Customer Reviews

Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I was expecting so much more from this book. Kelly is a very good writer but I was disappointed by her experience. One shift a week and some extra holiday shifts doesn't really make for a true experience. She describes what it's like to work retail but she doesn't truly have to survive on a retail salary so I felt like some "meat" was missing from this book.

I felt like Kelly also went out of her way to show how much she was "not these people" with many, many references to her social status, travel experience and education. This is more the stuff of a long article than a book.Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Americais a much better book.

After 17 years in retail I was hoping to find an entertaining read from someone who had something of value to share, especially given all the national press this book has gotten. Wow, I could not have been more disappointed. I am wondering what ego drives Ms. Kelly to think the world wants a play-by-play recap of how she soured to her little 'experiment' in retail, like this is some great revalation she is sharing with us? And then to ask for $26 for a hard cover version of it when one of the great themes she seems to beat on is how hard it is to make a go of it as a retail employee? Granted, if her portrayals are accurate, she picked a poor store to work at, and then realized it too late - but I get the sense that the author, however well traveled, educated, and successful she had been as a journalist, had never seen or imagined that this side of the coin of life actually existed, and was put back on her heels when she saw what most people in the world already know is out there. She just ends up coming across as whiney, pompous, and insecure.

As a person who has made retail a career, I must say that the author has never walked a full mile in a retailer's shoes. I am amazed at her trivial complaints and woe's over what many would see as a lucky break. I realize that schlepping stock from a back room must be a real low point for some one so prestigious as the author, who was quick to remind us that she interviewed the Queen of England ( actually she pointed this out on more than one occasion). It's too bad that this book was more about her self absorbed entitlement, and less about the countless thousands who feel proud to call retail a vocation.

When Barbara Ehrenreich set out to write about the lives of people trying to make ends meet on the minimum wage, she lived the story that she ended up telling in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and the book was about that experience, not about how smart or how qualified she was, how interesting her previous life and experiences had been, etc. The result was a fascinating and gripping narrative that told important truths about the retail workers and the struggle they face, told from the front lines in the first person. We, the readers, KNEW Ehrenreich was smart and savvy because she showed us so, in the story she chose to tell and the way she reported and wrote it.

That's a lesson Caitlin Kelly would have done well to learn before setting out on her own mini-adventure in working for a mall retailer. Had she approached either the experience or this book more thoughtfully, the result might have been less utterly irritating and frustrating for this reader. I started off with a great deal of empathy for Kelly -- I'm a freelance journalist, with an uncannily similar background. But by the time she mentioned for the umpteenth time her meeting with the Queen of England and how she loved to surprise customers by dropping into "fluent French", I didn't want anyone lumping us together as two of a kind. Because Kelly ends up undermining the important issues she could have raised by the way she tells the story, with her self-congratulation merely the most evident part of this. (Had I heard once more about how many countries she had traveled too, I would have flung my Kindle across the room.) Self-congratulation never makes for appealing reading but Kelly is intent on spending a chunk of this book telling us not about the lives of retail workers but about the way she's done great journalistic work, that she has won fellowships, that she's not impressed by wealth, that she writes for (insert name of prominent paper/magazine of choice here). I'm sure that's all true, but that's not why someone is going to buy and read this book. The title isn't "Journalist" but "Malled".

Kelly, laid off from the New York Daily News, has been freelancing for a year when she decides to add a retail job to the mix. She does so at an intriguing time -- just as the recession is about to hit, creating dozens of middle-class people to be desperate for work. That's a fascinating story, but again, it isn't either Kelly's experience or the story she's telling: she is still earning the bulk of her income from freelancing, she still has her retirement plan intact, and while her fiancé (employed as a photo editor at the NY Times) congratulates her for contributing to the household, she is in fact only working a single shift a week and earning a maximum of about $100 a week, before taxes and gas and parking fees. Then, a few dozen pages later, she lets drop that he then takes her on a trip to Paris during her time at the store... this is not about the average mall worker!

True, there's a lot of vitriol about obnoxious customers and stupid corporate goons here that will delight those mall workers (if they can afford to buy the book), particularly the repeated jabs at "skinny blondes" with serious jewelry. (And yet, when she goes shopping, she behaves in just the way she deplores when a Banana Republic clerk asks her to open a costly store account -- as the latter's bosses require her to do. One wonders what the BR clerk might say about that encounter...) The contradictions multiply -- she says she respects her less educated, less well-traveled or less worldly colleagues, and yet dubs one "a tough, mouthy little thing" and later issues a jab at them for deciding not to climb the professional ladder. The book is full of such contradictions, few as annoying as when Kelly takes great offense at not being considered for an assistant manager's job -- one she says she is willing to do on a temporary basis. "I didn't push, I admit, but didn't think I needed to," Kelly says (why not? if you want something, you need to push to show you're serious...) Yet, she laments, "it was clear no one in senior management took me or my skills or my ambitions seriously." Had the one-shift-a-week worker ever given them any sign that she had ambitions and wanted to be taken seriously?

There are many intriguing and worthy subjects for discussion and debate lurking in the wings here, ranging from the way the people producing these goods are treated and how we as consumers factor those into our purchasing decisions to the decline in civility in the retail world (and elsewhere.) The best parts of this book do address these issues, and the experience of other workers, but they are a smaller part of the narrative. The main focus is Kelly's personal experience, and it's repetitive and annoying, making this the kind of book that gives memoirs a bad name.

Full disclosure: I got an advance copy of the book from NetGalley, which by the time I was midway through the book was the only reason I kept going. Maybe it will be therapeutic for other mall workers to read this, but I found it annoying and tedious. Read Barbara Ehrenreich's book, which covers much of the same ground/many of the same issues and is respectful both of the people she is writing about and of the reader. 1.5 stars, rounded up because of the outside comments about the trends in the retail industry, which I found interesting.

The information in this book is interesting. I just wish I didn't have to read the same information 8 times. How many times do we have to hear about not getting any sales help in Saks while trying to buy a $200 blouse? Or about how little the author had in common with her co-workers? Where was this book's editor, asleep? I can understand being repetitious in writing, but in rewriting, please, cut it out.

In addition, I found Kelly's unquestioning use of the term "Associate" unnerving. "Associates" were created by J.C.Penney, because Penney's used to give every employee a chance to own company stock. Thus the workers were not "employees," but "associates". Odd that the term has stuck but not the practice. A little history of the term might have helped.

Caitlin Kelly has no idea what it is to work in retail.

Working one day a week, for just over two years, in a high-end store, in one of New York's most upscale malls is not "experiencing what it's like on the other side of the cash wrap". At best, what Kelly experienced was an extended research project to benefit her successful journalism career. Yet, she continously writes about the difficulty of being on your feet for such long hours (again, for one shift per week) and how dreadful her pay is for the work she puts in ($11/hour - more than I've ever made at any retail job with 12 years of experience).

However the most disturbing aspect of this memoir is her constant mention of her co-worker's ethnicites. Kelly often makes mention of her African-American and Latino co-workers as getting the best job they could. In one disturbing section of chapter 3, she finds it necessary to talk of the store manager's assistant's personal life, letting us all know she had a baby out of wedlock. After discovering that some co-workers may have criminal records, Kelly states "I was shocked, although maybe I shouldn't have been.". No further explaination for this statement is given and one must assume the undertone is "because they were all blacks from the Bronx".

Kelly may have done well for herself in her chosen career of journalism (this book makes it clear she loves dropping the fact that she's interviewed Presidents and the Queen of England), but writing this book was a false step. The pages reek of her racial and social privledge and prove that she is still blind to it. While she wants us to believe she is now a much more enlightened consumer, the only thing we know for sure after reading this is that she'll do anything for a scoop.

I read a couple positive reviews of this book in magazines and thought it sounded like an entertaining read. Well, like another reviewer mentioned, maybe she has some pull in the literary world that got her good blurbs, because this is a truly terrible book.

I'm actually surprised her story made it to publication, seeing as how it's basically false advertising. When I first read that she worked just one day a week, I thought surely that was just a starting point and her shifts would increase. Otherwise, how could she really call it a "career?" Nope, she works one day a week and thinks that qualifies her to expose the indignities of grueling retail labor. She also acts like she needed to take the job as supplemental work, when it's clear that it was very calculated. It's like she already decided on the entire book's content before embarking on her utterly soul-sucking shift at The North Face. Let's hear from someone who works 40 hours a week at Kmart and then we'll have a real story.

Caitlin Kelly is drunk on her own "prestige" and spends baffling amounts of space reminding the reader that she's met several famous people and is white and financially secure (and she seems weirdly obsessed with pointing out what race everyone is). She goes on and on about the problems of the retail world, but she's not doing the general world any favors with her snobbery and entitlement. I found the whole thing really revolting and I would love to hear what the poor people who worked with her really thought of her. To me they're the true heroes of the story.

Malled is is not exactly a Nickel and Dimed expose. Nothing in Malled will shock you or make you completely rethink your attitude toward retail. Its value may be mainly in accurately describing the tedious sameness of working in retail, or any white collar job, for that matter.

Caitlin Kelly, who is a journalist, lost her full time job at a newspaper and although she was able to do freelance reporting fairly regularly, needed the dependable income of a wage slave job. She started working in a brand new North Face clothing store in an upscale mall two days a week, but for most of her three year stint, worked just one day a week.

For all the dreariness and thanklessness of the job, it's not exactly a sweatshop. Kelly, who was in her late forties when she started the job, seemed somewhat naive about working at a job as opposed to a career. Her coworkers, who worked longer hours and commuted longer distances to work, and who were all younger, didn't seem as surprised as Kelly about how the management didn't care about working conditions or about how management could improve sales. Kelly early on established herself as a squeaky wheel, bringing suggestions and complaints to management. Her colleagues kept a low profile, perhaps realizing that expending unnecessary angst over the job would wear them down. Eventually Kelly quit her job out of sheer frustration and exhaustion.

While Kelly paints a painfully accurate picture of the tedium of working in retail at minimum wage, it's sometimes a bit hard to take her seriously. She was only working one day a week after all, indoors, selling clothing. She didn't even have the stress of working on commission. And when she talked about jetting off to Paris or splurging on a $200 silk blouse, you realize this job had a different priority for her than it did for her single mother and student coworkers.

I found myself wondering about her coworkers. Early in the book, Kelly mentions an assistant manager who, like Kelly, had lived in France. He had, she says, been a chef and before that, led a group of soldiers in the French Foreign Legion. And before that, he'd danced professionally in an American ballet company. But he disappears quickly, and we never hear of him again.

Recommendations: Katherine Newman's Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market and No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City,

The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse,

Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, the Global Consumer, and Beyond and Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping by the Author of Why We Buy (but not What Women Want: The Global Market Turns Female Friendly),

and of course, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

I wanted to like "Malled" by Caitlin Kelly. I really did. But I did not. I found Kelly's writing to be repetitive and contradictory, and her tone to be condescending and humorless. I honestly lacked any sympathy for her - I'm sure her shifts were tough, sure, but she only worked one day a week. And then got to return to her "real" life. Imagine those who do this for their only income, 40+ hours a week, as I once did.

Basically, I completely and utterly agree with everything J. Roberts wrote in his/her review.

Spot on. Skip this book.

Read "Waiting" by Debra Ginsberg. It is a much more interesting, entertaining and well-written

look at the service industry. And she has a sense of humor.

I really wanted to like this book. I have worked numerous retail jobs and was interested in a journalist's take on one. But seriously? This woman who takes a random job at North Face keeps going on and on about how her talents and skills are utterly wasted in this job, and how no one appreciates her ability to bond with random customers who happen to share her interests and background. She's embarrassed when people from her "real life" come into the store, and she has a hissyfit every time a customer is rude to her. And she clearly loathes at least a few of her customers at first sight. No manager listens to her ideas about rearranging the store, either.

She lost me completely early on in the book when she says that throughout her employment, she never once scrubbed the employee's toilet because she thought it was "demeaning." Hello? Who ought to be doing it, pray, if a person who has actually been to PARIS and interviewed FAMOUS PEOPLE is too good to do so? Were all these co-workers whom you profess to respect and admire just thrilled as could be to scrub a toilet that occasionally contained your poop, madam? NO ONE IS TOO GOOD TO SCRUB A TOILET. Period.

Frankly, as talented and as clever as Ms. Kelly might be, I would have absolutely HATED to work with her. By her own description, she complains constantly in meetings, is insubordinate to managers, talks back to customers, gets upset over trifles, and won't or can't do part of her assigned job duties. She also only works one or two shifts and then is ASTOUNDED that someone else is promoted to manager toward the end of her time at North Face.

Malled has some interesting research mixed in with some less interesting research (warmed-over Paco Underhill), and a few good personal anecdotes. NB, everyone: it is worse than meaningless to say that a factory worker in Cambodia makes less than $12 an hour if you don't have any context for that figure. Most likely all her neighbors make only 50 cents an hour and are green with envy.

But any pleasure I received from reading "Malled" was thoroughly overshadowed by the irritation I felt at the author's egotism and cluelessness. So the days of personal shoppers and long-term sales assistants are gone. So are the high-prices and overhead that came with them. So some people are rude when they are customers. It's not personal -- it's not about you. Yes, retail and waitressing and telemarketing and other service jobs are all incredibly difficult to do. And if you can't check your privilege and expectations at the door when you are in a service position of any kind, you are going to have a miserable time. I wish Ms. Kelly had written about learning this fact, instead of rejoicing in the martyrdom of being a square peg in a round hole.