Since the sexual misconduct, pedophilia, and assault allegations against Roy Moore came out, much has been made of the way he used malls to find his teenage victims. Most of that coverage has focused on the comedy or creepiness of a grown man prowling the traditional haunt of teenage girls, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that malls are also places which primarily employ retail and food service workers – workers whose primary job is to smile at and soothe a customer, no matter how obnoxious, angry, or sexually inappropriate they become.
Having worked a bunch of retail and food service jobs myself, there’s one thing I’m sure of: sexual harassers love the power dynamic that these jobs create.
Now, this is not to establish some sort of oppression Olympics for sexual harassment. As shown by the #MeToo tag and the “When did you meet YOUR Harvey Weinstein?” discussion, sexual harassment is horrifically pervasive in pretty much every industry, and the only differences between jobs are the specific dynamics of how we’re asked to put up with it. But I do think retail provides a particularly stark example of how obviously sexual harassment is about power, and how employers can, through ignorance or negligence, exacerbate those dynamics.
Emotional labor is the crux of your job when you work in retail and food service. You’re supposed to be pleasant. You’re supposed to smile at the customer, answer their questions, and laugh at their jokes. Whether as a checkout girl in a supermarket, a cashier at a department store, or the ticket girl at the movie theater, you’re there to ensure the customer has a good time. Especially in an automated world, where the work of tallying the customers’ purchases could be done by a computer, human retail workers are often there for atmosphere.
So what happens when what makes the customer happy is creeping on teenage girls?
As detailed in the recent Washington Post piece on Roy Moore, most employees have no recourse but to endure. They can help each other hide in the back room, but someone still has to stay at the counter and play nice when the harasser comes into the store. The best they can do to escape is find another task and look busy. I mean, just look at these quotes from Roy Moore’s victims:
“Make yourself scarce when Roy’s in here, he’s just here to bother you, don’t pay attention to him and he’ll go away.”
“He was persistent in a way that made her uncomfortable. She says he lingered in her section, or else by the bathroom area, and that she became so disturbed that she complained to the Pizitz manager.”
“I can remember him walking in and the whole mood would change with us girls … It would be like we were on guard. I would find something else to do. I remember being creeped out.”
And many of these workers can’t even hide. You’re stuck behind a counter, or in charge of a register. Especially if you’re good at your job, you’re often entrusted to be the only member of staff on the floor, or the only one manning a register. Harassers therefore have you physically trapped, and they know it. If you’ve ever been sexually harassed at one of these jobs, you know what it feels like when you realize: they take a particular pleasure in knowing that you have to be nice to them, and in seeing how far they can push that requirement. How much do you have to put up with? How creepy can they be and still make you smile awkwardly?
I was very lucky to have a lot of allies. A no-nonsense female manager who would say, “Okay, sir” and usher dudes into the theater at one job. A security guard at another job who would come up and pointedly ask harassers if they needed any help. As with creative industry “whisper networks,” a lot of workers look out for each other, and as shown in the Post piece, many managers are responsive to worker complaints and will ban customers. But not everyone gets this sort of support from their colleagues, and it comes down to sheer luck. It shouldn’t.
The dangerous dynamic of “the customer is always right” becomes especially clear when retail workers unionize, and we get to hear their concerns. When workers at Babeland sex shop in New York City voted to unionize, one of their chief complaints was inadequate help with problematic customers. They told The New York Times how customers would subject them to “invasive questions and even harassment,” and they advocated for “better training and support from management to deal with problematic customers.”
As we go through this moment of reckoning with sexual harassment, we can’t forget the millions of retail and food service workers who have to smile at the Roy Moores of the world. The deserve better training to deal with sexually harassing customers, and they deserve consistent, solid support systems across the industry.
(Via The Washington Post; image via Shutterstock)
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