Every morning I watch the girl down the street leave for her summer job at Penneys. Lanyard on. Earpods in. Ponytail tightened. She doesn’t know it, but I salute her as she goes into battle, for I too spent my summers folding and refolding €1 thongs as people pulled them out willy-nilly EVEN IF I WAS STANDING RIGHT THERE.
My years behind a till have let me in on two secrets. The first is that our entire ability to buy food and clothes relies on an unlikely alliance between hungover students and middle-aged women. The second is that middle-aged women with name tags keep the world as we know it turning.
I didn’t always think that. For about 10 years, starting in the mid-2000s, I pissed off a lot of middle-aged women. This was because they were either my managers or customers at my various low-paid retail jobs. I was a checkout chick. I scanned things and at the end of the day I counted up the wrong amount of money in the till.
I wanted to leave work on time so I could go sit in someone's parents' garage and pretend to smoke fags with boys. They wanted me to tidy up the lingerie department
I hated it. I had to work with the public, who seem to think someone wearing a uniform is a sign that they were allowed to be utter dicks to us. In retail you can only tell someone to get f**ked a finite number of times. I learned that number is zero. Or one if you say it really fast under your breath.
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My colleagues were all women in their 40s to 60s. They all seemed to have the same four names: Sue, Dawn, Val and Deb. I think these were the only names women were allowed to be given in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.
Initially, I annoyed them and they annoyed me. We had different priorities. I wanted to leave work on time so I could go sit in someone's parents' garage and pretend to smoke fags with boys. They wanted me to tidy up the lingerie department. Sorting fiddly G-strings and big ugly bras first by size and then by colour on the rack. Spacing them exactly two fingers apart. I couldn't leave until they checked this with white gloves.
"It's about taking pride in your work," one Val said to me.
This should have been a beautiful teaching moment, about an elderly shop lady taking dignity and purpose from her job and passing on the lesson to young women she’d taken under her wing. But I was on less than €6 an hour and I had places to be. I didn’t want to hang up over-the-shoulder boulder-holders any more. Also, I knew if a Val had dropped dead on the shop floor right there in front of me, the manager would have stepped over her body and her uniformly finger-spaced rows of hangers to ask me to cover Val’s shifts.
While I never did develop the knack for undergarment display, I learned other things from Sue, Dawn, Val and Deb. How you should always keep your money separate from your husband's. How to make a good roast. Which managers never to be in a room alone with
While I never did develop the knack for undergarment display and inventory, I learned other things from these women. How you should always keep your money separate from that of your husband. How to make a good roast. Which managers I should never be in a room alone with.
Whenever one particular predatory one would hover near me and watch my 16-year-old body bend down to pack low shelves, the Deb/Val/Sue/Dawn phalanx would knowingly appear and whisk me away in a cloud of hairspray and Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds to safety.
It wasn’t just me they took care of. Once, a woman appeared at the checkouts late at night. She had bruises on her upper arms that were a good match for the same dimensions of a man’s hand. She explained that she had just moved and that’s why she was buying so many kids’ pyjamas, toys and sheets. She was nervously watching the total come up on a screen while checking her wallet.
I saw Val Number 2 “forget” to scan about every third item and then hand back the “wrong” change, folding an extra tenner into the woman’s hand.
My own mum was one of these women. Lorraine worked in shops and then a bank for more than 30 years. She took any job she could, really, because she was a single mum at 19.
I used to be embarrassed that my mum was only a bank teller. “My mum works in banking,” I would say, as if she oversaw a trading floor rather than the lodgment of Mr Costantinou’s pension cheque.
Every time I go to the supermarket or the pharmacy or the reception area at my doctors, I see women like my mum working, the ones keeping the country going
But she did so much more for people in her community. Before, during and after the financial crisis she refused to push financial products on customers who couldn’t afford them, despite her job demanding sales quotas. She would take the time to break down complicated terms and conditions to people whose first languages weren’t English, helping fellow immigrants on their path to the great Australian dream.
When you look at equal-pay law it’s women in low-paid factories who won it. In England it was the Dagenham Ford factory workers; in Australia it was women steel-mill employees who took the first test cases. Sometimes we forget about women who do this kind of work. Our “influential women” lists tend to focus on chief executives.
Every time I go to the supermarket or the pharmacy or the reception area at my doctors, I see women like my mum working. The ones keeping the country going while the rest of us hid at home during the pandemic. So to them I say I see you, and thank you.