Aisles of Joy!

It was taboo to work in a retail store, not too long ago. It was indeed a fact that in India many parents would not give their girls in marriage to boys working in the retail floors and vice versa. Service jobs have definitely been neither white-collar office jobs nor even blue-collar operative jobs but they have fallen in the middle order as  ‘gray-collar’ jobs. The gray collar jobs are those that engage service personnel like the security guards, waiters, quick service restaurant personnel, etc.  For a long time the corporate world has only known white-collar and blue-collar jobs! No one knew the middle order until the service economy started shaping up across the world in the last two decades! Sales associates on the modern retail floors I am sure are a shade better and they should ideally fall in the comfort zone of any shade of white and would not border on any gray areas! (Incidentally merchandisers in India discovered the off-white colour in apparel!) I am not going to dwell on any colour classification and get into trouble like Sashi Tharoor who discovered the ‘cattle class’ of flyers! And a retail job was perceived in the Indian society as an insignificant one and this was because of the reason that most of the traditional stores were run by family owners where employees too were often the members of the extended families who were not well-to-do and in the case of outsiders such stores were manned mostly by children – the school dropouts or the ones who had to support their parents who managed a large household.

Our retailers no longer need to have the infra-dig feeling they had yesteryears when attending to customers on the floors extending any kind of personal service was considered low profile! Even as many in the past have considered working in the retail floors not so attractive a career option, we find many in the current times finding their happiness working for modern retailing in India. Of course, modern retailing is now about an experience for the retail associates too, as much as it is for the customers! There’s good music on the floors while there is an opportunity to work as teams enjoying each other’s company. Often retail floor personnel enjoy their interactions with customers. Employees at Walmart begin each day with the Walmart cheer and in many of our Indian retail stores too the day begins with a lot of fun during the morning meetings even if there may not be a big cheer song! Our sales people invariably celebrate every ‘big’ sale by sharing with everyone how the achievement is made and how happy the customer is. At every opportunity they have jokes to share.  An irate store manager once saw a bucket full of water the housekeeper was using to clean windowpanes, left forgotten for a while and he kicked it with all his might. The sales person in the store quipped, “Hi! Our manager just ‘kicked the bucket’ and understanding the pun, all went beaming instantly! Sometimes it is amazing to come across the sense of humour on the retail floors! In this computer age the young sales associates and store employees willingly see sales figures and share the fun of discovering the benefits of business analytics – the majority of them are comp-geeks too, adopting a ready tech-savvy attitude! The promise of a fast career growth track in retailing is seen delivered within short spans of time as the industry grows rapidly. The sales associates and supervisors of yesteryears are now sales managers and store heads. Today’s sales associates can grow fast to become department managers and floor managers in the next few years and the retail growth that is proliferating into every lower tier town in India is enabling the delivery of such great career promises!

The perception of small jobs and big jobs is fading into oblivion and now that modern retailing has set its foot on the Indian retail floors, it has become the true game changer!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani