Abstract
In Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work, Joya Misra and Kyla Walters offer novel insight into the experience of retail work at a time when schedules are precarious and workers are closely monitored by surveillance technologies. Walking Mannequins is a timely book. Retail jobs remain one of the most common occupations in the United States. This is also an industry dominated by women—including many women of color—who are paid poorly and receive few benefits. The book draws on interviews with 55 current and former employees working primarily in teen-oriented clothing stores, paired with 35 store observations.
The book begins with an overview of retail clothing work. Fast-fashion stores do not expect clothing to last more than a few seasons, and companies take a similar approach to their employees. Turnover in these jobs is high, and managers invest little time in training to build workers’ skills. Instead, they focus on whether workers fit the look of the store. As in many service-sector jobs, employers have found ways to successfully transfer risk onto employees. New technologies allow managers to match staffing to demand, meaning that workers often have shifts changed with little notice. In an environment where few employees are scheduled for enough hours to pay their bills, managers reward workers not through better pay but through the opportunity to work more.
The next section documents workers’ relationships with managers, customers, and each other. Here, Misra and Walters differentiate between frontline managers, who work in stores, and corporate managers, who monitor employees from afar. These different actors operate within what Misra and Walters call the “service panopticon.” Frontline managers constantly surveil workers, monitoring their appearance and interactions with customers and checking their bags at the end of each shift. Outside of stores, corporate managers keep watch using a barrage of metrics collected from cameras, computer software, sensors, customer surveys, and secret shoppers. Although frontline workers question the utility of these metrics, this data effectively transfers organizational decision-making power to corporate managers and strips both frontline managers and workers of agency.
This section also sheds light on the unexpected challenges retail workers navigate. Just as managers keep watch over workers, workers monitor customers as part of the service panopticon. Managers often task Black workers with the job of trailing Black customers whom they suspect of shoplifting, as if racial profiling is less harmful if outsourced to a Black employee. Workers are similarly bothered by expectations to push branded credit cards onto customers, which they find exploitative. Indeed, a surprisingly large percentage of store revenues come not through selling clothes but through credit cards with exorbitant interest rates.
The final chapters delve into the concept of aesthetic labor. Despite their low pay, workers at teen-oriented retail stores are held to high aesthetic standards. These stores don’t necessarily have uniforms, but instead regulate appearance through extensive “look policies.” Workers should appear as though they naturally wear the store’s merchandise in their everyday lives. Rather than throwing on a company t-shirt at the start of their shift, workers must contort themselves to embody the brand from head to toe. The examples that Misra and Walters document are striking. Workers describe trudging through the snow in January in their Hollister-issued flip-flops and are threatened to be sent home for unsanctioned nail colors. In one particularly memorable vignette, a manager opened a store late to re-style a worker’s hair, implying, in no uncertain terms, that the worker’s appearance was more important than any sales they may have made that morning. Workers are similarly pressured to buy the latest fashions, which—even with employee discounts—are expensive.
Throughout, Misra and Walters highlight the gendered and racial implications of this bodily regulation. Racialized beauty hierarchies valorize white middle-class norms and often relegate workers of color to the back of the store. Black women, in particular, describe difficulties fitting into the narrow “look” expected in these settings. Interestingly, men report fewer issues with performing aesthetic labor but are more troubled by expectations to perform emotional labor, perhaps, Misra and Walters argue, because they are less accustomed to performing this labor in their everyday lives.
There is also important variation in these practices between stores. Employees are given more latitude at stores that cater to a wider audience, such as Macy’s or Old Navy. The intense monitoring of workers’ appearance is particularly strict at stores owned by Abercrombie & Fitch (including Abercrombie Kids, Hollister, and Gilly Hicks). This does make me wonder whether these practices are unique to a specific set of stores that narrowly target middle-class teens and young adults. These stores are known, after all, for a highly specific style that has remained remarkably consistent over time.
As with most good books, this one inspires further questions. Walking Mannequins is tightly focused on experiences within the workplace, though I am curious to know how precarious schedules shape workers’ lives outside of stores. Considering that nearly all the respondents were enrolled in college, I wonder what challenges unpredictable schedules and aesthetic labor pose for students. I also wonder how the rise of online shopping might shift the patterns documented in the book. Will the aesthetic labor of retail workers remain important as more purchases are made online? Misra and Walters grapple with some of these questions in the conclusion. Yet the future of work is difficult to predict in a period characterized by drastic changes in how and where work is done.
Another lingering question is why corporate managers make the decisions they do, especially when they seem to undermine customer service and, potentially, sales. Misra and Walters were, unfortunately, unable to get the perspectives of higher-level corporate actors, who were reluctant to be interviewed for the project. Corporate therefore remains a black box throughout much of the book, though workers describe their interactions with district managers during their rare visits to stores as well as their surveillance presence. Yet the lack of first-hand accounts from corporate managers is perhaps revealing. Despite their seemingly endless data on stores, corporate managers appear out of step with the realities of working in them. Some companies mandate that workers use a limited set of scripts when interacting with customers, which respondents describe as stilted and nonsensical. Persistently understaffing stores through just-in-time scheduling likewise means that stores are often disorganized to an extent that might drive potential customers away. As Misra and Walters note in the conclusion, “Degrading work in these ways lowers customer service capacity, undermining long-term profitability in favor of unimpeachable metrics” (p. 223). These practices may therefore reduce the ability of brick-and-mortar stores to stay viable in the future.
Walking Mannequins is an enjoyable and engaging read, and an important contribution to the literature on work and occupations. Misra and Walters give voice to a diverse set of workers whose emotional labor and corporate-mandated scripts often conceal the challenges and intricacies of their jobs. The book is well suited for introductory-level sociology courses, especially considering that many students have likely had experience working in or shopping at the stores described in this book. Walking Mannequins is sure to encourage students and other readers to think differently about these stores and retail work more broadly.