claimed to have a great deal), but ego. The teaching job I used to have — in a corporate (and highly profitable — you think drug company profits are “obscene”? You ain’t seen nothin’) enterprise — the firm required of its instructors that we “present [the firm] as THE experts.” In practice, this meant — literally — dropping the name of the firm every 12-14 seconds, and “branding” every single thing we taught as this firm’s creation and property. Which would have been bad enough if that had been the case… but it wasn’t. There was not a single thing that I taught in any class at that firm that I had not known going in; they created, produced, developed nothing original, yet required that we instructors credit them with ownership. This I refused to do — not out of “moral fiber,” just because I was damned if I was going to do their lying for them, even at $33/hr.
I quit a month after that policy was imposed on me by a downgrade on my performance evaluation.
Holy shit, after 6079’s post, I hope my last reply to Amanda isn’t seen as flouncing off in defeat? I’ll keep up the argument if only not to be unoriginal!
I was jumpy for weeks on end after doing that job.
I guess what I’m saying is - somebody polite who wastes my time for 15 minutes was a blessing every time it happened. Not exactly revenge, except maybe on my employer.
OMG, Chet, me too! I only telemarketed for two weeks, but my fear of talking to people on the phone lasted for a long time afterwards, and it wasn’t the people on the other end of the line that were freaking me out (although goddam, did I not want to talk to them) as the large majority of the time people were polite, or at least only kind of snippy. It was the pressure from the management that meant every time someone politely declined my offer and hung up, it was just one more mark against me on my stats that my manager would be on my ass about when he got the shift report.
At the end of two weeks, it was clear I wasn’t willing to be aggressive enough to ever meet their quotas. It was October, 2001 - 9/11 was just hitting the economy, people were in no mood for a new credit card and I wasn’t willing to push it. I got really anxious, though, because I knew I’d never meet the goals and I’d end up getting fired in a month or so. Finally, as I was changing from my school clothes to my work clothes (we had to wear bank-teller style nice clothing for this phone bank job, because…I dunno, because someone somewhere thought that people working part time in a phone bank should look pretty) I actually forgot to remove my pants before urinating. Until that moment, I didn’t realize how stressed out I was about the whole thing. A few days after that, I walked in and quit without notice.
Of course, in our case the $11/hr was an average wage that you could only reach (or exceed) if you hit the goals, which were moving targets that were set by comparing set groups of telemarketers. That meant that if the rest of your group was willing to lie to the elderly to get applications completed, there was no way a non-aggressive-to-the-point-of-unethical salesperson could meet the goals. So the job I quit was really only an $8/hr job.
ask it in a pejorative fashion and hope that everybody assumes that the insult(s) are true.
You know, the thing is, accusing someone of writing a blog post from a restaurant or a campus doesn’t really strike me as an insult.
Context, my dear Constantine, context. We have this little sneer:
after postingMessage from Holly: I’m decent, upright, giving and selfless. You’re a rich, spoiled lazy (”cushy” not working; “dining” not eating, etc.) exploiter. Oh, and an exploiter of blacks it appears; I profoundly doubt that the “shuffle” was accidental.
But when somebody calls her on it that’s an ad hominem argument, see?
1. I hope the Holly/Amanda conflict doesn’t end in banning. I’m not usually the one to say, “can’t we just get along,” but I’m thinking about it.
If Holly perceived Amanda as being class-envious, then there must be a reason for it. I’m not saying that the reason is that Amanda has this attitude, because honestly I don’t see it. But I don’t think Holly is pretending to see it to piss Amanda off, or saying it because she’s a closet Repug. Something plucked a nerve there.
Subsequent argument aside, I think it’s worth noticing, if only to point up that the old woman/young woman “jealousy catfight” dynamic is so strong a cliche that we may see it even if it’s not there.
2. There are a couple of reasons it’s so easy to use these pressure behaviors.
First, because women are trained to be pleasant, and compliant, they are both easily trained into being the salesclerk and repeating the bullshit, and then easily pressured as the customer into enduring the spiel.
Second, because we are trained to think of the mall as a social place. Instead of being a place of business where we make reasoned decisions about purchasing needed goods, we are instead floating in a quasi-social arena. Lonely? Bored? Sad? Excited? Go to the mall!
This is where being an introvert really helps. I’m looking at the merchandise. The clerk walks towards me and faces me and smiles. The social reflex is to turn towards her and smile too. I don’t do that.
I don’t tell them to fuck off. I just half-listen to what they’re saying until they get to the end and say, thanks, I’m just looking at these [blah].
I don’t want to make their lives miserable or anything. Like whoever it was above said, that would be like hitting your kid when a cop gives you a speeding ticket. It punishes the wrong person. So I don’t mess with them.
But I just don’t respond beyond “no, thanks.” It’s not a social visit, and I don’t have to be friends with them. No matter how nice you are, if the pants aren’t what I want, I’m not going to buy them. I’m polite, but what the clerk wants, beyond politeness and simple stuff like “we’re closing in five minutes” or “can I reach in and restock this blouse,” just doesn’t matter to me. I’m there to evaluate merchandise and buy it if it meets my needs.
The retail store sales model is based on the exchange of social interaction traded for money. I do not wish to participate in that.
3. villiers wrote:
And it’s the manager’s job to do whatever Corporate says, and if the people at Corporate have decided that 2+2=5 or that fake perkiness is how to sell widgets, then no one below them in the hierarchy can do a damned thing about it without risking their jobs. Not many people have the moral fiber to take a stand that could mean losing their paycheck.
This is exactly the strategy Amway uses. It’s called patterning. The people in your “downline” must act just like you, not just in business practices but down to buying the same RV and vacationing in the same places.
“My problem is FINDING a salesclerk when I want one….”
Not that this isn’t sometimes our fault
but I must say I have noticed that customers get annoyed when, during the busy afternoons, I have to explain to them that I’m already helping someone, the customer service desk is just a few steps away, and someone will be with them in just a minute.
The nasty looks I get from people who don’t have the patience of a two-year-old…..
….(who will often complain to me about kids today being spoiled.)
In some shops and neighborhoods, you literally cannot escape the hard sell. And it’s definitely class-based.
Is this maybe a regional thing? Because I live in a city, and the big shopping areas near me are adjacent to some very poor areas. The class-based retail discrimination I have noticed is more like what tzs describes. I am convinced that the grocery stores near me deliberately understaff because a large percentage of their customers don’t have ready transportation to go anywhere else. They don’t upsell, though. The Target cashiers will ask me if I’d like to apply for a Target card, but they do that at the suburban Targets, too. To find aggressive salespeople, I generally have to go to the Mall of America. (It’s the closest shopping mall to my house.) The appeal of the MoA seems to cross class lines, but I don’t tend to think of it as preying on the working class.
There’s an easy solution for Ms Noonan if she truly hates being bothered by salespeople: get a hobby which doesn’t involve going to the shops. Seriously, it’s amazing how little I get pestered by salespeople when I’m writing at home. Or reading a book on my lounge. Or cooking up a cake. Or weeding the back garden. Oh, but I forgot - she probably has servants to do most of those for her.
Okay, I’m willing to admit I could probably wear a name like Woman-Who-Shops-Like-A-Man (in with a specific objective, out as soon as I’ve attained it, minimal browsing) but I’d put money on the fact that most people don’t go shopping in a reverie of blissful detatchment and airdreaming. The nearest I get to that particular state is in a supermarket (where it’s more a sort of “there’s the sugar, there’s the flour, ah, dried fruit, getting close, spices!”, then stop and examine more closely to find what I’m looking for). If I’m in a big department store, or a boutique, and I’m asked whether there’s something the assistant can help me with, I’ll tend to smile politely, and either name my objective for the visit, or I’ll say “no, just browsing”. Doesn’t take more than a few seconds, no skin off my nose, and the sales assistant has an immediate idea of whether or not they need to waste their time dealing with me. Okay, I’ve done my share of retail time, which means I’m more likely to try to be a helpful customer than an unhelpful one, purely because I *do* remember what it was like.
As for “class envy” (the correct term is “class struggle”, if you’re trying to invoke the spirit of Marx), I’m with six-oh-seven-nine here: the privileged classes (particularly in the US) are getting more and more brazen in their disdain for the non-privileged. Unfortunately, in so doing, they’ve forgotten the primary mathematics of social and economic structural relationships and the psychosocial implications of forgetting said relationships (as laid down in France in 1789): Do not irrevocably piss off the little people, for there are more of them than there are of you. It’s the basic law of aristocracy, and it does seem the US aristos need a bit of a refresher class.
Like Dan, I too generally come away from these discussions thinking about stuff I haven’t so much before.
Taking a sweeping inventory of my memories of all kinds of retail transactions, I really don’t “get” the point about the power of the hard sell. I suspect it must indeed be a gender thing; a way of successfully bullying women that men generally just don’t even perceive happening, and so it is rarely tried on them in the first place.
But I also think that what may be going on here is that we generally are indeed bludgeoned and seduced somehow into buying in to the deep cultural message of a capitalist society, that the answer to one’s fears and dissatisfactions is to own stuff, and one way or another wind up owning lots of crap we don’t need that doesn’t make us any happier, and then we feel guilty about that one way or another. I certainly don’t remember ever being cajoled into buying something I didn’t want, but I have spent a hell of a lot of “money” I didn’t actually have buying stuff.
What is basically at issue is the tendency toward commodification of everything. I suspect the deep and secret weapon of all the overt methods of enforcing this mentality is the underlying fact that this is after all the basic premise and empirical conclusion of capitalism, and as this is the ruling fact of our existence, we don’t need advertisers or salespeople to force-feed us a perception we rationally and accurately internalize, just on the evidence, of things as they are. The hard sell just tells us more clearly what we already see and know; that it is shouted out of megaphones to drown out any competing messages is only a reasonable expectation for a system that has evolved to perpetuate itself.
I see Amanda is doing a fine job of defending herself and have only this to say to Holly at this point–Holly, your critique of Amanda’s essay sounds remarkably to me like the right-wing line against John Edwards and other prominent progressive figures from Jesse Jackson to Michael Moore–”Hey, look, the man is rich himself, he lives in this friggn’ mansion, he made a lot of money from his class-action suits, so obviously he’s a total hypocrite when he says he has concerns about anyone poorer than himself. If these guys meant it they’d hand over all their money to those poor folks and live just like them.” Obviously this “standard” is just an attempt at enforcing the “I Me Mine” ideology of the right, since someone who says “I made my fortune; go scratch for yours” would be under no pressure to share any of it and would be free to deploy their wealth to further extend and consolidate their advantage. At best, it’s a demand for a revolution of selfless communists who would summarily and ruthlessly level everyone immediately; realistically it’s a demand to submit to the status quo. So it doesn’t surprise me you interpret comments as comparisons between you and teh Fundies; yep, you have put yourself in their boat on this, I don’t know why. As you say, none of us “really knows” any of us–but then no one “really knows” anyone else in an absolute sense. I’m guessing you’ve got the guilts and are projecting; you’d feel better if we were all singing the Sellout Blues along with you. Which has some merit, but I don’t think it’s the right way for any of us to go.
Um,
Oh noes, not the “if only we had real capitalism” meme! If that’s not a double bonus space on the “Libertarian Bingo Card” it should be. You’re doing so well in this thread, why bring this in?
Look, what we have is capitalism, no ifs or buts.
Let me illustrate with the board game “Monopoly.” The game faithfully captures the basic dynamic of capitalist concentration and ultimate monopolization of all wealth, because it reflects the fact that in any transaction whatsoever, wealth automatically confers an advantage. A given bit of bad luck that can break a trailing player can be ridden out; wealth tends to enable one to take more extensive and profitable advantage of good luck. The positive feedback inherent in the prevailing trend of accrual of wealth to wealth in rough proportion to its magnitude eventually overwhelms all countervailing tendencies. This is obviously true even though the game is normally played according to strict rules that apply uniformly and fairly to all players from beginning to end.
The notion that capitalism would be both fair and efficient if only no one subverted the rules to gain special advantages is wrong. Imagine if you will that some people agreed to modify the rules of “Monopoly” to vest power to enforce the rules in a “Quorum of Wealth” formed from the players who hold the top half of all assets. Everyone agrees to keep track of the net worth of each player’s holdings and defer to the collective rulings of the Quorum. (We’d need special rules for the beginning, when everyone’s wealth is exactly the same–or perhaps cash can be distributed at random and arrive at a hierarchy that way). Clearly in the beginning, the Quorum members would be just a bit under half of the players, and no one would feel secure in that status because small setbacks could easily land them in the disfranchised half, so presumably in the beginning there would be scrupulous enforcement of standard rules, or perhaps even some bending them in favor of the poor to curry favor should the positions of players be reversed. But the fundamental trend of concentration would prevail, and fewer and fewer players would be in the Quorum, and those would feel more and more secure in their status, and become more and more inclined to bend the rules in their own favor, as a class. Gradually one would pull ahead of all others; eventually that one would constitute the whole Quorum and feel free to subvert the rules outrageously in their own favor; the winner would quickly eat everyone’s lunch. But all this does is accelerate and accent the normal progress of the game.
I submit, that’s a good model of the sort of capitalism under “democracy” that we’ve had all along, where one dollar roughly equates to one vote. Imagining against all evidence that human beings will suddenly begin to scrupulously follow the rules no matter how easily they could get away with breaking them, conversely, does not change the basic dynamic of the trends we live under, but only slows them down somewhat. If you want to critique the capitalism we’ve got, it might be good political rhetoric to say “I only want to make capitalism work the way it should!” because attacking and reversing the engrossments of outrageous privilege would represent real progress, but don’t delude yourself that that would legislate Utopia. The privileged capitalists will just regroup, lie low, and come right back in another generation if economic populism stops there, though it’s a good start for sure.
Imagine reversing the “Quorum” membership now to include only the lowest ranked players, the ones who are in the bottom half of the wealth spectrum. (In real-world terms, this would actually go beyond European-style Democratic Socialism and be more like the Bolsheviks under the “New Economic Plan”, aka “NEP,” that Lenin and company adopted in the mid-1920s. They decided to allow and even foster the growth of quasi-private enterprise, but continued to deny the rich any formally recognized say whatsoever in politics–either within the Bolshevik Party that actually ruled, or the nominal government of “Worker’s and Peasant’s Soviets” composed exclusively of actual workers and peasants (with Party members automatically counting as proletarians, no matter how opulent their bureacratic perks got).) Now one can forsee that the dynamic would probably be quite different; the players would tend to rise to a certain average of prosperity and those who shot beyond that would tend to get pruned back by unfavorable rulings of the poorer folks, thus accelerating a steady rain of “trickle-down” that would enable anyone wiped out by adversity to quickly get back up toward the average. I’ve never played under any such formal rule but I have played “socialist Monopoly whereby the informal consensus of the players compelled the rich to be generous in bailing out their poorer competition, and thus arrived at a similar result. As a game, it quickly gets boring and pointless of course.
As an actual social and political system, I think it would work quite well. It’s what I call “social capitalism.” But as I’ve argued before, it would be very unstable. Either the rich would quickly organize a counter-revolution to secure the “inherent” privileges, conceived as “rights,” of property-ownership, or if the populist side prevails, they will quickly find that the pretense of private capitals competing just as boring and pointless (and also inefficient and perversely risky, politically) as the players of “socialist Monopoly” would that game. “Monopoly” captures the essence of capitalism, and if populists succeed in securing real political dominance and heading off the actual concentration of social power that concentrated private wealth is, they will find that they can more straighforwardly and efficiently do things on a straight socialist basis, without pretending that private wealth is a necessary intermediary.
Thus, the endgame is, either a new round of old-fashioned Monopoly, or tossing away the game board and getting on with the business of a progressive, rational human civilization all for one and one for all. This is why I am not much of an enthusiast for this “Social Capitalism” concept of mine; my eyes would be on the next steps beyond it, straightforward democratic socialism.
But someone has to get us into that intermediate state of dual power, and I suppose that will take true believers in a system of capitalism checked by the political power of the people as a permanant order.
And that’s why I don’t think people like Edwards or say, Thom Hartmann, are useless hypocrites. I say, give them every chance to prove their faith in a balanced system that allows both for private wealth and public interest a shot, and see how their views evolve if we can help them get that far. But I’d be a hypocrite if I pretended to believe they were 100 percent totally right on even now.
I hope this gives some indication of where I think Holly’s apparent “Wear a hairshirt and eat cat food, or shut up and admit we all want to be Suits here” standard goes off the rails.
I think that you are arguing that an orange is a round fruit, and and I’m arguing that it is orange in colour and lacking a smooth surface.Just for clarity, I do not argue for libertarian capitalism, nor for “real” capitalism, which is, as you accurately point out, Monopoly, but with the added benefit of poisoned lakes and people dying without medical care. It would be fair to say that I argue for that balance of maximum economic freedom on the one hand with protection of the weak and the helpless and the prevention of exploitation/destruction of either people or the environment on the other. (And it goes beyond protection; it involves cooperative assistance to get ahead so far as is possible.)
I am in favour of redistributive socialism up and to and not beyond the point that it damages the ability of the society (not the economy, mind) to create the expanding wealth, prosperity and mutual aid that we seek to redistribute. (Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, in other words.) I am in favour of taxation to provide maximum and egalitarian social benefits to all within the society. The only point where I would draw the line is a wary (but not instinctively negative) eye on government investment in commercial enterprises; corporate welfare is simply grossly inefficient and replaces investment decisions made by people with something to lose with investment decisions made by government officials who won’t be fired or demoted if they blow billions of dollars. We should, though, distinguish between social investments, infrastructure and policy investments and merely speculative ones. Good examples of the first are schools, hospitals and housing; of the second, road, rail, sewers, etc.; of the third, some dipshit in Ottawa raising taxes to create a cucumber greenhouse in Newfoundland, or cutting cheques to golf courses with ties to the Prime Minister under a vague “encouraging tourism” mandate. Judgment comes into play, obviously because things are so complex that no hard-and-fast rules apply.
By the way, Mark, if you’d followed the health care debates you’d know that describing me as a libertarian (TM!) is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off. I’m just a believer in a society with maximum freedom, with reasonable limits on that freedom in order to prevent negative consequences. Very much a balanced social contract dude.
Capitalism is a bit like explosives in road and rail building, Mark. Unquestionably the most effective tool for the job but only a cretin of the first rank would argue for no limits or controls over how it is used or that government can never be trusted with the detonator.
I apologize for the long and personal post, but I very much dislike being called an economic libertarian. Pure economic libertarians are cruel and selfish, and I’m not. They’re also ideological nincompoops of staggering proportions. I save all my viciousness for hockey arenas and my stupidity for my romantic relationships.
a way of successfully bullying women that men generally just don’t even perceive happening, and so it is rarely tried on them in the first place.
I think this is apt, in a way. Not so much in the way I see any of the men in this thread meaning it (”some special part of my rational maleness enables me to totally ignore this shit”), but because, remember, women are, more and more often, seen as the targeted consumers for a household. Which is an extension of domestic duties. There’s also the stereotype that women really love shopping as a social activity, which might exacerbate it (I notice the retail hard sell much more often in clothing stores than somewhere like circuit city).
So I do think it’s possible that in some senses, corporations throw the hard sell at women more, and that women probably do more of the kind of shopping that invites this sort of thing. I’ve only once been bullied when out buying media or electronics — when I bought my iBook, the sales people practically wouldn’t let me leave the store without also getting a .mac account. I spent more time explaining why I didn’t want one than actually shopping for a computer. It’s easy to find a bookstore that doesn’t try to shove a membership plan down your throat. Contrastingly, every goddamn time I walk into a clothing store, it’s like “no, I don’t want to try on jeans. no, I’m not looking for a winter coat. no, I don’t want 4 t-shirts, I really only want one today. no, I don’t want to open a store credit card. no, I don’t want to spend another $8.50 to be eligible for a $25 gift card redeemable next month…”
Remember, opononax, my personal experience with shopping was overwhelmingly at Natasha’s side, under her direction and as her agent (and at least half the time, the guy who paid for something he didn’t particularly feel any personal need or desire for whatsoever–but Natasha really lit up when I made her happy…) And I can’t recall, from my possibly clueless perspective, these tactics being worked on her either. As I’ve said we were visibly not so well-off, but I never perceived being shooed off as plebian annoyances either–as I’ve also said, she was cute and charming and maybe I looked precious beside her too. And finally, we probably had a team dynamic going that tended to throw standard technique out of whack too, though it took me over a decade to observe that working, in medical, political, or academic situations mostly.
Or maybe Natasha was just ornery.
The worst thing about her being dead is that new people can’t meet her and judge for themselves. I think she might in some ways have been an inspiration and example, but I’m biased.
I don’t think that they do; they’re too secure. Louis XVI didn’t have fully equipped riot and SWAT squads in every French town and city, nor an Army largely without class self-awareness; modern America has both in spades. Automatic weapons, the militarization of the police, and the perfection of riot/crowd control techniques have rendered a mass uprising sadly unfeasible. That’s one of the reasons the rich are getting so arrogant. It is interesting to note that in Europe, with more developed class identity, the capacity to/ possibility of/ acutal occurrence of riot is still a viable and effective tool of last resort.There’s also the conditioning. I’m rather worried that most Americans wouldn’t riot even if they were being rounded up in cattle cars, as long as the cars had Old Glory on the side and their president told them it was necessary for their own safety and for the preservation of their freedom. And the really sad thing is that I’m not exactly sure if I’m being hyperbolic in saying so.
Mark Foxwell wrote: “So it doesn’t surprise me you interpret comments as comparisons between you and teh Fundies; yep, you have put yourself in their boat on this.”
Nope, I’m not in their boat. I’m treading water, since I’ve been tossed from the Pandagon boat. However, you’re hanging over the gunwale and are chatting with me, so I’ll chat right back.
Mark, you wrote, “Wear a hairshirt and eat cat food, or shut up and admit we all want to be Suits here.”
Mark, that’s hyperbole. I think that stale bread would suffice.
To be frank, my frustration isn’t just with Amanda. I think Amanda is brilliant. I’ve said variants of this many times. And I’m on her side, even though I’ve been tossed over the side. My frustration is what is allowed to pass in these threads. For example, a few people have fantasized in this thread about Noonan being put up against a wall and shot. How many of you have been in a revolution? Heck, even hearsay is okay. How many of you have ever talked with someone who participated in a revolution?
Here’s the short version: Women get raped. Babies go hungry. Old people die. And a lot of young men have the time of their lives. Yee-haw!
Now, let’s imagine this in Noonan’s case. Several Pandagonians imagined her being put up against a wall. Will she be sweetly escorted to that wall? Or will she be dragged there by her hair? Raped along the way? Maybe she has a daughter? Will the daughter also be raped and shot?
It disheartens me to imagine the master’s tools in the hands of progressives. And then what happens after the young men run through the streets, killing and raping and having a good old time? Do a select few move into the mansions and don the master’s clothes and sit at the master’s table we begin again?
My original concern relates to what I just wrote. It seemed to me (Again, I don’t know Amanda. I haven’t seen in her action. I only know her Internet persona.) that Amanda was being dangerously certain about Noonan, which was reinforced by “rich bitch.” There’s a current in this thread and in this site and that current permits statements like “…capitalist-sympathizers like Peggy Noonan are going to be among the first ones up against the wall,….” As long as Noonan is reduced to a “rich bitch,” then perhaps one can squeeze the trigger.
I’m afraid of revolution. It won’t just be the rich folks who will suffer and again, I don’t want them to suffer. I expect, if I’d been raised in Paris Hilton’s shoes, that I’d behave like her. Instead, I was raised 3 to a bed and that shaped me differently. I don’t think that Peggy Noonan is evil. I think that she is ignorant. I think most rich people are. For those of you who’ve hanged with the wealthy, it’s easy to see how their lives are skewed by their days.
JoAnne wrote: “If Holly perceived Amanda as being class-envious, then there must be a reason for it. I’m not saying that the reason is that Amanda has this attitude, because honestly I don’t see it. But I don’t think Holly is pretending to see it to piss Amanda off, or saying it because she’s a closet Repug. Something plucked a nerve there.”
No, I’m not a closet Republican. If you knew the meat me, you’d see that as I’m as far from a Republican as a person can be. I’m queer and a longtime activist.
And JoAnne, I too wish we could get along, but that’s unlikely in any arrangement. Conflict happens. I’ve led an unusual life, as I partly shared. Most people don’t stay in the field as long as I did. So, I’ve got a different perspective. There are things I hear that remind me of things I’ve heard, things that were precursors to violence. However, one doesn’t need bunny ears to hear that in this thread. There’s verbal violence in this thread and hints of coming physical violence: Noonan against a wall.
And whereas I hate, hate, HATE that children and others do without while Noonan lives in a mansion, I haven’t learned that revolutions deliver justice. They are platforms for vengence.
Mark Foxwell wrote: “So it doesn’t surprise me you interpret comments as comparisons between you and teh Fundies; yep, you have put yourself in their boat on this.”
Nope, I’m not in their boat. I’m treading water, since I’ve been tossed from the Pandagon boat. However, you’re hanging over the gunwale and are chatting with me, so I’ll chat right back.
Mark, you wrote, “Wear a hairshirt and eat cat food, or shut up and admit we all want to be Suits here.”
Mark, that’s hyperbole. I think that stale bread would suffice.
To be frank, my frustration isn’t just with Amanda. I think Amanda is brilliant. I’ve said variants of this many times. And I’m on her side, even though I’ve been tossed over the side. My frustration is what is allowed to pass in these threads. For example, a few people have fantasized in this thread about Noonan being put up against a wall and shot. How many of you have been in a revolution? Heck, even hearsay is okay. How many of you have ever talked with someone who participated in a revolution?
Here’s the short version: Women get raped. Babies go hungry. Old people die. And a lot of young men have the time of their lives. Yee-haw!
Now, let’s imagine this in Noonan’s case. Several Pandagonians imagined her being put up against a wall. Will she be sweetly escorted to that wall? Or will she be dragged there by her hair? Raped along the way? Maybe she has a daughter? Will the daughter also be raped and shot?
It disheartens me to imagine the master’s tools in the hands of progressives. And then what happens after the young men run through the streets, killing and raping and having a good old time? Do a select few move into the mansions and don the master’s clothes and sit at the master’s table we begin again?
My original concern relates to what I just wrote. It seemed to me (Again, I don’t know Amanda. I haven’t seen in her action. I only know her Internet persona.) that Amanda was being dangerously certain about Noonan, which was reinforced by “rich bitch.” There’s a current in this thread and in this site and that current permits statements like “…capitalist-sympathizers like Peggy Noonan are going to be among the first ones up against the wall,….” As long as Noonan is reduced to a “rich bitch,” then perhaps one can squeeze the trigger.
I’m afraid of revolution. It won’t just be the rich folks who will suffer and again, I don’t want them to suffer. I expect, if I’d been raised in Paris Hilton’s shoes, that I’d behave like her. Instead, I was raised 3 to a bed and that shaped me differently. I don’t think that Peggy Noonan is evil. I think that she is ignorant. I think most rich people are. For those of you who’ve hanged with the wealthy, it’s easy to see how their lives are skewed by their days.
JoAnne wrote: “If Holly perceived Amanda as being class-envious, then there must be a reason for it. I’m not saying that the reason is that Amanda has this attitude, because honestly I don’t see it. But I don’t think Holly is pretending to see it to piss Amanda off, or saying it because she’s a closet Repug. Something plucked a nerve there.”
No, I’m not a closet Republican. If you knew the meat me, you’d see that as I’m as far from a Republican as a person can be. I’m queer and a longtime activist.
And JoAnne, I too wish we could get along, but that’s unlikely in any arrangement. Conflict happens. I’ve led an unusual life, as I partly shared. Most people don’t stay in the field as long as I did. So, I’ve got a different perspective. There are things I hear that remind me of things I’ve heard, things that were precursors to violence. However, one doesn’t need bunny ears to hear that in this thread. There’s verbal violence in this thread and hints of coming physical violence: Noonan against a wall.
And whereas I hate, hate, HATE that children and others do without while Noonan lives in a mansion, I haven’t learned that revolutions deliver justice. They are platforms for vengence.
Mark Foxwell wrote: “So it doesn’t surprise me you interpret comments as comparisons between you and teh Fundies; yep, you have put yourself in their boat on this.”
Nope, I’m not in their boat. I’m treading water, since I’ve been tossed from the Pandagon boat. However, you’re hanging over the gunwale and are chatting with me, so I’ll chat right back.
Mark, you wrote, “Wear a hairshirt and eat cat food, or shut up and admit we all want to be Suits here.”
Mark, that’s hyperbole. I think that stale bread would suffice.
To be frank, my frustration isn’t just with Amanda. I think Amanda is brilliant. I’ve said variants of this many times. And I’m on her side, even though I’ve been tossed over the side. My frustration is what is allowed to pass in these threads. For example, a few people have fantasized in this thread about Noonan being put up against a wall and shot. How many of you have been in a revolution? Heck, even hearsay is okay. How many of you have ever talked with someone who participated in a revolution?
Here’s the short version: Women get raped. Babies go hungry. Old people die. And a lot of young men have the time of their lives. Yee-haw!
Now, let’s imagine this in Noonan’s case. Several Pandagonians imagined her being put up against a wall. Will she be sweetly escorted to that wall? Or will she be dragged there by her hair? Raped along the way? Maybe she has a daughter? Will the daughter also be raped and shot?
It disheartens me to imagine the master’s tools in the hands of progressives. And then what happens after the young men run through the streets, killing and raping and having a good old time? Do a select few move into the mansions and don the master’s clothes and sit at the master’s table we begin again?
My original concern relates to what I just wrote. It seemed to me (Again, I don’t know Amanda. I haven’t seen in her action. I only know her Internet persona.) that Amanda was being dangerously certain about Noonan, which was reinforced by “rich bitch.” There’s a current in this thread and in this site and that current permits statements like “…capitalist-sympathizers like Peggy Noonan are going to be among the first ones up against the wall,….” As long as Noonan is reduced to a “rich bitch,” then perhaps one can squeeze the trigger.
I’m afraid of revolution. It won’t just be the rich folks who will suffer and again, I don’t want them to suffer. I expect, if I’d been raised in Paris Hilton’s shoes, that I’d behave like her. Instead, I was raised 3 to a bed and that shaped me differently. I don’t think that Peggy Noonan is evil. I think that she is ignorant. I think most rich people are. For those of you who’ve hanged with the wealthy, it’s easy to see how their lives are skewed by their days.
JoAnne wrote: “If Holly perceived Amanda as being class-envious, then there must be a reason for it. I’m not saying that the reason is that Amanda has this attitude, because honestly I don’t see it. But I don’t think Holly is pretending to see it to piss Amanda off, or saying it because she’s a closet Repug. Something plucked a nerve there.”
No, I’m not a closet Republican. If you knew the meat me, you’d see that as I’m as far from a Republican as a person can be. I’m queer and a longtime activist.
And JoAnne, I too wish we could get along, but that’s unlikely in any arrangement. Conflict happens. I’ve led an unusual life, as I partly shared. Most people don’t stay in the field as long as I did. So, I’ve got a different perspective. There are things I hear that remind me of things I’ve heard, things that were precursors to violence. However, one doesn’t need bunny ears to hear that in this thread. There’s verbal violence in this thread and hints of coming physical violence: Noonan against a wall.
And whereas I hate, hate, HATE that children and others do without while Noonan lives in a mansion, I haven’t learned that revolutions deliver justice. They are platforms for vengence.
Sorry about the triple posting. I posted once and the post didn’t appear. That happened the next two times too.
Holly Capote:
It disheartens me to imagine the master’s tools in the hands of progressives. And then what happens after the young men run through the streets, killing and raping and having a good old time? Do a select few move into the mansions and don the master’s clothes and sit at the master’s table we begin again?
Paulo Friere says yes.
The opoponax:
I’ve only once been bullied when out buying media or electronics — when I bought my iBook, the sales people practically wouldn’t let me leave the store without also getting a .mac account. I spent more time explaining why I didn’t want one than actually shopping for a computer.
Overcoming objections is the sales person’s job. It is usually a waste of time to explain something to them, because they won’t accept your reason. They have a canned answer for most any objection in the book. If you don’t present a specific objection, they can’t overcome it.
There are a very few exceptions. “It’s against my religion.” Or “I already have one.” But it’s best not to even give them a handhold.
However, I’ll bet several people here can talk about being bullied in electronics stores because “we don’t know what we want.”
And I think men are probably manipulated in different ways — not so much social pressure to be nice, but social pressure to be cool or strong or show they are wealthy. And there’s always “to impress the cute girl behind the counter.”
1. You’re right, you don’t know Amanda, so to come in here and start impugning her integrity is not only insulting and rude, it’s arrogant in the extreme. Attack the ideas, not the person.
2. I think it’s pretty well-known, at least around here , that Peggy Noonan in fact *is* a “rich bitch” to use the vernacular; a wealthy pundit and writer who doesn’t have to worry about her credit card balance or how old her truck is.
3. I would think after three or four rounds of saying the same thing over and over again and getting the same negative responses, you’d get the message and move on. Do you have anything new to add, some new aspect to your argument to point out? Or is it always going to be “Amanda’s just jealous.”
4. Related to #1, how in the world can you simply assume that post-publication Amanda will become fabulously wealthy? There’s no guarantees. And then you further assume that if she does write a bestseller and becomes fabulously wealthy, she’ll immediately become just as much of a “rich bitch” Antoinette as Peggy Noonan? You have some kind of crystal ball there, Holly?
5. The topic of this post is supposed to be hard-selling. Do you have anything to add that is related to the topic at hand? Or are you just here to fight with Amanda
Well, Holly, I can see that my disturbing and coarse talk of Revolution has gotten you quite worked up. Perhaps it was the crude and unrefined manner in which I speculated that snobby rich people who disdain the poor and hungry masses who are obliged to serve them in retail and service establishments that tugged your heartstrings to wonder if the rich bitches of the world will be raped on their way to the firing squad.
But then, I’m just an ignorant redneck from Arkansas who doesn’t do “social justice work for a quarter of a century.” My aspirations were always more humble than yours, obviously, for all I ever wanted to do was get far away from the reich-wing, wingnut-religious, homophobic, racist, sexist, bigotted white people who lived in the suburbs surrounding the Little Rock ghetto where I grew and never missed an opportunity to tell me how coarse and crude I was because all my family ever had was family, and I just wasn’t hating the black and brown people nearly as much as I should. Why, I was even friends with a few of them. OH NOES!
But, eventually, I did get out of Little Rock, and came to Los Angeles and met a very nice fellow who has, in fact, lived through a war. The Lebanese Civil War, actually, which is not quite the same thing as a Revolution. And yes, I do realize that people get hurt during revolutions and that they are frightening, horrific events for everyone in the whole society, but especially for the class of people whose wealth is being siezed to be either nationalized or redistributed.
However, deep down in my very soul, I am a conflict theorist and I believe that there can be no true social change without class struggle, in the Marxist sense of the word. I also believe that when haughty rich people openly mock and degrade the poor and working classes, it is only chickens coming home to roost when those same poor and working classes eventually rise up, overthrow the government, and sieze all the private wealth for the new world order. And if that means that the Peggy Noonans of the world get lined up before the firing squad…well…they shouldn’t have been so smug in their belief that they were entitled to exploit all those poor and working class people in the first place.
As with all things, your mileage may vary.
liberalrob wrote: “Attack the ideas, not the person.”
For that, I have no words.
And Mezosub, you’re not the only one comfy with, oh, let’s just use the standard military euphemism of “collateral damage.” You wrote the phrase about Noonan against a wall that I quoted, but others also alluded to it. Frankly, this makes me sad: raping and killing women isn’t the problem: it’s that the wrong women are currently being raped and killed.
I have to leave this place. I had some good times here, but it’s not healthy for me. I’ll lose hope if I linger.
i suppose douglas adams was advocating brutal rape and the starving of children when he wrote that the marketing flaks of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Before you go, Holly, I just want you to know that I don’t advocate anybody being raped for any reason.
Probably due to my rural Southern upbringing, I believe that the best way to rid the neighborhood of a rabid dog is to to shoot it, quickly and humanely, so that it doesn’t have an opporunity to have an awareness that it’s being put down.
I don’t believe in torture because it just doesn’t do any good.
Well, it appears that Peggy Noonan’s pen can craft truth, after all. Apparently it is morning in America!