Retail – A Gendered Workspace

Women dominated retail work in the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, retail trade is well-suited to gender-specific enquiries – in this article, enquiries into working-time issues and the social valuation of specific types of work. Until the 1950s, however, the retail trade was mainly organised around small shops with one owner, usually male, and up to five employees, usually female.Footnote ¹ However, as a result of the shortage of men after the Second World War and men's subsequent access to better-paying jobs in industry during the West German economic miracle, the retail sector experienced a labour shortage.Footnote ²

At the same time, more women in West Germany than before, especially wives and mothers, began to work in the growing service sector.Footnote ³ But until a reform of the marriage and family law in 1977, West German women were ‘permitted to do paid work outside the home only if it was reconcilable with their “obligations” to the household and family’.Footnote ⁴ The male-breadwinner/female-homemaker family was the norm to follow. Many women therefore accepted or even actively sought part-time positions.Footnote ⁵

For retail companies, these arrangements were useful, as employers could adjust paid working time to actual work load. For women working part-time, such jobs often meant a lifetime of low wages and double workloads, with circular effects on labour supply and demand in the trade: throughout the twentieth century, most retail employees continued to be women.Footnote ⁶

This holds true for both German states, although there were differences. In East Germany it was already more common and politically desirable in the 1950s for women, including those with children, to be integrated into the labour market. The model of the ‘two-earner, housewife family’ became the East Germany ideal. This emancipation imposed from above was successful in that women were able to outsource some of their duties, namely child rearing, to state institutions, but they also had to accept ideological influence. And even in East Germany, traditional role models remained dominant in social practice. Women were also primarily responsible for housework, family work and child rearing.Footnote ⁷ As Alexandria Ruble stated in her latest book: ‘in practice, similar gendered divisions of labour existed on both sides of the German–German border’.Footnote ⁸

Migrant women most often found jobs in the textile production or food industry, since German language skills were usually required for work in the retail sector.Footnote ⁹ When working in retail, migrant female workers were predominantly employed for ‘unskilled or low-skilled, poorly paid, physically demanding and unhealthy jobs’.Footnote ¹⁰

This article discusses the blurred boundaries between work and non-work based on the working practices of shop assistants in the West German retail sector. A praxeological approach in combination with an analytical focus on working time helps to identify what kind of work was considered valuable (and was valorised) in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹ Some tasks are mixed in this regard; they lack clear boundaries. They show that the line between work and non-work in retail was notoriously and constantly thin, especially for women. And they exemplify that women's work was not perceived as proper wage labour when measured against the work done by the standard male breadwinner. As Jane Whittle points out in her latest essay, the most common definition of work is that of ‘what you do while “at work” . . . to earn an income’, to participate in the labour force and contribute to the economy.Footnote ¹² This is, however, a problematic definition. When it comes to women's work which often consists of what is described as ‘care work’, including housework and caring for family members, its value for the economy is often overlooked, and therefore women's contribution to the economy is undervalued.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, often the value of certain female work practices is overlooked, as this article will show.

Mixed work practices are understood here as forms of work that cannot be clearly assigned to either work or non-work. While employees regard them as part of their work, management and customers view them as a matter of course or merely an individual characteristic of a particular worker. The latter interpretation often accompanies a failure to remunerate these tasks or skills accordingly. What seems to be happening here is the continuity of the idea of a ‘female nature’. Because certain social skills and characteristics have been seen as part of female nature since the 1920s – and still in the 1960s and sometimes even nowadays – such as friendliness and diligence, and not as part of culture or personal achievement, they have not been adequately rewarded.Footnote ¹⁴ For work in retail, this has a particularly extreme and disadvantageous effect on women's pay, as it is precisely these characteristics and skills that are important here and that count as the actually decisive professional qualifications.Footnote ¹⁵ Retail work consists of many work practices that are – at times – perceived as non-work and are therefore not paid appropriately or are not accompanied by a higher status or reputation.

Examples include the work habit of smiling, the work phenomenon of ‘serving until the end’,Footnote ¹⁶ extended breaks, overtime and the common willingness to engage in part-time work. All these phenomena can be viewed as irregular activities in regular occupations. This characterisation brings light to work situations that can be described as non-working activities; while the latter four are on the borderline between work and leisure, the habit of smiling is not remunerated although considered central to service work.

To analyse retail work, I assume here that each sales activity can be divided into seven tasks: greeting, serving, taking payment, packing, saying goodbye, managing goods and maintaining the store.Footnote ¹⁷ I use examples from chains in the German food and textile retail sectors, which are the two largest sectors in terms of both the number of employees and the number of companies.Footnote ¹⁸ The stores analysed belonged to the grocery chains of the Ulm-based Gaissmaier company, which were located in south-western Germany, and the Latscha company, headquartered in Frankfurt and scattered throughout the Rhine-Main region. In addition, male apparel specialist Hirmer in Munich and textile retailers Beck (Munich) and Braun (Stuttgart) are analysed. In order to supplement these local and regional players with a national perspective, the clothing stores operated by C&A, a leading European clothing retailer with its core market in West Germany, are taken into account. At the same time, different strategies are examined here: while Hirmer and Beck targeted an upmarket clientele, C&A and Braun both sought to attract a broad customer base.Footnote ¹⁹

The time frame the article is looking at concerns the years between the 1950s and the 1990s. I argue that even though major changes in the retail sector took place during that period – introduction of self service, computerisation – the gendered structures of work in retail did not change with it; instead, work practices like working part-time even reinforced gendered spaces of work.

With the introduction of self-service in the late 1950s and early 1960s, certain sales practices were outsourced or transferred to machines. Employees lost their influence over their previous sphere and no longer controlled access to the goods. They found themselves in an increasingly marginalised position, which also affected their standing in society.Footnote ²⁰ The balance of power in the grocery stores of the 1960s was hierarchically structured along gender lines, so that the introduction of self-service did not affect men and women in the same way. Women worked in the positions that were increasingly marginalised, while men assumed management positions or specialised in ordering, advertising or marketing.Footnote ²¹ This showed in the 1960s what had already been observed in the service sector in the 1920s.Footnote ²²

The Trade, Banking and Insurance Union (Gewerkschaft Handel, Banken und Versicherungen; HBV) along with the superordinate German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund; DGB) and the German Salaried Employees’ Union (Deutsche Angestellten-Gewerkschaft; DAG) were supposed to represent the interests of female shop assistants. But the level of organisation in the retail sector was traditionally low.Footnote ²³ One reason for this was that many women worked part-time, a situation that made it more difficult to mobilise them for union involvement. The trade unions themselves were ambivalent and sceptical towards part-time employees.Footnote ²⁴ The size of the company was also a decisive factor. In fact, at that time, the size of retail companies was usually rather small, and their employees were less likely to be unionised.Footnote ²⁵

Many of the examples of how female sales assistants experienced marginalisation are difficult to grasp, as they were not recorded in writing but based on daily interactions. Therefore, employing a praxeological approach, the article relies on various, rarely used source materials such as job advertisements, instruction materials and leaflets, but also trade union documents and oral history sources.Footnote ²⁶ These shed a unique light on working time and working practices and help answer three questions: Is time spent on the important work habit of smiling and on overtime perceived as work? Who controls or deliberately exceeds working time? Is there a gender-specific difference in the organisation of working time?

A special feature of the retail trade is that the usual dichotomy in the world of work – between employer and employee – is supplemented by a third party, the customer. There is thus a third dimension in the contest for the organisation of time. This trilateral pattern makes work in the retail sector paradigmatic for many professions in the service sector where exceeding working hours directly benefits customers, but also signals a lack of respect for employees. Because their professional ethos requires them to satisfy customers, sales assistants are in a double relationship of dependency: towards the company and towards the customers.

What this article can add to the field of gender and work studies in a (Western) European context is the following: even when women were working there were micro mechanisms and hidden structures of working practice in operation that prevented them from equal status and equal pay.

First, the article tackles the practice of working part-time as a female choice. Then it examines three ways of irregular extensions of working time such as overlong lunch breaks, unpaid overtime and the practice of ‘serving until the end’. Afterwards the essential practice of smiling is under investigation, and in the conclusion the consequences for gendered work spaces in retail will be made clear.

Time Framing: Working Part-time as a Female Choice

In the early 1960s, the number of part-time employees in the German retail sector rose significantly over a relatively short period of time,Footnote ²⁷ in keeping with the general increase in part-time work (see Table 1). The trend proved robust, and at 28.4 per cent, retail was the most popular sector for female part-time work by 1976.Footnote ²⁸

Table 1.

Part-time employees as a percentage of the total number of employees in the retail trade sector, 1960–90. (*The figure for the year 1989 is taken from Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1990, 236–7.)Footnote ²⁹

In 1968 the proportion of part-time employees in textile retailing was 17.2 per cent, lower than the proportion of part-time employees in food retailing at 23.4 per cent.Footnote ³⁰ However, the 1979 figures show a significant increase in the part-time rate to 32.8 per cent in textile retailing and 34.4 per cent in food retailing,Footnote ³¹ which meant that these two sectors were aligned and both were above the average part-time rate in retailing. Within just ten years, this working practice had spread to almost the entire retail sector. A gender-specific difference can be observed here: in sectors where more men than women were employed, the part-time rate was lower.Footnote ³² At the end of the 1980s, the part-time rate continued to rise. In 1987 the numbers for food retailing (45.1 per cent) and textile retailing (45 per cent) remained above average.Footnote ³³

The reasons for taking up or switching to part-time employment were varied. Companies noted, for example, that by this means they could better cope with peak shopping times. To women in the 1960s/1970s, part-time work seemed to offer a good opportunity to take a first step into the labour market, and it was widely believed at the time that working women would still have enough time to look after their children and household.Footnote ³⁴ Only in 1977 legislation was introduced that was based on a more partnership-oriented family life. However, it was to take several decades before this approach would be reflected in social practice.Footnote ³⁵

Part-time employees were often assigned menial tasks that were considered easy to interrupt and could be continued on another day or by another person. Over time, the responsible tasks shifted to the full-time employees, i.e. to male colleagues. Wages and appreciation were also distributed according to gender. As a result, women remained in subordinate professional positions, which ultimately meant that they also remained in subordinate positions in a society that set a premium on income and occupational status.Footnote ³⁶

Part-time work was initially not common in the high-priced textile retail trade. In 1954, the personnel statistics of the menswear retailer Hirmer recorded a total of eleven temporary workers. With 105 permanent employees, they made up some 10 per cent of the workforce.Footnote ³⁷ In the 1960s, some of these temporary workers were converted into part-time employees with social security benefits,Footnote ³⁸ so that in 1966 only half of them were still listed as purely temporary workers.Footnote ³⁹ In the 1970s, the number of part-time workers rose again, to 9 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁰

A personnel list from 1977 provides the first direct information on the fields of activity of part-time employees. According to this list, a total of two men worked part-time, one in the tailoring department. Eight women were employed at the checkouts and one at the packing table, and the remaining ten worked in sales.Footnote ⁴¹ A single example from 1979 shows that in rare instances, part-time employees were converted into full-time employees.Footnote ⁴²

In the 1980s, the number of part-time employees stabilized at around 8 per cent before rising again slightly from 1987.Footnote ⁴³ The following year, the temporary staff members were integrated into the overall workforce by receiving long-term part-time contracts, and the number of part-time employees at Hirmer rose sharply: in January 1989, the proportion was 21.5 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁴ Despite this increase the part-time share was comparatively low, as the ratio was generally much higher in the textile retail sector. At the end of the 1980s, it stood at between 40 and 80 per cent, depending on the company.Footnote ⁴⁵ At Hirmer, thirty-three people worked part-time in sales and twenty-five in the ‘checkout, packing table, office, customer service’ area, with another three in the journeyman tailoring workshop. In sales, the proportion of part-time employees was 21.8 per cent, and at the checkouts, between 55.5 and 64 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁶ There were no part-time employees in the ‘male’ areas of advertising and decoration, alteration tailoring, home craftsmen, home security and sales. Hirmer was thus one of those companies which regarded part-time work as a specifically female form of employment and offered male employees almost exclusively full-time positions.Footnote ⁴⁷

In the retail food trade, part-time work was widespread early on. In 1961 Latscha's annual report stated: ‘They are mostly housewives, some of whom used to be saleswomen and now want to earn something extra, but for family reasons can no longer work full days.’ The proportion of women working part-time within the company was 29 per cent, just under one-third.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1972, Latscha advertised part-time work with a brochure aimed specifically at women.Footnote ⁴⁹ One learns that at the time, ‘every 2nd employee at Latscha is part-time’.Footnote ⁵⁰

However, things looked different in smaller shops in urban areas. In Latscha's small inner-city discounters the ratio was as high as 71 per cent full-time to 29 per cent part-time employees.Footnote ⁵¹ But a nearly levelled ratio could be seen in 1976 at the big Latscha hypermarkets where 300 full-time employees compared to 284 part-time employees .Footnote ⁵² These figures show that part-time work was particularly worthwhile for companies with large-scale sales formats. At the end of the 1980s, part-time ratios in the food retail sector stood between 24 and 77 per cent, depending on the type and size of the company.Footnote ⁵³

Union members were less likely to work part-time, and fewer part-time workers were interested in unionisation than full-time workers.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the 1950s, retail trade unions still regarded part-time work as a marginal issue. Some trade unionists feared that the ‘extra work’ of part-time employees could depress piecework and collectively agreed wages, and that part-time employees could not be well organised.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1956 the DGB agreed in principle to part-time work out of economic necessity, but at the same time it tried to protect the standard, eight-hour working day for the male breadwinner.Footnote ⁵⁶

But when part-time work became a socially desirable work-schedule model for married women and mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, unions had to react.Footnote ⁵⁷ The DGB adopted a statement in favour of equal treatment under social security, labour and collective bargaining law in 1966.Footnote ⁵⁸ Because of the high proportion of women, the HBV was comparatively early out in advocating for the recognition of part-time work and in making efforts to recruit members among part-time employees.Footnote ⁵⁹ But this approach continued to be controversial in the DGB's women's movement.Footnote ⁶⁰

In 1982, the HBV published its first workbook on part-time work and incorporated demands for part-time work into its collective bargaining policy.Footnote ⁶¹ The unions were particularly critical of ‘call girl systems’ and capacity-oriented variable working time (kapazitätsorientierte variable Arbeitszeit; ‘Kapovaz’).Footnote ⁶² This ‘constant readiness to work’ was not remunerated, but it had been established through an obligation in the employment contract.Footnote ⁶³ From 1990 onwards, part-time employees were included in the HBV collective agreements. After that time, the planned reduction in working hours would also apply to them and a regular weekly working schedule would be set.Footnote ⁶⁴

Notably, however, part-time work had an effect not only on daily or weekly working hours, but also on the number of hours worked over an entire lifespan. As Jonathan Gershuny has pointed out, the missing hours due to part-time work or baby breaks add up over the course of a lifetime. As a result, women have lower qualifications, are promoted less often, and have less responsible positions, which leads to a gender pay gap that increases with age.Footnote ⁶⁵ Statistically discounted as ‘free time’, childcare and household duties were of course very real work, but not remunerated.Footnote ⁶⁶

This pattern still applies. A 2022 survey found that:

So while part-time work originally seemed like a good idea and was hailed as an innovation, it operated to reinforce the subordination of working women.Footnote ⁶⁸

Working part-time as a female work practice in retail is therefore clearly a factor of lower pay and lower prestige of female labour. Ultimately, working hours were therefore framed in gender-specific terms. According to Zimmerman, a lack of work in the welfare state entails a number of problems, concerning, for example, social order and participation. This observation also applies to reduced working hours in the context of part-time employment. It is difficult to position yourself adequately in a social order that is defined by full-time employment if your waged labour accounts for just half of the time you are working.

Irregular Extensions of Working Hours

Sales staff regularly exceeded their working hours, as it was a common practice to continue serving customers even though the shop had already closed. This custom, along with mandatory long lunch breaks and unpaid but taken-for-granted overtime, contributed to companies’ reducing their employees’ paid time during actual working hours. By analysing these working-time phenomena, we can assess the extent to which employees and their working time were valued and respected and therefore valorised accordingly.Footnote ⁶⁹

Dating back to the 1938 working-time regulations (Arbeitszeitordnung), as well as the 1956 Store Closing Act, a special regulation applied to customers who were still in the shop at closing time: ‘Customers present at closing time may still be served’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, this regulation was used quite a lot, sometimes in a provocative manner that openly challenged both the authorities’ rules and employees’ rights.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1968, the Cornelius Stüssgen company in Cologne placed a newspaper advert asking its customers to enter its grocery shops one minute before closing time on Fridays to do all their weekend shopping. The advert emphasised the alleged interest of the staff, pointing out that the longer sales hours would mean less ‘hustle and bustle and crowding, [which] was unacceptable for customers and employees’.

In 1974, the Baden-Württemberg Consumer Association organised an ‘unhurried shopping’ (Bummelkauf) campaign in Stuttgart to protest against the shop closing-time law. Customers were not supposed to enter the shops until after 6 pm. While the organisation emphasised that their campaign was not directed against employees but, rather, against legal restrictions, it came at the expense of the sales staff's working hours and without their knowledge or consent. The consumer organisation (and the customers heeding its call) single-handedly made use of the time capacity of the sales personnel and determined the boundary between working hours and free time.

After these campaigns became widespread, the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice took up the issue. The First Civil Panel of the Federal Court of Justice ruled against a shopping centre that had advertised that, ‘If you have entered our store by 6.29 pm, you can still shop in peace, without any hustle and bustle’. The court found that this intentional increase in the evening flow of customers violated both the store-closing act and the law against unfair competition.Footnote ⁷²

The practice of ‘serving until the end’ also existed in the textile retail trade. In an interview, a long-standing employee of Hirmer in Munich recalled: ‘We always went out on time. Unless we still had customers.’Footnote ⁷³ A poem written for a company outing at Braun in Stuttgart mentions this common practice: ‘You choose and sort until a quarter past seven, and would have preferred to stay longer even!’ It was not the sales assistants’ working hours that determined when the shop closed but the needs of the customers.Footnote ⁷⁴

The practice described dates back to the days of full-service retail. In that context, it made sense if the closing time did not automatically end the sales talk. By contrast, in the self-service world of retail, which has prevailed since the 1970s, the rule lost its raison-d’être. ‘Serving until the end’ thus was (and continues to be) an underhand way to extend the working hours for shop assistants deliberately, rendering planning nigh on impossible. While the wording suggests that the extended time is a trifle, time piled up week after week.

Since this undeclared overtime was legitimised as a courtesy to customers, employees were not allowed to show any displeasure: the work tasks they performed while ‘serving until the end’ were in no way different from those during ordinary hours. As a result, overtime was set by customers and company owners. The unpaid labour and time interests of the saleswomen were neither recorded nor monitored – and hardly ever paid for.

The situation was similar for working-time violations during lunch breaks. Even then, sales assistants were expected to display customer friendliness: ‘Imagine you meet a customer on the stairs on the way to the canteen who is looking around. Our willingness to sell … is also effective there and helps customers where they need help.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Moreover, the breaks were supposed to be used to optimise one's own appearance, since looks and outfits were part of the sales work: ‘Make sure that you are relieved to briefly put your outer appearance in order. Above all, remember to take advantage of the breaks to do this.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Two things become clear: First, women's physical appearance continued to be one of their essential qualifications in the service sector. Second, the value of leisure time, which became more important in the 1960s, did not seem to have gained any significance in this female-defined labour sector.Footnote ⁷⁷

Another way for companies to extend working hours was to impose extra-long lunch breaks. In the 1950s, it was still common for working hours to coincide with shop opening hours. This led to retail employees working six days a week and sixty hours in total.Footnote ⁷⁸ With the Store Closing Act of 1956Footnote ⁷⁹ and the reduction of working hours to a forty-five-hour week in 1957,Footnote ⁸⁰ however, shop operations and staff working hours were decoupled, so that a real reduction of working hours in the retail sector became possible. This possibility was thwarted by extended lunch breaks through which the standard daily working time of eight hours could be formally maintained.Footnote ⁸¹ One example of this type of lunch break from the early 1950s is described by a young sales assistant at the Beck department store whose boss sent her home for her lunch break:

That this tactic with its blend of financial and paternalistic motives was nothing unusual, but rather common, is illustrated by a letter from the C&A's central management, which pointed out that the two-hour lunch break of the ‘young people’ was no longer being observed in many cases. Therefore, it admonished store managers to make sure that the junior staff should not overwork themselves.Footnote ⁸³ To compensate for the reduction in working hours brought about by the 1956 Store Closing Act, C&A further extended the breaks at lunchtime from the previous thirty minutes to at least ninety and up to 120 minutes.Footnote ⁸⁴

During the 1960s, staff shortages and a reduction to a 42.5 hour week brought an improvement in some places, and also the reduction to forty hours per week in 1971. However, even the reduction of working time to 37.5 hours per week did not necessarily mean immediate relief for the employees, as is illustrated by the DAG's criticisms of the implementation by the companies.Footnote ⁸⁵

In general, breaks did not count as paid working time. The need for the work force to re-energise was thus interpreted as the employees’ leisure time. This pattern was challenged by the HBV at the end of the 1980s. At a regional conference in Erlangen in 1988, Bavarian delegates voted to demand paid rest breaks for ‘employees who work predominantly at self-service checkouts’ in the coming collective bargaining disputes.Footnote ⁸⁶ Working at the cash registers was considered so strenuous and hazardous to health that paying for recovery time seemed justified to trade union representatives.

For most of the period under consideration, however, sales workers had to find their own ways to escape the stress of never-ending customer lines at checkout counters; the use of restroom breaks as a form of recreation loomed large in this picture.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such practices remind us that it was not solely management that played with the rigid limits of working time but that employees, too, had agency. ‘Empty labour’, to use Roland Paulsen's categories, came in two varieties: ‘soldiering’ and ‘coping’. While the former ‘refers to [an] intentional type of output restriction’ and helps to regain sovereignty over the use of time, the latter is ‘“recreational” in a non-euphemistic sense . . . [as] the employee's intention . . . is to remain at a productive maximum’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus, in a speech on Saint Nicholas Day at the Beck company in 1971, a few words of rebuke were addressed to transgressions of working time. Some employees took advantage of the in-house cafeteria to invite their families and spend time with them while at work. Unacceptably, both working time and the workplace were used for private purposes and leisure. Criticism was also applied to conducting private conversations whilst at work and for the apparently frequent instances of using working hours for one's own shopping.Footnote ⁸⁹

The utilisation of free time thus mainly affected grey areas between work and leisure. This cut both ways: a degree of elaborate hairdressing was usually necessary for a professional appearance, yet it had to be done outside working hours. Meanwhile, private conversations and exchanges with the family were no longer possible when the shops closed late in the evenings – nor, for that matter, was shopping for oneself. In negotiating these spaces and (re)appropriating free time, employees pursued coping strategies that, though neither unique to sales nor to West Germany,Footnote ⁹⁰ were particularly notable in the retail sector with its ill-defined boundaries between work and non-work. If the Beck example shows a certain degree of autonomy on the part of the sales assistants who subverted work assignments by briefly escaping the company's control, it also points to the uneven availability of such discretionary practices. Part-time employees were much less likely to be afforded such opportunities because of stricter time management and more narrowly defined work activities.

Another practice of extending working hours beyond the agreed limit was regular overtime, which was often required of retail workers as working days were too short to complete the tasks at hand – a genuine predicament for the employees, as one worker described at the end of the 1980s:

Other frequent deviations from the regular schedule were working on the regular day off and shifting and swapping the day off.Footnote ⁹² In particular, preparation and follow-up work in food retail was not always counted as working time.Footnote ⁹³

One practice at Hirmer, which was similar to overtime and indeed bordered on illegality, was to skip the lunch break and have the working hours paid out instead. Former employees reported that this could mean ‘40 DM, or 30 DM, or 20 DM in cash. If you didn't go on your lunch break’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The employees’ families benefited from this financial bonus for a long time: ‘The table-time sales, the family, they lived off it for whole months’.Footnote ⁹⁵ When the five-day week was introduced at the company in 1970, employees could elect to have their unused vacation days paid out.Footnote ⁹⁶ The notion of ‘selling’ recreational time amply illustrated the general commodification of workers’ time but also the particular blurring of the division of working and non-working hours as devised by the law and enshrined in employment contracts.

That this logic also worked in reverse order is illustrated by the case of Frankfurt food retailer Latscha. Here, overtime could not be contractually paid, so it was to be either avoided or compensated with time off. In the 1950s, the management assumed that fewer working hours were more important to (female) employees than higher pay. Therefore, the store manager was asked to schedule the work so that it could be completed in the allotted time. However, it was made explicitly clear that certain preparatory work such as changing clothes and doing private shopping did not count as working time.Footnote ⁹⁷ It was also pointed out that ‘the prescribed 30-minute clean-up time must be observed’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In effect, this amounted to undeclared and unpaid overtime.

Questions of time off and overtime were the same for the (mostly) male store managers at Latscha – but the solution was different. Assuming higher career ambitions, managers were expected to put in a great deal of extra time, but – in contrast to sales assistants – it was remunerated. Until 1961, overtime was compensated by a bonus above the standard pay scale. After that, store managers were granted an additional 3.5 hours of time off per week to compensate for overtime. Overtime was still required – ‘in view of the bonuses paid, [the] store managers should not be petty about overtime’ – but it was paid only ‘on special order’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Realising that it was hardly possible to claim the free time in practice, the Latscha management changed overtime regulations again and reduced free time to 3.5 hours per month while overtime was again paid at a higher rate.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, the expectations remained the same: ‘We expect you to run your store successfully. That's why we pay high bonuses and expect and know that you won't be petty when it comes to working hours.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Here, too, the choice of words was telling: the repeated insinuation that any insistence on contractual obligations would be ‘petty’ (kleinlich) invoked notions of monetarised time as well as a tit-for-tat attitude: power and pay came at the price of the company's right to colonise off time. The difference to the predominantly female sales clerks was that Latscha's higher echelons assumed that their male line managers did not want leisure time anyway but status and money.

All of the phenomena described above – overtime, overlong lunch breaks and ‘serving until the end’ – were unpaid practices because they were not recorded but were based on assumptions, were not regulated but taken for granted, and were not valorised because they were ‘just necessary to be done’ or were viewed only as follow-up tasks. As these working hours were generally unpaid, they did not contribute to a higher status for working women but on the contrary reinforced their subordination in the gender hierarchy of the retail trade.

Smile! Performing Sales between Habit and Work

Social scientists use the term ‘interaction work’ for work in the service sector.Footnote ¹⁰² This means that many activities that make up work come about only through interaction with a counterpart, and in the sales profession that counterpart is the customer. This particular type of interaction entails additional work alongside the actual sale, including managing one's own emotions and accommodating those of customers,Footnote ¹⁰³ engaging in cooperative work and the subjectification of work activities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The fundamental work skills for successful interaction – smiling, conversing, using fine motor skills – have been feminised since the nineteenth century and were still deemed natural traits of women in the 1960s (despite the largely legal equality of the sexes),Footnote ¹⁰⁵ rather than actual job skills that require an effort and thus deserve payment. Job advertisements shed light on the ideals that companies had in mind for their employees – including the requirements for unpaid interaction. By analysing job advertisements, we can identify the required work tasks, work practices and gender-specific attributions and qualifications.

In the mid-1950s, the Gaissmaier food company expected applicants to ‘enjoy their work’ and be capable.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ By the early 1960s, the company was looking primarily for ‘reliable’ female sales assistants, and it now deliberately targeted women.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The training was described as particularly rewarding for girls, because they would later take over the financial planning in the marital household anyway.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They were also expected to sell with ‘zest and love’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Now personal commitment was demanded. This points to slightly changing ideas of femininity in professional contexts, where individual dedication and involvement started to be expected not only from the male managers but also the female sales personnel.

Nevertheless, the job advertisements show that the labour market around 1960 was still segmented along gender lines that covered a wide range of qualities. Exclusively male applicants were sought, for example, for the position of butcher and as co-drivers for delivery trucks; both jobs required a certain amount of physical strength.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The salary of the male connotated positions was higher than the average payment in the stores since it had to compete with the salaries in the industries. For the positions as ‘packers’ in large stores, female employees were targeted, including part-time workers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Packing involved sorting and maintaining the warehouse, pre-packing loose goods, stocking shelves and labelling merchandise. For these activities, a certain dexterity was expected, a skill associated with female work. Change was slow but come it did: at the end of the 1970s, gender was no longer overtly relevant when Gaissmaier recruited sales assistants and store managers. Only job adverts for the position of butcher continued to address exclusively male applicants.Footnote ¹¹²

For Latscha, efficiency was also a desirable trait primarily attributed to women. Seen through the employer's eyes, the characteristic resulted from the specifically female embodiment of the virtues of diligence and willingness to perform, which were central in the post-war economy.Footnote ¹¹³ This, however, did not replace older expectations of empathy and attractiveness but, rather, supplement them: In 1961, two men explained to employees that despite the spread of self-service, ‘the customer [wants] the friendly advice of a saleswoman’, and that ‘capable good-looking saleswomen’ were still needed for this purpose.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The job advertisements placed by textile retail companies echoed those of the grocery stores in terms of requirements, services advertised and gender specificity.Footnote ¹¹⁵ One ad sought ‘a confident manner, a well-groomed appearance and pleasure in dealing with customers’ while another promised female applicants a return to working life: ‘Your second training path at C&A will give you opportunities for a new profession as a saleswoman.’Footnote ¹¹⁶

C&A was specifically looking for temporary workers, to whom it offered ‘a good extra income’, ‘professional training’ and the opportunity to work on individual days.Footnote ¹¹⁷ A special feature was a call for gentlemen as temporary help for Saturday sales. They were also offered good pay, and ‘pleasure in dealing with customers, helpfulness and a well-groomed appearance’ were required, no different from their female colleagues.Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, as male workers were sought only for Saturdays, they were apparently presumed to already have other employment and to accept this work only for the sake of extra income.

An example of a job advertisement for trainees at Hirmer at the end of the 1980s shows that, despite the occasional softening of stereotypes, little had changed in the general expectations sales staff had to meet. Not only did formulations such as an interest in fashion and ‘an outgoing, likeable personality’ more often than not imply female job seekers,Footnote ¹¹⁹ against the background of the expansion of higher education of the previous decade, formally scarcely qualified selling was increasingly regarded as inferior work and thus assumed to be solely the realm of women. An anonymous job application from the same period illustrates the decline in social recognition of the sales profession: ‘Journeyman baker seeks work, also as a saleswoman.’Footnote ¹²⁰ While unwittingly comical, the phrasing revealed the negative connotation of the profession and its female gender.

The qualities of friendliness and politeness were also omnipresent in internal brochures, staff magazines and circulars to employees, as well as ‘certain embodied capacities and attributes that favourably appeal to customers’.Footnote ¹²¹ Employees had to ‘show a friendly face, even if sad’.Footnote ¹²² They were expected to keep their composure at all times, as was underlined by management's instructions to their female staff: ‘A good saleswoman makes an effort for every customer … . And we repeat that we will dismiss sales assistants who do not want to improve in this respect.’Footnote ¹²³ To check on their personnel, the Latscha management used test buyers until the mid-1950s. These found fault with performances across the board and notably where the company's external image was concerned. Among the incriminated points, the lack of cleanliness and friendliness (‘slow service, untidy hair, surly reception of customers . . . dirty coats, dirty floors’) stood out with its criticism of personal traits.Footnote ¹²⁴

Technological change did not do away with such worries. When Latscha switched to self-service, the checkout staff first had to learn to cope with their new, restricted role: functioning as a checkout machine and putting on a smile at the same time. In 1962 the company headquarters, apparently dissatisfied with their staff's performance, called for a ‘female cashier competition’, with ‘ballot papers at all tills’ and customers as judges.Footnote ¹²⁵ Although accompanied by photos displaying employees in high spirits, actual practices in the stores obviously did not correspond to the management's specifications and therefore had to be re-enforced through such disciplinary measures.

At C&A, a ‘courtesy campaign’ was launched in 1952. The response was initially positive, but the employees’ efforts waned after a short time. In one store, five employees were even dismissed for lack of politeness. In 1954 a ‘courtesy competition’ was planned as a way to ensure polite behaviour: ‘These public evaluations are to be the basis for awarding prizes to the most courteous and service-oriented employees as well as for the possible follow-up of poorly rated employees.’Footnote ¹²⁶ A decade later courteous service was the topic of the first-ever audio-visual show specially designed for C&A employee training, titled ‘Friendliness and Courtesy Help with Sales’. ‘Sales trainers’ led the exercises and drove home the need for constant civility and availability: ‘If we are doing non-sales work, we have to stop immediately when a customer comes in. It is not acceptable for goods to be sorted and put away according to orders, while the customer is overlooked during this time.’Footnote ¹²⁷ Clearly, pleasantness and politeness were not mere character traits but skills to be acquired and honed.

At the Braun company in Stuttgart, smiling and friendliness as work habits were primarily assigned to two, choreographed practices: greeting and saying goodbye. In the 1960s, staff greeted customers already at the entrance doors, as a photo caption illustrates: ‘A young lady greets us at the main entrance. She has put on her brightest smile in our honour.’Footnote ¹²⁸ Another photoFootnote ¹²⁹ is captioned as follows: ‘At the entrance located here, Ms S[…] is the receptionist.’Footnote ¹³⁰

Two important conclusions can be drawn for the working routines in retail: first, managers expected from their sales staff characteristics that had, and still have, female connotations, such as reliability, friendliness and a constant willingness to serve. This observation confirms the findings of contemporary historical research that a re-traditionalising of gender roles took place in the 1950s.Footnote ¹³¹ Little would change in this respect until the 1990s. In addition, with an ever-expanding consumer society, the focus on the customer was pervasive in all companies. And rather than relativising this trend, automation reinforced it: the criticism of ‘soulless’ sales after the introduction of self-service was countered with a redoubled emphasis on service.Footnote ¹³²

The interactive dimension of sales work implied anticipating customers’ expectations of and reactions to staff behaviour – in managers’ eyes, patrons could rightfully demand a neat appearance, cleanliness and a constant smile. And whereas work clothes with company logos were common in food retail, textile stores would regularly feature staff wearing the clothes on sale. In both cases, employees’ bodies served as additional advertising space for the companies.Footnote ¹³³ If the body, in Susan Bordo's famous formulation, is a ‘text of femininity’,Footnote ¹³⁴ it was the feminine more than any other body that served as a canvas for retail companies to paint their marketing agenda on. In contrast to billboard space, however, it was never paid for: this was not waged labour but an ancillary quality of the worker that came free of charge. What was more, the generally low pay in the retail sector articulated a lack of valorisation of these ancillary components of retail work that were mainly performed by women, among both employers and trade unionists. Labour skills that had female connotations were not seen as genuine skills but as natural habits, and they were therefore not remunerated.