ABSTRACT
The chapter describes the salespersons’ job duties, portraying what they usually do and how their work is organized and monitored by the store managers. The work organization within the stores, the distribution of roles, the customer assistance provided appear identical not only among the stores of the same chains in Milan and New York but also between different chains. The self-service model marginalizes the salespersons’ role and assigns them very standardized and repetitive tasks (folding, sizing, and labeling clothes).
The chapter also analyzes the characteristics of the labor force employed in the sector and the labor market conditions in the two contexts. Mass fashion retailers have two main target pools of labor supply: young people—flexible in terms of scheduling and similar to young customers of the stores—and women who are willing to work part-time. In Italy, both the labor force pools seem less abundant than in the US. Nevertheless, by resorting to slightly different labor force pools, mass fashion retailers can find, in both countries, a labor supply willing to satisfy their flexibility requests. What is not directly comparable across the two contexts is the role played by the Latino and black people, which has no equivalent in Italy.
