I worked for Sears, Roebuck and Company at its warehouse on Utica Avenue during the summers of 1957, 1958 and 1959. The job lasted for ten or twelve weeks each year and I was paid $1.25 an hour for the first two summers and then was catapulted to $1.30 for the third. At 40 hours a week, I could, in theory, earn $50 a week and take home $40, but Sears managed to calculate it so that I had worked 39 hours or 38.5 hours. Always less than forty. I was routinely baffled and disappointed by my pay envelope. I'm utterly convinced that the time clock was rigged, but there was no one to whom to protest, and if I had made a fuss, I wouldn't have won my case anyway. No one did. (It might seem frivolous to worry about a few cents, but cents mattered a lot more in the 50s than they do now. Ten weeks at $40 amounts to $400. When I entered Cornell in 1956, tuition cost $450 a semester and a half of a double room in the dorm for the year was $315. At college, I survived on chocolate malts ($.25), hamburgers ($.25), and an occasional celebratory cheeseburger ($.30).)
At the Sears warehouse, my job was to pinch hit for people who were absent for their annual two-week vacations. I performed a variety of services of which I have clear memories of just two. I was a substitute "receiver" on the loading dock where I kept records of railroad cars and tried to minimize "dunnage." A second job: I operated the manual telephone switchboard, inserting jacks into receptacles in order to complete a connection; it's stunning to remember that such equipment, now seen in old black-and-white movies and found only in museums of early technology, was still in wide use. I can't remember my other jobs, except that each one took about two hours to learn, was interesting for a day, but stupefyingly boring for the remainder of the two-week stint. I developed real sympathy for the people who were Sears lifers. What a test of will to come to work every day, year in and year out, to the tedious rote dehumanizing employment that the warehouse provided! Job satisfaction? I doubt that anyone, employee or employer, had stumbled upon such a concept, let alone given it an instant's thought.
The warehouse stocked "big-ticket" items: washing machines, dryers, and reefers (refrigerators). Day one: sales orders were sorted and routed; day two: goods were pulled and lined up on the dock in the reverse of the order in which they would be delivered; day three: items were loaded onto trucks and sent out to various Brooklyn neighborhoods. The system worked well but there were always crises when a particular model in a particular color wasn't available. It might be impossible for this generation of youth to believe, but in those pre-civil rights years Sears didn't sell refrigerators at a fixed rate. Salesmen (at the main store on Flatbush Avenue) received 11% of the negotiated price on an item and therefore had an incentive to set the figure as high as possible. It quickly became evident to me that there was a pattern: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the sale price. Moreover, 99% of big-ticket items were purchased on time. The obvious corollary: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the negotiated rate of interest. Prices and interest were most outrageous in Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time -- and perhaps now -- Brooklyn's Harlem. Occasionally I'd see a repossessed used model (no cardboard carton) on the loading dock. It was to be delivered as if new to Bed-Stuy. When I questioned the practice, I was told, very definitively, "Who's going to believe them?" Working for Sears was, in a word that had not yet come into existence, "radicalizing."
The warehouse was a Staszewski-Sullivan stronghold. No Italians, no Jews, no "Negroes." Well, actually, there was one African-American, but he was assigned to a broom rather than to a forklift. I didn't make any friends at the warehouse (I was chronically, disablingly shy), and although I was fearful that I might be ostracized as a "college kid," I was treated not unkindly. I suspect that my paltry wage made me an object of pity.
An embarrassing moment: Sears held a sale on cheap, shiny suits. They sold so many that I was called to the main store to help fold and pack. Even today I'm a hopelessly inadequate folder and packer. It was a nightmare. After watching me fumble for a few moments, the wives would snatch the suit impatiently from my hands. "Here, sonny, let me do that."
A good moment: I was on the ROR desk for a week or so. ROR stood for "record of return." When a refrigerator or washer came back, Sears didn't reimburse the purchase price until the ROR had been cleared. One day, bored, trying to kill some time, I was searching the desk to which I had been temporarily assigned. Stuck behind a drawer I found a misplaced three-or-four-year-old ROR, unprocessed. I called the telephone number on the ticket and asked the woman who answered if she'd ever been reimbursed for the refrigerator she had returned -- $350 or so. There was a long silence. Then the woman broke into tears and into fervent thanks. "I've been trying to get my money back from Sears for years. I've tried everything. I can't get anyone to believe me." I arranged to have the money sent to her and I felt that I had done a good deed. Not much satisfaction for three summers of employment, but something.
The principal result of doing my time at Sears: a decision to give a wide berth to the much revered "corporate sector." It's a decision that I've never regretted, not for a moment.
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