What the Totalitarianism are you Talking about?

“[A] tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

C.S. Lewis

With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, I believe that he is quite wrong about this since the Communist regimes of the late 20^th century demonstrated that they could provide all the power of these omnipotent moral busybodies without any of their sincerity. I would argue that all totalitarian regimes exercise power in ways that are extremely similar to his hypothetical omnipotent moral busybodies and they only approval they seek is the continued exercise of power. Still, if we look at the strategies these oppressive rulers engage in to subjugate their citizens, I think Lewis has made an intriguing point There is no more effective totalitarian state than the one where the dictates of the security apparatus has been internalized by its citizens. In short, all totalitarian regimes find a way to turn the consciences of their citizens against themselves, while studiously avoiding having a conscience of their own.

You might be wondering, why the hell is Erin thinking about totalitarian regimes and how they oppress their people? I blame it on this little shelf above me. A guy can only spend so much time surfing the Internet. There on the shelf was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of those books that you are supposed to read (can we call it one those Books? Or at least, one of those Novels?) and truthfully, one that I had been meaning to read for a long time. And when I finished it, I saw that Lewis quote and it produced an internal dialogue that was long and complicated enough to warrant the time and effort needed to turn it into a blog post (and a good long one at that).

Since Kundera's novel was the proximate cause for this line of thought, let's start with the Communist police state (for the record, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Tom Stoppard have all written eloquently on this subject and I'm drawing from all of them). The Communist police state in action strongly resembles the more busybodies that Lewis talked about. The primary tactic applied to the population as whole is to create a culture of the surveilled, which is to say that the security apparatus is dedicated to creating institutions that give the average person the impression that they are constantly being watched. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discusses how Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon works in society. In the Panopticon (first envisioned as an ideal form of prison design by Bentham), the prisoners can all be seen by a security area at the center, but the center is opaque, so they never know when they are being observed. Since most people act in their own best interest, simple game theory calculations show that the most reasonable choice is to act as though they were always being watched (a perversion of Pascal's wager perhaps). Foucault feared the way that Western society had manifested this idea, but the Communist states took this idea and made it quite literal in applying it to their societies as a whole.

In the smaller states, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia every high profile dissident and everyone suspected of possibly being a dissident was convinced that they were being bugged and surveilled and informed on (history has shown that they were mostly right). Just in case anyone thought they could escape from the surveillance net, the regimes made examples of certain people, often they weren't particularly vocal or particularly dissident, in order to silence everyone else. This obviously has an (intentional) effect on the “normal” citizen as well (two birds, one large expensive stone). Kundera's Tereza talks about this feeling in very personal terms, comparing her experiences in Prague to her girlhood under the baleful eye of a once beautiful mother who survived the loss of her beauty by becoming old and grotesque openly and without shame and by stripping her daughter of her own right to feel shame. Tereza internalized this as an intense need for privacy and was thus constantly terrorized living in the post Prague Spring era. Kundera says that, for Tereza at least, a concentration camp is the total absence of privacy, in which case the ultimate goal of the security apparatus is to turn all of society into a concentration camp.

The overall effect of the Communist methods of subjugation (perfected over time beginning as early as 1917 under Lenin as Solzhenitsyn points out, lest anyone be tempted to blame this solely on Stalin's influence) is the same as that of a state of moral busybodies. We will get to the Nazis in a moment, but a key distinction between the Communists and the Nazis is only how they turned their citizen's consciences against themselves; both regimes made it a point of policy to do so. The Nazis had a generally a stable sense of what it was correct to believe, while Communists (both good and bad) never had any idea of what it was acceptable to believe. Maybe the Nazis would have gone this way as well, but Communism was riven from its very beginnings by disagreements and factions and a steady series of purges. Being a good Communist in 1933 was not the same as being a good Communist in 1938. This may confuse those who believe that Communists were acting rationally as a result of their ideology. Marx certainly didn't write anything new between 1933 and 1938. But Solzhenitsyn points out that these great waves of purges had a particularly chilling effect on society because the terror of the police state is most effective when no one has any idea why they were arrested. Solzhenitsyn points out that the KGB was adept at simply inventing reasons for you to be arrested and then convincing you during the interrogation that you are in fact guilty, turning their own consciences against them, usually by assuring them that if they go along with what the authorities want, they or their families will be spared. The key to understanding the success of all totalitarian regimes is understanding the extent to which the state makes a bargain with their citizens to trade their silence for their safety. The Communist regime was brutally effective at creating an atmosphere of fear and stifling a sense of community because they had no compunction about lying to, arresting, and generally bullying everyone, from the lowest citizen to the highest officials. The offered trade for safety was always false, but most people are helplessly innocent in the face of state power and they just refuse to believe that a government official would lie to them so blatantly. Note that the Communist regime is not acting in accordance with any particular ideology when it acts this way. Communism has its own set of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies and so a Communist regime will resort to Communist discourse to justify its actions, but underneath the rhetoric, we find an iron fist and an iron will to power. Words did not mean anything and they could be played with at will in the pursuit of silencing dissent, destroying a citizenry's sense of privacy (and therefore community), and generally creating an atmosphere of fear that made it possible to rule effectively.

As I mentioned earlier, the Nazis chose a slightly different tack. Instead of creating a blanket of fear through uncertainty, they enabled their regime and its goals by highlighting certainty in the calculations of personal safety. Much has been made of the silence of ordinary citizens concerning the Holocaust in Germany, both by Germans themselves in their intense introspective debates about the meaning of the Holocaust (or Shoah or Auschwitz or whatever you want to call it) and by outside observers (hence, Hitler's Willing Executioners). “But I didn't know!” is the classic cry of those who seek to justify themselves and this cry has been completely worked over in the course of the intense and long lasting debate about German history, showing how little power that phrase had in clearing anyone of guilt. It also doesn't give the Nazis enough credit for their adept manipulation of the conscience's of the average person. The Nazis co-opted their citizenry from the outset by offering a clear cut boundary. Pastor Niemoeller's classic quote lays it out: “First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew . . .” This was the bargain between the Nazis and the majority of its citizens: if you were not a Jew, then you have nothing to fear from us. If you don't help Jews or have anything to do with them, we will leave you alone and for this you will be grateful. You didn't have to agree with the Nazis beating Jews up, and you didn't have to do it yourself. All you had to do was not to look at it. From that point on, the Nazis own you, even if you don't take part in the beatings or the killings or the expropriation of property (though they did take your children and tried to make sure they took part – that's a much more effective compromise of someone's conscience after all). The Nazis have you on their side because the act of turning your back was immoral and people knew it. After all, no government that goes around beating people for one reason has any compunction about changing that reason to include you. But if the price for not getting beaten at the moment was not condemning the beating of this other guy, that is a price that most people will pay. But it creates a complicated calculus of guilt, which is undoubtedly intentional. If you didn't beat a Jew, and you didn't kill one, and you never saw the smoke from a crematorium, what reason did you have to be considered guilty was the public cry of many, but deep down, they knew that reason and the regime knew it too. The regime had purchased what it wanted from them, had used your own conscience against them by preying on this natural insecurity. Niemoeller finishes the thought of course (then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything). In other words, the Nazis also created an atmosphere of fear, removed any sense of privacy and community, and used the conscience of their citizens against themselves.

The Nazis co-opted their citizens by guaranteeing their safety and so silencing their consciences. The Communists arrested random samples of people periodically so that everyone assumed they were being spied on and could be arrested for doing something that was counterrevolutionary and since no one knew exactly what that meant, everyone's conscience became a weapon in the hands of state security. Both methods of totalitarian rule divided the people, kept them apart from themselves and never gave them the safety. You could argue that the difference in methodologies was a result in the difference in their ideologies and the end goals of the regimes, but that ignores a great big variable, which is that Communist countries perfected their tactics over the course of seventy years and the Nazi regime only lasted twelve, which is to say, the Nazis might have ended up in the same place, given enough time in power. My point is that despite these slight differences, the same effects were aimed for and achieved. Obviously the surface rhetorical and discursive strategies diverged, but in the end both regimes, and I think all totalitarian regimes, do the same things to their citizens and for the same reason, regardless of the surface rhetoric and ideological appearances. The purpose of a totalitarian regime is to exercise power in a particular way and it is always necessary to oppress their citizens to do so. Their justifications for this oppression differ (within limits) but all act to instill fear in their citizens, remove a sense of privacy at a societal level, and offer a fake bargain between safety and acquiescence which compromises the conscience of their citizens. In other words, Lewis was wrong to think that a completely oppressive society required moral busybodies who were convinced they were acting for their citizen's own good. He was right however, in sensing that a state that used the people's own good as it's justification could reach the highest heights of oppressive tyranny. There were good Communists who were true believers, and they had their uses, but true believers lack the flexibility of those who wish to remain in power, which is why the Communists had to purge them on regular basis, silencing those who would remind them of Marx's purpose, as if that were the point! Communist China is doing a wonderful job of living out this contradiction: Communism is as much a method of maintaining power as it is an ideology. Since the 1980s China has not let Marx or Mao get in the way of accruing economic strength.

C.S. Lewis is hardly alone in making the mistake of believing in the sincerity of the rhetoric of oppressive regimes rather than recognizing them as a means to an end, but nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. All totalitarian regimes fundamentally act to the same ends: terrorizing and silencing their populace by finding a way to use the conscience of the populace against itself. While true believers exist and though they help to provide the ideological and rhetorical cloak that enables totalitarian regimes, totalitarianism is fundamentally devoid of ideology. The surface rhetoric changes from regime to regime because the realities of power differ from place to place, but you will always find with such regimes that ideology is a cloak applied to the iron fist of power. Some (clueless) leaders may even believe some of the stuff they are spouting, though I have my doubts about that. Is Qaddafi really so insane that he sincerely believes the claptrap he spouts? I don't think so. Whatever the cloak, the underlying imperative of a totalitarian regime is to get and retain a certain type of power. Ideology provides a discursive reservoir for the rhetoric intended for public consumption. It's also a handy weapon against any of their citizens who make the mistake of actually believing any of it.

What are they thinking?!

The New York Times reports that Wisconsin Republicans have found a way to get their way even without a quorum. I have no doubt this will continue to be controversial.

Even if I agreed with the Wisconsin Republicans (which I don't) this seems counterproductive. You vacate any moral high ground in an argument about who better represents the will of the people by acting as if those Senators (and the people they represent) weren't there. Not a smart move.

Nate Silver (the excellent election forecaster and ) has pointed out that this move will probably not help Republicans in a state he calls a swing state in more than one way. Did anyone attempt to use this as leverage? Does anyone think strategically out there?

Political Philosophy in a Paragraph or Less.

Once again the Economist sums it all up for me fairly well. This post from their Free Exchange blogger is a great look at free trade and its costs and benefits. My favorite line: "Society doesn't owe anyone a factory job, and it doesn't owe factory workers a cheque if an improvement in trade rules leaves them jobless. It owes them precisely what it owes all of its members: a level of protection against the unpredictable sufficient to afford them the opportunity to get back on their feet."

I don't think I can put it any better than that. If I could, I would run to the nearest political campaign and get a real job.

Politics Found Me

It all started with a blog post from the Economist. I try to avoid long political debates on Facebook. It's not why I use the site since the 'Book is so diligent about telling everyone I know exactly what I'm doing. Eventually, the constant posts on politics will drown out the rest of the personal stuff that people come for. I don't want to do that to all the apolitical folk who friended me because we did Summer Theatre together.

I do love politics, though. This is a blog; it was inevitable that politics would find it's way here. Posting a news item about a topic like the Wisconsin union situation was bound to draw a response and draw one it did. An old friend took issue with it almost immediately. I'll just reproduce his post (adding some of his own edits) and my response here to save some time:

• Peter: What this article pretty much ignores is the fact that government jobs = fat pensions that you don't get in the private sector. That's one of the primary perks of getting a government job.
  
  The author dismisses said pensions by arguing that they'll be underfunded, but in doing so destroys the rest of his argument. Clearly then, the government is out of money and cuts have to come somewhere, but he provides no solutions.
  
• Erin: Hey, Peter! It's been quite a long time, hasn't it? Funny, I remember arguing quite a lot about politics as a rabblerouser in high school. It's almost like fifteen years hasn't gone by.
  
  Anyway, the author's argument here doesn't really deal with strategies for fixing the deficit (though the Economist in general is consistently on the side of pension reform, though not union busting). It's about the new idea that public sector workers are a lot better off than private sector workers. I would argue that even with the pension benefits, it's impossible to believe that public workers (meaning teachers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, firemen, policemen, etc) are paid wildly out of line with the work that they do. I also think he is right to point out that given the current economic climate, it is quite likely that even that one supposedly gold-plated benefit will vanish before most of the workers get their shot at it. Ultimately, I don't think there is any reason for the blogger to try to provide a particular solution to the deficit problem, since that isn't his purpose (though the Economist's editors consistently stand behind the need for meaningful deficit reduction through pension and health care reform, as well as other sensible tax reform to increase tax revenue and diversify the tax base away from an over-reliance on the income tax).
  
  The only point that I wish the author had made was that public sector benefits haven't fallen to the same levels as private sector benefits because governments are just plain slower at reacting to economic changes and because it responds to political as well as economic pressure (unlike, say GE or IBM). Even the Wisconsin union acknowledges the need for pension and health funding reform, though, a point that doesn't get enough emphasis, I think.
  
• Peter: It has been a while since we set up the ol' chess board and discussed life, politics and whatever else we deemed important. That said, I don't disagree with you, I guess I just don't get the point of the article. While it may be true that the pensions end up not fully-funded, isn't the fact that public employees have such fat pensions and sweet health-care plans that make it difficult to hire/retain/give raises to current employees? Moreover, though a direct comparison is difficult, I think that many public sector employees do make more than their private sector counterparts.
  
  At the end of the day, I'm all for paying a good wage to teachers, but I'd kill the unions too as they've long been against any kind of merit-based pay and make it darn near impossible to fire teachers.

I hope Peter has dropped by so that we can continue this discussion (sorry about the roundabout way to do that, Peter!), though I will gladly debate these points if anyone is interested.

I disagree that public sector pensions are outrageously high or that their health care plans are significantly better than many private plans (my parents will certainly debate that point and my father has worked for the federal government for his entire career). I would love to take issue with the comparison and there is a wealth of empirical data out there, but I'm just not going to out and find it (though if someone wants to hire me to spend the time to do that, they are welcome to send that interest along). It's just overall strange to me that in the past couple of years it has become an article of faith that the private sector workers are getting screwed and people look longingly at public sector compensation and benefits, something that would have been laughable even five years ago.

I definitely agree that teacher's unions have not been amenable to some obvious solutions to the clear problem of teacher quality (though it could be because of the confrontational way that these ideas have been presented by people who would happily do away with the union - not a recipe for dialogue).

As I said, I'm all about the discussion. Chime in if the spirit moves you!

Let the Retailing Begin

The accidentally brilliant thing about waiting as long as I did between the training post and this post about first day is that it took over a week and a half (but less than two weeks) to get to that first day of work after those awful training days (longer for the blog, many apologies, etc). It was excruciating. When I was hired, the woman indicated that I would start work the very next week, but that was not to be. No, I had to wait much longer.

When the time finally did arrive and I was walking up 7th Ave toward the employee entrance at 9:30 AM, it slowly dawned on me how little I actually knew about working for Macy's. I was opening the store and at the Bon Ton, that would have meant a morning meeting where we would talk about meeting sales goals and single out high performers and things of that sort. At the Ton, this took place in the break room, which was also a meeting room. No one told me where the morning meeting took place at Macy's. So I went straight to my station on the third floor. I can't say I was all that interested in a morning meeting at this store and I was fortunate that I was never forced to experience one.

Once on the third floor, I was greeted by a packer, who was just as surprised to see me as I was to be there. This packer was my first introduction to a non-manager, non-HR person at Macy's and it proved to be a wonderful surprise. He was pleasant, good-natured, relatively knowledgeable, and friendly. He told me what he knew and directed me to where he thought I should go and went on his merry, as the saying goes.

The thing about being early and not knowing where you work day begins is that you will wait for a long time before anything actually happens and if you work in retail and you show  up before the store is open, you will be doing nothing for in the dark for awhile. The lights finally came on and other associates (what's wrong with just being a cashier anymore? Sales associate is such a farcical term. I'm not a salesperson, I don't make commission, and I can't be anyone's associate anything) began to trickle in. They knew their business and they went about it with about as much effort and diligence as you would expect from long term employees at a store run like Macy's Herald Square. 

The number of things I didn't know about this store were piling up quickly. When no one has bothered to introduce you to a manager, you have limited resources for getting your questions answered. The urgent one at the moment was, am I, a temporary employee, allowed to open the cash register? I had been trained to do it (oh so efficiently), but no one had bothered to tell me if I should (that might sound ridiculous, but don't forget that opening a register involves counting money and that temporary employees are not allowed under any circumstances to close a register). I was standing behind a counter full of registers, so the question was not only should I open this register, but how many of these registers should I open? It was my first day, so I hung back and let the real pros handle that delicate question (for future reference at Macy's during the holidays, you open every register you come across).

The store was now definitively open (with the wandering customers to prove it) and still no one had greeted me, told me if I was at the right register, what was expected me for the day, when I would have a break, how long that break would be, where the stockroom was . . . you know generally useful information that you should be, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, trained on. But hey, this was the pants section and like all pants sections in department stores, it was a mess. The piles of pants were spread all over, forget about neatly stacked, the racks were full of pants that had no business there (Kenneth Cole doesn't sell for 39.99, I'll tell you that). The tie displays were a frightening nightmare.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, I got to know the nearest sales associate. He was an incredible resource, always helpful and cheerful. He looked at me oddly when I told I had been assigned to men's pants, but he took it in stride and let me in on a few tips, including what the manager's looked like. When it came time for my lunch break (meaning half the day was over), he helpfully pointed the managers out and I sauntered over to them to introduce myself. They too looked at my strangely when I told them I had been assigned to men's pants. Fortunately, I caught the area number that I was supposed to be working (that required some deduction, since none of the trainers bothered to point the number out or explain its significance, that was left up to me). A light dawned on the managers. "You don't work in this department." What? "You work in the basement. Uh, follow me."

Off we went, down into the bowels of the Herald Square store. He showed me where I could go, told me the name of the manager and went on his merry. That might sound brusque, but once again, the actual employees on the floor of Macy's are always eager to help (often because they are not eager to do their job or help customers, who, unlike me, are rarely grateful for it). I finally landed in a lonesome section, tucked between the Tommy Hilfiger discount boxers, the Hugo Boss, not so discount underwear, and the socks, the section devoted to Dockers. The men's pants that I had been working with not so long ago were on the third floor, there were casual pants on the second floor and jeans on 1.5, but Dockers were in the basement. You're right, it is ridiculous.

I never got around to asking managers about why no one asked me what I was doing on the third floor and why no one bothered trying to find me when I clocked in at the wrong register. I later learned that attendance is a perfunctory affair at the store. At some point during the day, a manager will come around to each register, usually after the staggered shift change should have been accomplished and ask if someone has arrived. Then they will check that name off their printed list. In their defense, while associates are assigned to specific sections, they will quite often float over to the busiest of the nearby sections on their floor in search of their daily goal, so they won't be found when a manager goes looking. Now, the idiotic thing about this is that we have to clock in and we do so on the registers, all of which have unique ID numbers. Somewhere in that building there is a record of an employee signing in and where they signed in. You don't really need to go around looking for people, especially since the computer keeps track of their sales goal in real time. If they clocked in and they have recorded sales then why do you need to lay eyes on them? What kind of idiotic con would involve coming in to work and giving all the credit for that work to another person? Just one more inscrutable mystery about the procedure of Herald Square.

I spent the next hour folding corduroys on a satellite display (the main one was on - wait for it - the third floor) that would prove to be the bane of my existence. Then I finally had to help a customer. I wandered over to the nearest, or the most obvious cash register and rang them up. And since no one lines up at an empty cash register, as soon as I was there, I was trapped. Another employee eventually wandered along and immediately treated me like an idiot child, the kind of behavior I had been expecting, but was now disappointed to encounter. She rudely shooed me from her counter (after stealing my credit application, something she undoubtedly did not need for her quota) and waved dismissively toward "your" registers. At first I didn't even know what she was talking about. But then it became clear: just behind the massive sock display and directly in front of a wall of socks was the counter for the Dockers, not fifteen feet away (the placement of those registers neatly sums up what is wrong with the Herald Square store, something I'll elaborate on later).

And that just about wraps up my first day, the rest of which was so uneventful that it is lost in the horrific sameness of the retail experience, particularly when you work one 80 square foot section of store. Every day. Awesome, I know, right?

Let's Get Trained

So, you've been hired by Macy's. You get a tiny break, since they don't throw you directly onto the floor. First, they throw you into a room full of computers and POSs (seriously – it stands for Point of Sale, but it has to be one of the most unfortunate acronyms ever conceived) and they make you wait. I've already run through a number of synonyms for dreary and dingy in my last post, but I managed to find one that I like better – seamy. The room is seamy. In keeping with the best Macy's tradition, you are left waiting, along with your other confused new hires, before anyone bothers to sort out who belongs in which training room (sales gets a different room from support which gets a different room from the Santaland folk). When they finally decide that you belong in the room, you get to sit and wait again as a clutch of HR personnel hunt down paperwork and comb through lists making sure that they made the right decision on whether they let you into the right room. Their original decision is by no means final.

Most of the fuss was over the sign in sheet and what to do with the people who weren't on the sign in sheet. For the extremely unlucky, it might be scheduling another early day at least a week later. For others it meant signing the sheet by hand. That required them to pass out a new sign in sheet, so everybody had to sign in again. Then there was the time sheet (which they insisted you sign before you had every clocked out, which is always a no-no in the real world – it's like leaving a signed blank check lying around. Not that Macy's cared). It took about forty five minutes to sort out the dos and don'ts of the two sheets and the members of your training party finally settles into a discernible pattern.

In the meantime, no one has given you anything to do, so if you are fairly certain that you are in the right room, you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs and watch the inefficiency and bureaucratic machinations unfold in slow motion. Once the ponderous decision making process has settled down into a semblance of certainty and lent the affair some stability, you begin. You begin the process . . . of filling out your HR forms, various bits of information organized neatly for various government authorities interested in your income (or lack thereof). Most of these forms are online, which requires a silly process of logging in to the system with your employee number (remember that white form? Well, you need it now. You needed to present it to get into the room and you need every time an HR person is confused about your existence or any question that you have posed to them). There are two astonishing facts about the process of filling out all of these forms. The first is that you have to do it at all. I have no idea what regulatory or legal walls exist between macysjobs.com and the internal site, but you have to give up all of the information that these forms require when you apply. So when you log in with your unique employee number, it is apparently ridiculous to expect all of those forms to have been filled out in their entirety and they await only your approval. But that didn't happen. Instead, you have to type your name and your social and your address several times to satisfy the bureaucratic monster at the center of these machines.

The second astonishing fact is that there remains one or two forms that you have to fill out by hand for no obvious reason whatsoever. And one of these forms, a classic bit of tax form obfuscation designed to confound and trap the unwary into making inadvertently false statements about their tax status. On top of that, if you use a ball point pen and you make a mistake, the Macy's HR people make you fill out the form again. Because, and they say this with a straight face mind you, that unless it is perfect the first time, if you so much as double up on one letter or number in the interests of clarity, the New York bureaucrat responsible for processing the form will assume that someone has tampered with the form and reject it out of hand (presumably Macy's and without even the thinnest glimmer of insight into why someone would tamper with a form in a way that makes it more legible). So you have to get it exactly right and without any problems from your ballpoint pen. I dare you to attempt the experiment. Take out a clean sheet of paper, write out your address, your phone number, and your social security number and see how many times a used ball point pen causes legibility problems. I'll wait.

The mistakes you make on those forms will follow you into the next session, which is a bizarre mixture of lecture and interrogation, but we will get to that special torture in a moment. There are too many people in the room to completely let them off the hook. The first thing that will strike you when looking over the room is that holiday managers are in the same room as you. That makes some sense when all you are doing is filling out forms (something that took about two hours for about twenty people). But when they follow you into the lecture on how to sell the Macy's way (which isn't strictly speaking different than selling things any other way, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself). There is a wide range of socio-economic levels and levels of education in the room. There are several people who are clearly college students or recent graduates and who simply need some extra money over the holidays. They are generally betrayed by their age and their quality of their clothing. Then you have the people who are hoping to turn this temporary position into something permanent with Macy's after the holiday is over. They are a little bit older by and large. Then you have the prospective managers and executives (yes, I said executives). They are obvious by their age or their deportment. And then you have the people who probably shouldn't have been hired at all. I mentioned last time that the most important characteristic that Macy's is looking for is not being a thief and a stated willingness to report thieves. One of the most important documents we were to fill out was the direct deposit form. Direct deposit is generally desirable, but in Macy's case, it is doubly so, since the only other way to get your check is to wait in line at a place ominously called the Vault during regular business hours (heaven forbid that anyone in human resources be around to help employees after six pm), a wait that our hosts inform us could last at least an hour every Friday (one piece of mercy of the Macy's system is getting paid by the week). At hearing what it requires to get direct deposit, namely a bank account, the woman next to me talked to me about how little she trusts banks. Didn't trust them at all. She was shortly to be flummoxed almost completely by the cash register, but that's tomorrow (tomorrow's training, not tomorrow blog time). To help us wrap our heads around direct deposit and speed that path along, Macy's kindly hosted a group of Chase hawking their checking and savings accounts and offering to open one on the spot, with a $100 gift card as a sweetener (I'll be taking them up on that one shortly). I would have thought such a presentation much more crass and insulting if I weren't sitting next to a woman who was completely unbanked, in the graceless phrase of the industry. When you take that into consideration, Chase and Macy's are doing the often poor people that Macy's hires a huge solid. It is one of the few things that Macy's gets right, though the flagrant salesmanship of the Chase team made it apparent that even when good comes of Macy's actions, it is always tempered by incompetence and inefficiency.

When it came to filling out all of those forms, which took far too long and presaged the maddening inability of the trainers to, you know, train, this woman was constantly stymied and needed help. I seriously doubt that she filled any of the forms out herself. You'd think that some kind of skills test would be the final arbiter of hiring because this woman would be a major drag on the sales floor (just wait until she is ringing up someone who is in a hurry and finishing up a shopping day with something that isn't from her area – a nightmare of customer service). But no, this woman had been hired by Macy's and would shortly hit the floor to terrorize customers already harried by the pressures of the world's largest and most illogically laid out department store.

It got much worse for her when Macy's revealed it's associate discount policy: you have to have a Macy's credit card to get it and your discount shows up on your bill, not at the register. It is veering dangerously close to company money. If you want the discount, you have to have some kind of Macy's credit card, either the line of credit (which that unbanked woman was not going to get) or a pre-paid card, which they discourage you from using. Since your discount occurs “back of house” (a phrase so meaningless that I didn't know what it meant for a long time), meaning your discount is applied to your balance, not to your purchase. For example, if you buy a $100 item, your balance will be $80, but at the register, it will look like you have paid $100. This is awkward for the pre-paid card, since you actually have to have the $100 on the card in order to buy your item. You will just end up with a credit. It turns out there is a trick to treating the Macy's card like a pre-paid card since you can make a payment at any register, as soon as you make the purchase. It's better than the pre-paid because you don't have to waste value on the card (which from Macy's point of view isn't a waste – based on my experience with the Bon-Ton, I'd say that employees of department stores are some of the most dedicated customer's of those stores). Macy's Credit Card will be the subject of another blog post, don't worry.

The best part about filling out all those forms is where you digitally sign the code of conduct. Every company in the world has a code of conduct, as does every school, and they all generally go out of their way to construct the document so that you have to read it before you sign the document that says you read it and agree to abide by it. I have no idea how legally binding that document is frankly, but I know that you could get out of any lawsuit that results from violating the Macy's code because you will be told explicitly not to waste time reading it; just skip to the bottom and say that you have nothing to divulge regarding past violations (meaning things done in the past which would be considered violations even though you weren't an employee at the time) and that you had read it. It was the real physical equivalent of skipping the licensing terms on software. You know the annoying part of installing any program, the part where it makes you scroll all the way down before “Agree” is highlighted as an option. It was a stunning admission on the part of the Macy's trainers that their code of conduct was useless. We were encouraged to read the 50 page document at out leisure. It is only available online through the employee website (InSite – get it? Yeah, me neither).

After hours had been wasted filling out forms that we should have only needed to rubber stamp, rubber stamping forms that required our signature, and generally waiting around watching the trainers waste time, I mean work, you will be herded into another room down the hall. In the computer room, you were told explicitly that you would not be allowed to eat or drink in this or any other training room. That made sense in the computer room. It didn't make any sense in what was essentially a converted hallway. Perhaps it just meant that they could give up all pretense of cleaning the room. It would save them the money it would take for a janitor to do the work. There were clearly double doors on both sides of the room and you could hear the raucous cacophony of the employee break room next door. In my case, the most immediately striking thing about the room was how cold it was. It wasn't hard to spot the broken window that was letting all the cold air in. This was our home for the next couple of hours.

In this room you will learn several things, almost none of them the lessons that Macy's wants you to learn. They do have a sales philosophy articulated by the acronym MAGIC. Meet and make a connection, Ask questions and listen closely, Give options, give advice, Inspire to buy and sell more(!), and Celebrate the purchase. But that's all marketing speak for “Be nice, be knowledgeable, remember what your job is, and make people happy they bought something.” The fact that it took hours to drill this into the new recruits (including the executives and managers, I might add, a soul crushing blow at the beginning of employment that would almost be enough to make me quit on the spot since it shows such dedication and care on the part of Macy's corporate). Much worse is the incredible incompetence of the people presenting the information. We were familiar with them from the enervating experiencing of filling out all of those forms, mostly since nearly everyone had that New York tax from rejected for some arcane reason or another at least once (three times for me). Their crowd management skills did not exist or if they did exist, they were never on display. When it came to the actual lectures though, their disinterest was palpable. They tag-teamed the presentation, the one seemed engaged at least, she stood up, actively sought responses from the dulled minds of her audience. But she was hampered by the fact that she didn't actually know the material very well and she was hopeless at warming the room up. Like most bad teachers, she defaulted to angry frustration far too often, though the next trainer took that anger and snarkiness to another level. “No.” “Wrong.” She was so bored by her work that she didn't bother to stand and she picked mercilessly on the crowd, passing a binder and cards along to be read by people who have no desire or inclination to declaim, let alone have any idea how to do it well. That should be the trainer's job. She was at least entertaining when she went off script and told us about the outrageous ways the customers and employees would steal and her shopping habits as a stewardess based out of Singapore.

Finally, the agony of that silly training was over and it is time to be subjected to another presentation, this time from the hilarious Loss Prevention personnel. I know that some marketer or PR guy decided that store detective or something along those lines said the wrong thing, but Loss Prevention is a soulless euphemism full of all the coded cynicism and distrust that corporations can muster, especially since the vast majority of loss prevention measures are aimed at employees. On that high note, the day ended and we could finally leave the building on a day that started at eight in the morning (or six in the morning if you had to commute like I did). The next day will be worse. It will be shorter, but that just condenses the horror.

Register training is both a sad necessity and a ridiculous task. Modern point of sale software, especially at the high level that Macy's requires guide their users through each step of the process. All you really have to do is read the prompts and fill out the requested fields. Macy's current POS terminals are NCR's top of the line RealPOS 80XRT (remember what I said about unfortunate acronyms?). I have a hard time believing that anyone needs a quad-core cash register, but it's available if you need it. Within two hours you can have all of the basic functions of the terminal down and they can throw you out onto the sales floor confident that you can handle that aspect of customer service, the easiest part. There are lots of other parts, especially knowing the practical running conditions of the store (how long breaks will be during what shift, what to do when you open, what to do when you close, where the stock rooms are, how to get in touch with a manager, etc). They don't bother helping you out with that. But that's another story.

Instead, register training, as well as the odds and ends of proper maintenance, lasts for over five hours. There is no description for the tedium of being chained to a computer via headphones doing the same thing over and over again without even the validation that doing it all on the floor gives you. The training lacks all focus or thought too. You are given fake checks and told to use the terminals nearby but then no one checks to make sure you have run the transaction properly. About a third of the time, the computer wants you to run through the transaction on the computer and not the terminal. You would think that this would prove you can do it, but the computer doesn't give you options; there's no way to get it wrong. The room is full of terminals that you are supposed to use, but there is only one trainer whose sole job it appears to be to hold the incompetent new hires' hands. There is no way to be unhired just because you can't use a computer, a sad state of affairs for the nice customers just trying to finish up their holiday shopping.

That would be horror enough to complete this epic tale of woe and degradation, but in my case, there were two more ridiculous affronts to my reason and attention. The first thing that happens after you complete training is that they give you your schedule. Except for me. In my case, they couldn't find the sched. They asked for that white piece of paper again, the one with my requisition number. They didn't say that I should bring it, but after all the “Can I see your white paper?” action yesterday, I knew that I wasn't going to be without it. They asked for it. After twenty more minutes, it turns out that I would not be working the next week, but the week after that. So I had been trained, but wouldn't be working for another week and a half. And then there was the tour.

There is no way to do justice to a ten story department store on a whirlwind tour trying to explain both the store and where each of the twenty people following you around is going to work. It took far too long to complete the tour and when I got to my first day of work, a week and a half later, it turns out that my tour guide had told me to work on the wrong floor in the wrong area. It was a great introduction to the next three weeks.

Welcome to the Assembly Line

I realize that my last post may have involved too many of the kind of geeky numbers that I enjoy immersing myself in, so I want to continue this series on Macy's with some of my personal experiences.

I started my time in New York looking to snag that elusive first internship, so Macy's was deep into hiring for the holiday season when I finally got around to looking for a real job to get me from getting the news about being a production assistant to actually being a production assistant. As with so many massive employers these days, Macy's begins their hiring process online (www.macysjobs.com if you are super curious). Macy's gets you to work before they even hire you by making you fill out an extensive application, including those annoying personality inventories which are meant to weed out the dumb potential thieves (though frankly, I am positive that the results of these questionnaires are simply ignored by an overworked HR department). It took me between forty minutes to an hour to apply. If that seems excessive, then you and I agree.

Eventually, someone makes an executive decisions and you get an invite. Macy's gives you a time to be at the Herald Square store. You are instructed to head to the 8th floor, which in addition to being home to Santaland, Au Bon Pain, and Ladies Outerwear, is also Human Resources central for the store (and possibly for the entire region). Your first trip to HR goes through the employees entrance on 7th Ave, a door that is easy to miss except for the crowd of six to ten people dressed in black sipping on coffee avoiding getting to work. The entrance to the store is a bad omen. The hallway is dingy and dirty. The exposed pipes are rusty and frequently dripping with some unknown liquid with clearly corrosive properties. The rusty cage protecting the stairwell up into the store proper is a sign as well. The uncomfortable truth of your future place of work is that the infrastructure of the store is clearly hurting.

Once you make it down the scary hallway and up the intimidating stairwell, you are immediately confronted with an ultra sophisticated security setup – another narrow hallway guarded on one side by a bored security guard who manages to look menacing and disinterested at the same time and on the other by the vendor sign-in window and the vendor coat and bag check. To the left, is a tiny alcove filled with crappy old chairs that serves as a holding area until an HR person comes to wave you past security without a pat down, search of backscatter scan of your person. The lesson of this is that they are more worried about the people leaving the building (that would be the employees). Your HR guide shepherds you into the elevator for the quick jaunt to the eighth floor via the back way. 

Once you get to the eighth floor, you are awarded with another dismal holding room full of chairs, though this room at least has the space for all the silent hopefuls staring at the Human Resources people beavering away in their glass enclosure. Their job is a mystery but it involves taking questions and looking like they are busy (knowing what I know now, I bet the company is giving them something idiotic to do that makes them simultaneously busy and unproductive). On the other side of the room is the computers for those who want to apply to Macy's in store rather than in their pajamas. The floor hums with activity as gregarious employees who have nothing better to do than chat with each other as they meander between the places they may or not supposed to be. At your first trip to the woman behind the glass (what is it about HR that makes it primarily female?), she has you fill out a few tidbits of information and then directs you to the security guard who prevents shoppers from accidentally wandering into the logistical nerve center of the region (or during the holidays, the home of an endless procession of children and parents waiting on line to see Santa). The security guard takes your ID and gives you a bright pink pass. Then you go back to the dreary holding cell and you wait. 

About twenty minutes past the time you were supposed to be there, you are invited into an interview room where as many as six prospective associates and managers are being interviewed at once. There is very little privacy in there and as far as I could tell, there was little of substance being asked for except to glean what I thought they wanted to hear about stealing - yes, stealing is wrong. Yes, I will narc on anyone I see stealing, etc. If you convince her that you are sincere about not stealing and committed to squealing on those who do, she will tell you to go back out into the awful sitting area and wait. Thank the Lord for technology because you will spend the next half an hour to forty five minutes surfing the net on your mobile internet device. No one reads actual books anymore.

Eventually, a different woman will bring you back into the interview room, and sketch the general shape of what to expect from being employed by Macy's over the holidays, things like what department you'll be working, dress code, and wages. Macy's has a theatrical approach to dress. Everyone (with a few exceptions, usually based on whether you make commission or not) is expected to wear black and for once, women have more options than men, because most men are expected to wear suit jackets.

And then there is the matter of pay. I'm searching for a word to describe the pay for an associate at Macy's. Only one word comes to mind: derisory (such a fun word, especially when you say it out loud). Eight dollars an hour. Eight. I admit to being a bit stunned by that. For one, burger flippers at McDonald's make 7.25, since that's the minimum and Macy's customers have a right to expect more service from their cashiers than from McD's cashiers. It's not entirely out of line with what other retailers pay though. I heard rumors that Express pays their employees minimum as well, which is utterly absurd considering the level of fashion expected from Express employees. Apple is at the other end of that scale. They pay fourteen dollar an hour, for essentially the same job, only easier because there isn't an Apple Store in the world that occupies nine stories of an entire New York City block. I would also like to point out that I was paid more than eight dollars an hour to work at the Bon Ton in York, PA almost six years ago. If there is a better benchmark for wage stagnation over the least half decade, I don't know it (it probably involves inflation adjusted purchasing power parity, but hey, that's not the kind of analysis that's we're doing here). 

Where was I? Oh yes, the woman had given you the down low. The next step is getting your ID back from the security guard (no one has ever explained why that security guard is in charge of my ID up until you get hired, but not afterward). Once you get your ID back, you are permitted to wait again, albeit in a different room. The eighth floor is a warren of cramped rooms that stretch your ability to come up with exotic synonyms for dismal and dreary. Let's call it utilitarian, since it is dominated by the desks and work stations of the HR managers (again predominantly women) who process the already copious amount of paperwork generated by hiring a temporary sales associate. The most important piece of paper is essentially a P.O. Or requisition and the product being ordered is you, which is (another) disturbing glimpse into Macy's inner workings. It turns out, that req number I had originally been given had already been used. That necessitated an additional wait, while they tracked down the woman who had briefed me (not the woman who had interviewed me) so she could sign the new form.

Your next bit of business is to choose two days for the completion of your Macy's training (I was surprised that they had any training at all, but that training session is a whole other topic, one that I can only address when I no longer work for Macy's). The whole thing was appallingly old fashioned, with these women dedicated to processing endless mountains of paper, stuck in this tiny room dealing with people and computers. Every. Day. Once you get that form, the one with the requisition number, the one that every HR person who talk to or even glance at or question during training (I need to go to the bathroom. Can I see your form?), you have been hired by Macy's.

During training, one of the HR people let slip that Macy's hires twenty five hundred, that's two thousand and five hundred, temporary employees for the holiday season at the Herald Square store. The entire set up, from signing up for your user id on macysjobs.com, to sitting with the HR ladies while they gossip and do your mindless paperwork, is a grinding machine, the kind of low power, high maintenance machine that passed for race cars in the fifties. You look at engines today and wonder what those guys in the fifties were doing only getting three hundred horses out of a V8 that big, when you should be getting six or seven. Here is Macy's with a huge HR department, 24 billion dollars in revenue and they still haven't graduated their HR procedures from the fifties and their IT department is stuck in the eighties. Macyjobs makes a good fist of things, but it's a giant database and the last thing that I or anyone else interested in hiring me should be doing is writing my name on a form, and yet that happened on countless occasions during the two hours between when I was interviewed and when I was hired. The Macy's I've been hired by is a relic, a hulking behemoth, that is lumbering under the weight of a bad business model and a terrible business infrastructure. It survives on its name, tradition, and the attractive ideal of a department store that offers a one stop shop for so many of your household needs (except wool socks). Macy's hires armies of underpaid temporary employees with overworked and unproductive staff. It's mass production in the age of just in time assembly. The Herald Square store is a time machine dedicated to the memory of the past in more ways than one.