Sales floor trajectoriesDistinction

Sales floor trajectories
Distinction and service in postsocialist China
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Amy Hanser
University of British Columbia, Canada
ABSTRACT
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This article considers experiences of social change and
downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical
tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large,
state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It
demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of
working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions.
Sales clerks did so by calling forth the waning symbolic capital of state
socialism and translating it into a form of postsocialist, working-class
nostalgia. In an effort to appeal to a downwardly-mobile, working-class
clientele in a reconfigured marketplace, sales clerks simultaneously traced
the downward social trajectory of China’s diminished urban proletariat.
KEY WORDS
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China, service work, postsocialism, social change,
social mobility, distinction, trajectory
Like many Communist and former-Communist countries, China’s shift
from a centralized, planned economy and a state socialist system to a
market-driven one has upended the categories that once organized people’s
everyday lives. Shopping plazas replace factories as urban landmarks.
Businessmen earn recognition as ‘model workers’. The urban working class,
once the vanguard of China’s revolutionary aspirations, is now viewed as
an inefficient and undisciplined workforce (Rofel, 1989), a ball-and-chain
on state enterprises and the urban economy. Whereas economic reforms
have brought growing prosperity and upward mobility for some, for
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China’s urban proletariat the emerging social order threatens to deliver
economic insecurity and dramatic loss of social standing (Lee, 2000, 2002;
Solinger, 2004).
The dynamics of China’s socio-economic transformations play out
vividly on the sales floors of urban department stores and marketplaces.
To explore these changes and the strategies of daily life they bring forth,
I secured a sales clerk position at a state-owned department store in the
northeastern Chinese city of Harbin in the fall of 2001. But after only a
few days on the job at the Harbin No. ‘X’ Department Store, I found
myself ill-prepared to deal with the skeptical shoppers who frequented the
store.
A young woman, accompanied by her father, stopped at my counter in
search of a winter coat. She questioned me carefully about the quality of
the down coats I laid out across the counter for her. In response, I parroted
back the lines I had heard my co-workers, Big Sisters Zhao and Lin, use
with customers: ‘This is a Bingya coat, Ice Day line, new style’. The Bingya
Group was a famous Chinese maker of winter coats, and Ice Day was its
new subsidiary. But the young woman and her father were skeptical of my
claims, and they carefully examined the tags on the coat looking for some
mention of Bingya as parent company.
‘It must be a different company’, the father said. He carefully examined
the seams of the coat while zipping and unzipping the pockets.
‘This isn’t last year’s left-over merchandise, is it?’, the young woman
challenged.
Certainly not, I assured her. New this year.
The young woman then insisted she wanted the coat she was looking at,
but a ‘newer’ one – that is, one that had not been taken out of the box yet.
I informed her that we did not have two coats in this particular style, size,
and color.
‘If this is a new product, and not leftovers from last year, then how is it
you don’t have another coat in this color and size?’, she asked me. ‘It must
be old goods – doesn’t what I say make sense?’
At this point I felt myself getting angry. Why would I lie? ‘I just know
what they’ve told me’, I responded lamely, and to my relief my co-worker,
Big Sister Zhao, arrived to rescue me. Zhao patiently explained to the
customer that we received the goods in small lots and that the shipments
included many colors, but the range of sizes was incomplete. This expla-
nation satisfied the young woman, and she bought the coat. I nevertheless
marveled at the customer’s suggestion that I had been trying to trick her
and insulted at the implication that I was lying.
Countering such customer suspicions was a regular part of the workday
for Harbin No. X sales clerks. I quickly learned that my co-workers
deflected customer anxieties by reminding them of Harbin No. X’s links to