The Seater Greeter May 25, 2008
Posted by voolavex in Uncategorized.Tags: Add new tag
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Many years back my husband used the term “seater greeter” to describe what used to be called the maitre ‘d or host at better restaurants. He doesn’t claim it as original – just a term he heard and found perfect to describe the job. Expensive places used to have maitre d’s and hosts that lead one to a table – even clothing shops had sales people who saw to ones shopping (Are You Being Served on the BBC was a great example of this phenomenon.) As we slipped quietly into the realm of fast food, discount stores and lately, rising prices – the role of the Seater Greeter has reemerged and seems to have become very important to corporate business. Not to me. The Seater Greeter is an insulting ploy. I am trying hard to figure out just how stupid businesses think consumers are. Do they imagine that some slack jawed, bored human at the door saying “Welcome to Buymart” is going to erase our knowledge that we are now paying higher prices for cheaper goods using more expensive gas to go out and do it? That customer service is going to take the place of good value for money? That we go to the parking lot in sticker shock but still talk about how nice the guy at the door treated us? In one local supermarket it is impossible to turn a corner without some eager beaver stopping you as you shop to ask “if you’re finding everything okay”. Try asking for something specific and they won’t have a clue. The other day a confused looking man was handing out grocery fliers as people left the store with a delightful grin spread across his face.
I remember when, about a decade ago, a company for whom I worked decided to reinvent the wheel, add integrity to its policy and recreate the employees as something else. They had participated in a est like training program called Smart U. To this end, they had a contest for the new name and since the business had a slightly nautical theme in its infancy (managers as Captains, First mates etc.) the names we all suggested were really hilarious. I remember that catch of the day was one, cabin boy another and someone even suggested bait . Accurate too because we all had a sense of becoming fish in a barrel. They eventually called us “crew members”. I suggested that had I wished to be a crew member I would have been a sailor or sailed a yacht. No one laughed.
This whole concept of course is lifted from the Japanese who have used it to great success in their corporate and retail ventures. Elevator Girls in Japanese department stores take extensive lessons in in bowing and scraping and among corporate samurai the bowing in measured in the angle of the bow- the salary man is indeed part of a greater entity. Why does anyone imagine this works in a country founded on a revolution and pioneer spirit.
I suppose this stupidspeak nomenclature is also designed to shortcon the employees themselves into a mythical squadron of dedicated workers who – for their low pay and minimal benefits – imagine that by being “team” members they are helping the company who hires them. Corporate culture has taken on anthropological status in the last 20 years. Corporations have gotten obscenely rich on this exploitive sleight of hand. Silly titles do not pay the rent. Seater greeters are not in the fast track for promotion. Gone are the days when the bag boy becomes the CEO. It seems to me that the intelligent thing to do would be to eliminate the grinning and the greeting, train and pay the employees adequately, end the company pep rallies and figure out a way to have the prices of the goods balanced with the economy and the current cost of living. That means actually living not camping in your car. It is not prudent to buy more when people have less to spend. It is not smart to fire ( oops, downsize) employees and then ask the consumer to get a warm fuzzy feeling about a company dedicated to increasing its profit margin by laying off minimum wage workers. Frankly there is nothing demeaning about terms like clerk, cashier, stockperson, janitor or waitress. Calling a sow’s ear a silk purse doesn’t make it true. And there is nothing wrong with either one unless you try to compare them. I would far rather be a very competent clerk for $20 an hour than a expendable team member for eight bucks an hour with little hope of adbvancement. Screening for good manners isn’t discriminatory; smiling, saying hello and answering questions are pro forma.
By the time prices could go down we will be so accustomed to what they are we won’t even care. The rich will get richer and the rest of us will get new titles for less pay. Or no pay at all. And the guy on the street corner playing Three Card Monte will call himself a seater greeter instead of a hustler and no will notice or wonder why.
The Content of Our Character April 5, 2008
Posted by voolavex in Uncategorized.Tags: Add new tag, State's Rights, Voting Rights Act of 1965
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When I was a teen-ager, the worst fight I ever had with my father was about the Freedom Rides. Incredibly, he had raised me without bigotry in 50’s America (think about it – it’s a rare and fragile gift ). I was 15 and had saved enough money to get on the bus and register voters and he told me simply “no”. I accused him of being a bigot. But his explanation was simple. He was terrified I would be killed by white people. Idealistic and wet – I had no comeback and so I didn’t go. I have never forgotten the fight and the lesson it offered. He clearly knew things that it would take me a lifetime to learn. It has.
Martin Luther King, Jr. has been dead for 40 years but his elegant dream ended long, long ago. Not in the hearts of daydream believers – but in the cold reality of the nightmare that is America’s endless, ugly hypocrisy toward stolen and sold humans who got here as slaves. We created – in that awful business- a unique American that is refused a real home here and one who cannot go back home again. Yet who belongs more? As I waged my own war for Civil Rights in the 60’s – I never gave a thought to the fact that there should never have been this war to begin with. That after Emancipation, freed slaves – Americans through and through, should have simply been treated as emancipation decreed. This was the dream that began on Juneteenth and started a process that saw colleges, schools, businesses and mobility among newly freed people in the United States until about 1876. Brave, ingenious people who invented their own forty acres and mules in as many ways as there are ways to imagine. People, forbidden to read or write, whose first acts included those very skills that should have brought them into American history and society as a success story for the ages. Instead 18 states created Jim Crow laws that mandated “separate but equal”; laws that continued a slavery that exists into this new century. If separate but equal had been a statement of fact – not an invention of bigots – the freed community might have still flourished. The status of equal in the equation might have allowed this community to create an infrastructure rivalling that of the other America – the same way that immigrants, after Ellis Island opened for immigration in 1892, created the Emerald Society, the B’nai B’rith and other ethnically centered welfare organizations that kept traditions alive, while allowing each group to mainstream on their own terms, into the common population. Most immigrants at first, even practiced a version of their own Jim Crow, in subtle ways, with churches, synagogues and fraternal groups that excluded some and welcomed others. And it worked for them, to a large degree. But the real Jim Crow was none of these things – and least of all was it equal. These vicious laws ridiculed and subjugated freed slaves; cleverly engineered to ignore their rights as citizens. A State’s Rights free for all to keep them down and back and trodden upon for as long as they lived. Jim Crow and his ugly twin De Facto Jim Crow would not allow them to rise, to learn, to create, to prosper. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not a triumph for anyone – it merely restated what should have been in effect since the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18, 1865. Ninety-nine years later, after opportunistic Americans of all backgrounds demonized fellow citizens descended from former slaves, this act was passed to honor a promise dishonored and never kept. One year later The Voting Rights Act tried to do the same thing
So I believed in that movement – I lived that movement – I admired the activists who created that movement. I revered Dr. King and I believed what he believed. It took me over 40 years of close observation and anger to realize that he was trying to make a silk purse out of a 346 year Holocaust that was illegal and immoral. He used his pulpit and his reason to shepherd people into a path of truth gone cold. But he tried. And he died trying.
He is still a hero to me, nonethless, and deeply deserving the respect and admiration of every American. Perhaps someday we may even see the dream come true. And we are reminded, on this 40th anniversay of that dark day at the Lorraine Motel, that he dreamed and hoped for the lives and future of not only his people, but all people. And as so many of us outgrew or abandoned his truth and this fight, we have still failed to realize that in fact, it was the content of our character that was in question. It still is.
.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_ride
(http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm)
Voolavex 