A visitor emerged from Bloomingdale`s first-floor cosmetics department last week saying that she had been spritzed by so many perfume and cologne demonstrators that ”it was like walking through a car wash.”
As another visitor observed, it`s no wonder they`re aggressive. ”Not only the spritz girls, but nearly all the girls in the department I knew from before,” she said. Some of them she had known in their previous employment at Carson Pirie Scott & Co., from Neiman-Marcus and from J.C. Penney, but most she knew from the cosmetics department at Marshall Field`s Water Tower store. ”Bloomie`s,” she said, ”took all their best girls.”
In what has come to be known as ”Store Wars” since Bloomingdale`s set up shop at 900 N. Michigan Ave., a Bloomie`s raid on Field`s cosmetics department would be no minor skirmish.
This is a world in which women are known as ”girls,” be they ”line girls” who sell only one cosmetic vendor`s line of mechandise or ”fragrance girls” who sell only fragrances. The term is their own and they take it with them into their 40s and 50s.
It`s also a hotly competitive world in which many of the vendors, retail competitors and the ”girls” themselves are loath to speak on the record, as the stakes are high when rivalries heat up.
”Cosmetics is the most important department in the store,” said Annette Green, president of the Fragrance Foundation, the New York-based perfume-industry trade association.
”It gives the biggest return per square foot, and the industry pays for almost everything-the flowers, some of the girls behind the counter, the promotions, the sampling and the advertising. I hadn`t heard about a raid (by Bloomingdale`s), but if it`s true, does it surprise you? It`s a very competitive world out there.”
”They (Bloomingdale`s) visited all the stores in town,” said an Oak Street merchant. ”There were a couple of weeks last year when several Oak Street people called me to complain that they had been throwing Bloomingdale`s people out of their stores.”
Bloomingdale`s flatly denies raiding.
”I don`t really know how many Field`s people we have,” said Arlene Friedman, Bloomingdale`s vice president-cosmetics. ”I`m sure we have some, but we have a lot of staff, over 100 people in cosmetics. We certainly did not go in and raid the (Field`s) department.
”We did nothing more than run an ad that we were looking for people, and many people applied from many different places. It`s a beautiful department. So I would hope people came to work for us because they wanted to come to the new department.”
Still, there is no substitute for money in the cosmetics game.
”Bloomingdale`s is promising the cosmetics girls they`re going to make a lot more money,” said a Chicago-area vendor who sells to both stores.
”They`re certainly luring away people all over town with that idea. I think they have a very exciting department in New York, but I don`t know if they`ll be able to translate that here. Certainly they are masters of bringing theater into the store, but Field`s does wonderful things, too.”
A theatrical cosmetics department, she pointed out, fosters impulse buying, which is important in the cosmetics trade-as is the less-impulsive urge to buy cosmetics as gifts.
”The girls work on a base plus commission, and they`re starting at something like $9 an hour at Bloomingdale`s, including commissions,” said the shy vendor. ”Field`s starts you out at about $4.25 an hour. If you`re making $9 at Field`s, you`ve been there a long time and you`ve had a lot of raises, and you might make $12 at Bloomingdale`s.”
At least, that`s the word on the street. Said Friedman: ”When people tell you how much they`re making, do you believe them? What people tell you and what they really make can be something different.”
”The $4.25 figure is wrong,” said Hillary Rosenfeld, public affairs manager at Field`s. ”The average starting salary for an inexperienced girl is $6 an hour-that`s the minimum. But all the beauty advisers (Field`s term for
`line girls` and `fragrance girls`) work on commission, and our commission estimates are based on a higher volume of sales per beauty adviser. We feel sure it`s at least a third higher. So they should make more money at Field`s. ”But we did lose some beauty advisers to Bloomingdale`s. A couple of them said they were promised jobs in management they didn`t get. I don`t know how many we lost, but they weren`t all from Water Tower Place. There`s a lot of turnover in that business.”
A particular sore point at Field`s, no doubt, is the belief that some of the alleged defectors took their client books with them, or made copies before they gave notice. Client books are the property of the stores.
”See, when I`m not busy,” said a Field`s defector who did not, as it happens, go to Bloomingdale`s, ”I can get on the phone to one of my best customers and say: `Oh, Mrs. Gardner, we just got in a fantastic promotion. Lancome`s giving a new bag, and all you have to do is buy . . . whatever,` and she`ll probably say, `Oh, all right, send it out to me.` When I was actually doing that, some of my customers just loved me. So you want to take your best customers with you, and everyone knows that`s how it happens.”
The charge that Bloomingdale`s took all of Field`s ”best girls” appears to be wildly exaggerated.
”Beauty advisers move around a lot,” said Field`s Rosenfeld. ”But we have a lot of beauty advisers in our stores who`ve been with us for years and wouldn`t think of moving.
”I suppose we lost some because they wanted downtown jobs or promotions that weren`t available at the time.”
Indeed, a number of ”line girls,” the term for those who sell only one vendor`s products, left because at Field`s they were blocked from promotion to high volume, high-priced, high-commission lines by successful veterans, according to one vendor, who said Bloomingdale`s offered them better lines.
Some even became ”fragrance girls”-a step up. Why? ”There`s no money in color-lipstick and mascara,” the vendor said. ”Fragrance girls just sell fragrances, no makeup. They make more than anyone else in the store, and they can move around the floor.
”If a man comes in to buy Bijon for his wife-the most expensive-and maybe Joy for his grandmother, the Bijon girl can sell both lines.
”The girls hate this: `You took my sale!` But they all do it, even the line girls. If I`m a line girl, and you come up to my counter and buy something from me, you`re mine. I can waltz you all over the floor. I`ll start you with a lipstick, which is, say, $14.50, and then you can say, `I need a mascara`; so I`ll waltz you around for a mascara for another $14, and maybe I`ll get you to buy a face cream, which is $35. That`s how I make my money.
”But if I`m a fragrance girl, I usually won`t waltz you around for color. The fragrances I sell, let`s say, start at $50, and if I`m lucky, I`ll say to the man who buys a perfume from me, `Aren`t you going to get her the body cream to go with it?` That`s another $45; so now I`ve got him hooked for $95, and if he buys the bath powder, that`s $55 more.
”So if somebody buys a fragrance from me and says, `I need a mascara,`
I`ll say, `I can`t sell you that-you`ll have to get it over there.` Because I can`t be bothered.”
However the Bloomingdale`s staff was recruited, Friedman does not deny they are good.
”Hopefully, we have the best people. I`ve opened up a lot of stores, and I`ve never seen a crew of people for the cosmetics division that have been any better than this.
”But no one should be stunned that they`re here. You can only be stunned if yesterday they`re one place and today they`re some place else. Everybody we hired gave two weeks` notice because that`s what we asked them to do, and they started with us in July. They helped us mark the merchandise, bring it in, set it up-everything you do to set up the entire department.”
”At Field`s nobody is worried,” Rosenfeld said. ”Put it this way: Now that I`ve seen the figures, they might be getting my resume down in the cosmetics section here.”
Said Bloomingdale`s Friedman: ”I think everyone will thrive; I think competition is good for everyone, and we hope to be good neighbors-with our competition.”
At least one neighbor of both giants fears for neither.
”We were just packed last Saturday, and almost everyone who came in had a Bloomingdale`s shopping bag,” said Oak Street perfumer Marilyn Miglin, a retailer and vendor to Bloomingdale`s and Field`s.
”When Water Tower opened, everybody said, `Oh, what`s going to happen to Oak Street?` But Water Tower has done wonders for Oak Street.
”Bloomingdale`s will create even more traffic, and I think it will benefit everyone in the area.”
