If you've ever felt intimidated by a stylish, attractive saleswoman, you're not alone. According to a post by Bee-Shyuan Chang on Stylelist.com, a new study out of the University of South Australia shows that women between the ages of 18-26 are less likely to buy from a sales associate who is more attractive than them. Of course, retailers — from Chanel to Abercrombie and Fitch — love for their employees to be the face of the brand. So sales associates tend to have a "look." But if that "look" scares customers away — making them think they're not good enough, not pretty enough to shop at the store — then what's the point?

On the other hand, the fact that the women in the study are young could mean that as we get older, we're more self-assured and less likely to give a crap about comparing ourselves to the salesperson. You go in, you get the shoes you want, and you don't think about her.

Still, the fact remains: Companies believe that women want to see other beautiful women. Our ads contain flawlessly Phoshopped celebrities, and stores like Ambercrombie banish anyone deemed less than perfect to the storeroom. PhD researcher Bianca Price says: "Retailers often think that beautiful is better… The solution lies in hiring women of all shapes and sizes, someone for each of your potential customers to relate to." Sounds like what we've been saying about magazines.

Attractive Salesgirls Could Turn Off Shoppers [Stylelist]

Sometimes I feel like Alice slipping through the looking glass, toggling between worlds. In one world, I interview C.E.O.'s, write articles for national publications and promote my nonfiction book. In the other, I clock in, sweep floors, endlessly fold sweaters and sort rows of jackets into size order. Toggling between the working class and the chattering class has taught me a lot about both: what we expect of ourselves, how others perceive us, ideas about our next professional step and how we'll make it...The contrasts between my former full-time job and my current part-time one have been striking. I slip from a life of shared intellectual references and friends with Ivy graduate degrees into a land of workers who are often invisible and deemed low-status.

The woman, it should be noted, works "six to eight hours a week" - i.e., one shift.

I'm extra-prickly about this sort of anthropological experiment approach in this case because I've done the freelance-writer -retail thing, if that's a "thing." I just thought of it as having a job, like many of the people I know. It's true, she's older than I - a woman who, presumably, has a career behind her which makes taking on something "demeaning" more noteworthy. But this is not novel: even before the current economic troubles, people worked these jobs. And now, I know numerous people, financially devastated, who are going back to work at whatever can be found without complaint or comment, and working far more than eight hours a week. To a degree, she acknowledges this - that she is lucky to have this job (although at minimum wage, one shift can't make a huge difference, surely?) , but her wish to distance herself from it is palpable and distasteful.

I love sharing my expertise and experiences. When customers tell me they're going to Fiji, Kenya, the Grand Canyon or Cuzco, Peru, I can offer first-hand advice from my own trips there. I know what they need to stay warm, dry and comfortable on the ski slope, boat deck, hiking or bike trail.

We get it: you're better than this. And then, of course, she Learns Lessons. She naturally gets to know salt of the Earth types, appreciates that ego isn't allowed and that people are judged on how hard they work. She learns that some customers are shockingly entitled, not realizing that "We, too, are intelligent and proud of our skills; many of us are college educated. Some of us travel often and widely, speaking foreign languages fluently."

No shit. It's called a job, and most of us have been working them since high school. It's not a degradation or a novelty, but a simple reality of pursuing a creative career. Look, whatever, more power to her. But if she wants a medal, she's not getting it. She doesn't need to sell me on retail: I worked it for years, really enjoyed it, and was grateful for the human contact, steady income and chance to flex totally different muscles, literal and otherwise; I still pick up a shift when I can. I somehow managed to survive the devastations of "scraping gum and food off the floor or standing for five straight hours...refolding clothing so many times the skin on my hands cracks from dehydration." I know, hard to believe.

My Retail Job, Crazy As It Is, Keeps Me Sane [NYT]

For one, I think lying in relationships is counterproductive. I consider it extremely disrespectful to my intelligence (because especially in a close relationship, the truth comes out eventually) and to the purpose of having a relationship in the first place. Isn't the goal to have someone to love you for who you are, shoe addiction and all? It's obviously one thing if you're trying to save for a house, or a new car, or simply to pay off your credit card debt, but if you have the money to buy one, then what does a shirt matter?

I just keep thinking, though, there's no need for deception in the first place. If it's so important for you to consume without regret, it's easy enough to keep your money separate. Several friends of mine do this — you get one joint account from which the bills are paid and contribute to that as you agree, and then keep your own accounts. As long as the mortgage is paid, the 401K is growing and nobody is going into debt on the sly, then her money is hers and his is his and no one complains about the new golf clubs or the new shoes because no one is feeling like they contribute to the joint expenses more than the other, or that their money is feeding the other person's silly spending habits.

Spouses Who Spend And Pretend [Wall Street Journal]

(Don worked at a gas station at the time; allegedly he noticed that all the nice cars pulling up to the gas station he worked at were owned by people in the fashion industry. And saw to it no one would be able to make fashion ever again!)

Mrs. Chang, who attends pre-dawn services every day and strongly encourages her vendors to do the same, makes it a piot to give Christians in the industry a leg up, too. "She plucks young designers out of the companies she's working with," he says. "And if they're Christian and religious, she puts them in business." Rowena Rodriguez, a 33-year-old fashion consultant and one-time "unbeliever" who was born again with Mrs. Chang's help, may be one of those lucky designers. "In the short time I worked with Mrs. Chang, my life was transformed, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior," she recalls in an email interview. "Mrs. Chang prayed me into the Kingdom! Rodriguez says she has been approached by executives looking for the secrt to Forever 21's phenomenal success. "I usually say, 'If you really want to know, I'll tell you. But you won't believe me...The Changs love Jesus!"

Whoa, weird how similar their names are, no? God, when did shopping turn into some insane moral allegory???

Radar
Related: Religion in Business: Invoking The Almighty Or Just The Almighty Dollar? [Medill News Service]

They called it "d.e.m.o." — a name "meant to evoke 'demolition,' 'demonstration' and 'demo tapes,'" company president Tim Harmon told the Orange County Register in 1998 — and stocked it with velour tracksuits and outsized medallions and Rocawear tracksuits, Apple bottom jeans and really tasteful miscellaneous rhinestone jewelry.

But something was changing, slowly but also sort of fastly, about suburban youth culture.

Skater boys began collecting sneakers. Hip-hop boys learned to skateboard. Skater girls discovered rhinestone-studded acrylic nails. Hip-hop girls discovered the Beatles. Large corporations lost their hold on the music the kids heard, the music that had previously divided them. Japanese guys started turning up out of nowhere, setting crazy new colorful — color-blind — trends.

Paul Wall also happened. I just wanted to point that out.

And the big corporate peddlers of pop culture were challenged. Challenged to think of America's teenagers not as rapper thugs or skater punks or emo/goths — goth mecca Hot Topic is suffering a similar fate as d.e.m.o. — but as individual, openminded, humanesque customers who exercise Equal Opportunity on all their possible consumer choices.

Including their next president!

Pacific Sunwear To Close Remaining d.e.m.o. Stores [Reuters]

A friend just forwarded the american apparel story link and said: "dude, you're efamous...kind of". I was totally amazed and happy that such a debate was sparked by my humble offering.
First off, i'm not a graf writer. Honestly, I was just reacting to the constantly degrading images of women that AA creates. That ad in particular - headless, bent over, composed so that the focus was irrefutable... I went home, grabbed some spraypaint, took the train back and waited until 4am to climb the scaffolding.
Now that i've read all of the comments and reactions posted on jezebel, i feel regret at having chosen the word "get". The people who mentioned "are" as a better choice of wording were right. I struggled with the thought of leaving such an open-to-interpretation message, but eventually just decided to go with my gut-reaction and get the hell down from there.
It was horrifying to read that some people interpreted it as "women deserve to be raped" or that i was probably some uneducated/ignorant/misogynistic graf writer promoting my justification....(geez, talk about a stereotype!) I also took offense to the comments that suggested i need to re-evaluate my concept of feminism... duh! of course i agree that women should be able to dress as they please and not have to worry about others interpretation. That said, i couldn't let this advert slide by without a protest. This wasn't a run of the mill ad by some faceless corporation. This was Dov Charney's "art" and ideology.
I'll be the first to admit that i have a lot to learn. I'm not much of an academic, and have only recently started reading books which address gender, feminist theories, body image... i have my own (imperfect) ideas and reactions to the world around me and accept that i am going to make mistakes, and grow as i learn more...
As an act of civil disobedience/direct action, i believe that this form of protest was effective(if only momentarily) in that it caused AA economic damage(well over $10,000.), inspired an open discussion on many levels and was a learning experience for all.
I don't mean to ramble on and on, so i'll just end this by saying thank you for bringing this topic/discussion onto your website. In the future, i will take greater precautions to be more clear in my meaning...

That barely keeping pace with the core rate of inflation isn't such a travesty for the retail business. That some years you're going to learn last year's lesson and cut back a bit and Target just has to learn to live with that.

Whatever. What did you get for Christmas, what do you still want, and what would you like to return to pay off that hospital bill you keep getting all those calls about?

Retail "Tipping Point" May Be Ahead [CNBC]
Christian Louboutin's Red-Soled Shoes Are Red-Hot [USA Today]

As we gawked, a saleswoman sailed past, one corner of her mouth slightly turned up. Two upturned mouth corners make a smile, of course, but a single upturned corner amounts to the way the homecoming queen regards the president of the math club, according to Mr. Hill, who whispered, "She just gave us a contempt expression."

The best part here is that our favorite fashion blogger Lauren Goldstein Crowe weighs in on Portfolio to wonder why it is that sales clerks at fancy stores remain so snooty "in this day of mass luxury."

I'm not sure it will ever be eradicated. Because when your livelihood depends on selling expensive things to people who have much more money than you, it must feel nice to be able to look down on somebody else once and a while.

On Style [Wall Street Journal]

In general, the best shopping advice is not to shop at all. But if that's not good enough for you, I can babble on about margins and commodity fetishism to the point that you'll probably want to pay me to shut up, and I hear that's good for the environment. Yesterday Clorox bought Burt's Bees. This is hot on the heels of Colgate buying Tom's Of Maine and Adrian Grenier telling Woman's Wear Daily, "I hope to replace my entire wardrobe with eco-friendly clothes." Meanwhile, the ice caps are melting, people are getting horribly disfigured from unregulated medi-spas, women are dying from this new Brazilian formaldehyde hair-straightening treatment, and legions of New Yorkers like Jennie are obsessed with the notion that nail polish can kill you. How does it all link together? Very tenuously, which is part of the problem.

So, what does it mean that Clorox is buying Burt's Bees?
Well, first off it means that whoever owns the most shares in Burt's Bees is getting retardedly rich, because Clorox paid four times sales for the thing, or just south of a billion dollars, or about six times as much as it was sold for four years ago to... wait for it, a private equity firm, when one of the co-founders sold her shares to go do hippy-dippy shit.

Anyway, the company's CEO came in from Unilever, whom you'll remember as the giant conglomerate that gave you such eco-conscious products as Axe and Slim Fast, and he probably got a shitload of stock options with which he will probably start some sort of private equity firm specializing in such other "green" industries.

Now, for you, the Burt's Bees consumer, it's hard to say. Usually when big consumer products companies buy smaller ones they use their clout with retailers to get more of their merchandise into bigger retail chains in more visible sections of the store. But is it possible to go anywhere without being visually assaulted by a yellow Burt's Bees display? Seriously, I'm so glad that now when I'm in line at the Borders scanning the Economist the consumer gods get to fill my brain with thought like, "Oooooh, that last lipgloss made my teeth look a little yellow, but maybe if I get a slightly pinker shade..." Anyway from the looks of the stories they'll be taking the brand international, to which I say, "Oh, how nice for those international markets?"

So, what does it mean when something is "organic"?

Generally that it doesn't involve seeds that have had their chromosomes fucked with or fertilizers. Anonymous Lobbyist, who was involved with the legislation, says it's different here than in Europe, and there are reasons it favors bigger businesses here and smaller businesses there and sent me this sob story about a small farmer who got fucked by the regulations, but in general I think regulations are a good thing in a market where the little-guy-gets-fucked-by-big-business paradigm is so resilient.

Why we should care about that stuff?

I think the biggest thing is that there's a lot of paranoia out there about shit we don't understand, because none of us really understands any information we can't distill thirty seconds between pointing and clicking anymore. That's why parents are so afraid of the internet, and we're afraid of genetically modified crops and hyperpotent fertilizers. They are creepy, no doubt, in large part because mutations breed other mutations: overuse and misuse of antibiotics and antibacterial agents breed superbugs, and fertilizers breed disease resistant roaches, etc. etc. It's in human nature to want to put it all on halt, to say, Wait a sec, this shit's not natural, let's get back to basics. Just like it's human nature to believe that a positive attitude and a macrobiotic diet can beat cancer, or Amazonian shamans can heal your chronic back pain, or that God exists.

Do you believe in that shit?

Here's what I believe: the whole point of the market economy is to keep you engaged, driving to work, making money, buying shit with it, driving home, repeat as necessary. Protecting the environment, on the other hand, is about a certain level of disengagement; walking when possible, re-using shit, buying less. You'll notice that when you're broke, you tread lightly on the environment.

But broke people don't do much good to big public companies trying to eke out higher sales and fatter margins, so companies like Whole Foods and Rogan and now Clorox and Colgate go for the sweet spot: wealthier consumers armed with an array of fuzzy neuroses, paranoias and superstitions borne of the fact that they don't really understand how it all works, or who gave them all the money. So organic/natural/eco /green products that kind of fuzzily try to tap into that fuzzy array of concerns — personal health, ethically-sound practices, karma, cool packaging, the future of the planet — are never going to be fully satisfying. Sometimes you're going to find out it's a big scam, like with a lot of environmentally-friendly paper products, and other times you're just going to get a lot more conflict. Like if you go to Whole Foods and buy sushi, it's good for your health, but not so much the environment, since the tuna has to be flown vast distances in climate-controlled jets.

In general, you're probably just better off avoiding spending the money in the first place. And when you do want to spend money in a way that feels "healthier" or whatever, factor into your formula the question of whether the company's employees — and contractors' employees — are happy, given the circumstances. The combination of predictable prices, fewer meaningless "choices" and better employee benefits is, for instance, why I feel better buying food at Trader Joe's to Whole Foods, and, despite my own experience being annoyingly underpaid there, American Apparel to Forever 21, but really, when it comes to looking out for society and tempering the forces of global market capitalism, that's mostly the business of the government.

In general, the best shopping advice is not to shop at all. But if that's not good enough for you, I can always babble on about about margins and marketing long enough for you to forget why you wanted that frivolous piece of commodity fetishist crap in the first place. In this space I'll try to solve some of the mysteries of shopping, starting with that ubiquitous handbag label Coach.

Q: So, if Coach's profits are up 23%, why are they in trouble?
A: Net profit means nothing. Maybe they produced a 23% gain in net profit by selling a bigger proportion of shit in Europe, where the Euros are beating our asses right now. Maybe they produced it by getting their accountant to change the tax rate. Maybe last year, their earnings were so strong they decided take a giant writeoff related to store openings, or better yet, waste a hundred million dollars on a vanity ad campaign so their earnings wouldn't look so scarily strong. Because in fashion the only thing truly disastrous is if you can't beat last year's numbers. If you can't beat last year's numbers, your proverbial stock is on the wane, which means your literal stock is on the wane, which I assume is the case for Coach, which would be how those intrepid bloggers picked up on it.

Q: Well yes, Lauren Goldstein Crowe's opening sentence is "Coach shares are at a six-year-low."
A: Jesus, a six-year low. Six years ago this company was grossing less than $700 million a year. This year that number will be close to $3 billion, they've got over a billion dollars cash on hand just hanging out looking for a place to be invested, and Wall Street — in its infinite wisdom — thinks the company is less valuable than it was then. Think about that for a second.

Q: So the market isn't always right?
A: Well, all the market really cares about is short-term growth, though sometimes, if what you are selling is super important or indispensable or high technology or necessary for life and/or the treatment of restless leg syndrome, the market will make some exceptions. That would not be the case with Coach.

Q: Oh, so the problem is that Coach is no longer growing.
A: Well no, it's more complicated than that. In fashion you're expected to grow on a few fronts. Number one, every individual store you open should make higher sales than it did last year. Number two, you should constantly be opening more stores, to keep up with the mall developers constantly opening up more malls. Number three, the "same-store sales" numbers, which is to say, the sales at stores open a year or more, should always be growing at a rate higher than they did last year. Oh and also, your profit margins should constantly be growing, because you don't want to look like you're only growing by offering consumers more value. It's like the difference between velocity and acceleration in physics, I think, although I don't really remember physics.

Q: But isn't it impossible to sustain that?
A: Yes!

Q: So what are they expected to do?
A: Well, they can try to keep the momentum going for awhile by spending an inordinate amount of cash sending free purses to celebrity stylists, filling the nation's bloated fashion magazines with glossy advertisements, paying for product placement in movies, hosting multimillion dollar parties in exotic locations for the fashion trade press/buying and sales staffs of your local Nordstroms and Neiman Marcuses/sundry "tastemaker" demographic, outsourcing any manufacturing work you might still have been stupid enough to do domestically to the Third World factories doing all your competitors' bags — in Coach's case, they closed their last US factory in 2002 —
and, um, raising prices every year.

Q: Doesn't all that shit get old?
A: That might begin to explain the billion or so dollars in cash Coach has sitting in its bank accounts.

Q: What should they do with that money?
A: Give it to orphans! Ha ha ha no seriously, they should probably buy back some of their shares at this bargain basement six-year-low. It apparently shows "confidence" in the brand or something. And you know what they say about perception and reality in fashion! If most of the population knew how to differentiate between them, the whole business would evaporate. Imagine that!

Sierra Tucson Store - Keepsakes [SierraTuscon]
Related: Breaking: Marc Jacobs In Rehab [Fashionista]

[Image via Splash, 4/7/07]