We all know this person, many of us have labored under them. There is no flunky in the world like the retail chain-store manager…Ed Falkowski with a super piece dissecting this beast.

‘Evolution of the Flunky: From Clerk to Manager’ by Ed Falkowski from Labor Age. Vol. 16 No. 9. September, 1927.

I. Chain Store Chains

FEW towns are without their sprinkling of yellow or red-fronted chain stores. These store corporations have expanded from a small handful of unknown grocery concerns, to enormous corporations still growing mightily. Their expansion, and economic methods of distribution, enable them to undersell the old reliable grocery man who was the one chamber of commerce in the old town. A stir and bustle replaces the pokish casualness of the chin-whiskered gossip who had the “dope” on all the local doings, and retailed information with his products.

Swift go-getters invade slumberish communities. Even in coal towns where buying on credit is universal, these cash stores settle, and are able to expand. Some anthracite towns are dotted with chain stores; even rural villages have their chain store with their gas station, and post office.

Hustling managers drive through these towns on sleek cars, magically getting accounts, ledgers, etc.—sacred scriptures of business turnover. While for high school boys, and pseudo-educated fellows just breaking through the shell of a college life, here is the world of growing opportunity. The top is pictured as a specious roof-garden where faithful servants smoke contented cigars, and talk of pioneer days when they swept floors better than other boys and gave up the movies to invest spare pennies in the stocks of their firm.

With stores sprouting over the country, each store becomes a recruiting station for ambitious youths. Daily, fresh-shaven chaps seek out the manager who studies them with shrewd eye, and probably puts them on trial for a week or two—either at clerking, or at doing the more menial tasks that must be done around each store.

Low wages and long hours greet the aspirant as he takes off his coat, and puts on the soda-dispenser’s smock of the chain store flunky. He must cultivate an oily tone of voice, a sleek approach to customers, an accurate memory for locating ketchup and tuna fish, and oystershells; he must add rapidly, and when not putting these—talents to use, must apply himself at the handle end of a broom, and sweep the rotten lemons, squashed cantaloupes, mushy onions and crushed prunes, and papers that litter the floor at the end of a day’s work.

Nor must he look at the clock. To be a time-server is to betray oneself as one who merely flirts with the job for financial ends. The chain stores do not desire such employees. The man serving this corporation must despise time, as well as money. His highest ambition must be to rise in the world of chain stores, and become a manager. In that upper world great figures walk, smooth-coated, and able to broadcast the sweetest imbecilities to the public that lines up at the buying end of the counter, and sends the clerks about in little panics, searching for the vanished orange extract, or the small size of cocoa.

II. The Spur of Ambition

Weekly rumors float through clerk’s ears of humble gawks who have suddenly risen to the eminence of managership. The overworked fellows tremble with anticipation as the immovable clock binds them to their posts.

Ambitious germs ferment immense desires within them. Each sees himself caught in that magic web through whose tanglements one emerges at last, blessed with position and future. But as day trails on day, they listen to the mixed public’s desires for coffee, or mustard, their shoes becoming thinner, and their purses not taking on flesh. Ambition is flaunted much like the straw before the stubborn donkey. Prospects dangle in front of one’s nose. But they never get any closer.

Each chain store emits its success-gush in a monthly pamphlet with some name suggesting boisterous confidence. Smug faces of great managers stare fish-eyed out of patriotic embellishments. The determined jut of chin, the tight lip, the jam-advertising smile, the soapy high-pressure countenance, are featured, with comment running through columns. Inspiration blows through these organs which thrive on scoops of unbelievable successes. Sweated clerks, after a hard day’s toil, can ponder the evening away on themes suggested by these exhilarating breeders of pep.

III. What Price Ambition?

The two big chain store corporations in the eastern states are the A. & P. Stores Co. and the American Stores Co. The A. & P. has been much longer in the game. They claim almost ten times the number of stores that the American has. The American Chain Stores Co., numbers almost 23,000 stores—almost a total of 150,000 employees. Of this number, 23,000 are necessarily on the managing end, since each store has its manager. Above these managers tower a hierarchy of officials encased in elaborate offices whence they regulate the works, and hold their tremendous fingers on the business.

The youth of the Chain Stores Co. appeals to the young man. It is presented as opportunity’s gold itself. The vast profits made by these stores are turned into more stores, which give rise to the need for more managers, which is the competent man’s chance of becoming more than a mere wage slave.

To a degree, this is true. The corporation is growing into new stores, and new managers are being placed. But what percentage of men employed become managers, and what does it mean to be a manager?

Usually the ambitious person starting at bottom to. evolve upward, may get as high as $18 a week, for which he is obliged to toil nine hours or more per day, and any number of hours on Saturdays when these stores keep open till the last customer.

If the clerk is “intelligent”, and shows sufficient interest in the work, after a year, he may find himself advanced to the position of “second man”, which means, a salary of twenty or twenty-five a week, and one-half per cent on the sales. As a full-fledged manager, he will receive one per cent of the sales moneys, in addition to his regular $25—which, in the usual small store, may bring his salary up to $35 a week. Usually, however, it is something below this figure.

For this, the manager assumes responsibility for the store. He must push sales, must extract efficiency from a mixed force, must coax the public into buying needless articles, must face the “music” of enraged inspectors who snoop about the place at all hours; must put in his ten hours a day, opening before eight of the morning, passing up his regular meals, and staying till the clerks are gone at night. While Saturdays mean twelve or fifteen-hour stretches for this envied person who has mounted the summit.

IV. Spirit of the White Collar

The men who drift into the time-books of these stores throw overboard every ounce of manhood to attain their future. Before eight in the morning they are already wrapped in their flunky-jackets, ready to trot about on ‘errands for early customers. No virile curse, no giant discontents stir within them. Smiles accurate as their weighing out a pound of butter are printed on their sallow faces. Their soft hair is combed at rakish angle, and they drip sugared nothings to pretty faces that inquire about prices of hams or watermelons.

Their private conversation is of hunting dogs, of qualities of motor cars, and that trend of speculation that culminates in the admirable summing up—”She’s some kid!”

Months of bumping one another doesn’t melt the ice that keeps them separate on the job. In the flurry and rush of the store no time for intimate acquaintance can be found. Spare moments are spent in kidding, or in playing pranks on one another. But serious conversation does not enter this strangely superficial world of embryo managers.

The day is too long, as the clock toils wearily toward six P.M. when the store is to close. Few clerks do not feel the heavy stretching out of hours, as their shoes pace along the sawdust, and slide on banana skins. Yet when at last six o’clock does arrive, not a clerk will throw off his coat or wash his hands, and no one dares to quite feel he has done a good day’s work! They linger about the manager, laughing at his empty jokes, playing the flunky, until ten or fifteen minutes pass, when the manager decides, in a casual way, to shut the store for the night. Incidentally, he tells the boys they “can go”. Only then do they take off their servile garments, and slip out to the street.

V. Unionize the Clerks?

A sixty hour week is enough punishment for any one’s ambitious impulses. On top of that, a pay that rarely reaches from week to week, and an honesty that exposes a man to starvation while a bunch of bananas swings in front of his nose. An honesty ruthless in its reaction to the victim!

Five legal holidays in a year—and one of them is celebrated by taking inventory! If a holiday falls within summer time, when it is customary to observe Thursday afternoon as half-holiday, the Thursday half-holiday is sacrificed. For instance the American Stores gave their employees the Fourth of July off. But the boys had to work on Thursday afternoon while all the other stores in the town were closed! Hardly a dollar’s worth of business was done all that afternoon—but the store was kept open, and the employees penalized for celebrating the occasion of the nation’s independence! Chain stores indeed! When will the clerks celebrate their independence from these chains?

Thursday half holiday is only a summer-time observance. In the fall, the store goes back to the full week—for no reason whatsoever. The public can be very easily educated to recognizing Thursday as half holiday all the year round.

Conditions are so intolerable on the whole that only the best flunkys can survive. The turnover is as great as in the textile or steel industries. Every week new faces replace old ones. Fresh chaps come in, alive and eager to work hard. But chaps with vitality prefer more active and less oppressive fields of work. They do not want to be obliged to wear professional smiles, or praise stale hams (the mold of which has just been scraped off in the back room)—or take advantage of blind old women. They don’t like the manager’s constant eye, or the superintendent’s hot-talk of “climbing”—rewards held out for the best flunky.

Since the most virile blood is always being drained off from the stores into more physical industries, what remains is the dregs—usually sickly, or weak, or thwarted types, who “don’t mind” puttering about the odds and ends of the store.

It is interesting to speculate on the possibilities of organizing these men. Not only is their own attitude remote from organization, but the corporation itself is violently opposed to unionization, and stands ready to fire any one who even suggests unionism. One of the store managers once attended a Central Labor Union meeting. “If my firm knew I was here tonight,” he said, “I would be off my job tomorrow.”

The job-fear is universal. Every one who doesn’t quit, or irritate the manager enough to get fired, lives in mortal dread of the “sack”. Mean as their jobs are, long hours and miserable pay, they cling through thick and thin, climbing with pitiable persistence on that long trail topward…

Yet the only effective power that will enable them to straighten their backs, and feel like men is the union. They will quit at quitting time and start at starting time, and not fear the eye of the boss. They will get decent hours, good pay, and a reasonable number of holidays only when they organize, and learn to do things for themselves. Of hard-pushed slaves who overlook the need of organization, and who need it most badly, we can place the store clerks somewhere near the head of the list.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v16n09-sep-1927-LA.pdf