Five mornings a week, Arlette Chaney-Cain rises at 6 a.m. and cooks herself a big breakfast. Sausage, two eggs, toast and jelly, two cups of black coffee. It`s usually the only meal she`ll have all day.
At 7 a.m. she puts two candy bars in her purse-classics such as Hershey, Milky Way, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger. Then she leaves the South Side apartment she shares with her husband, walks two blocks to the bus stop on 79th Street, catches a bus to the 79th Street station on the Dan Ryan ”L,” and takes a train to the Loop.
The candy bars are for extra energy. She believes they stoke the reserves of stamina required by her job, which makes working in an office seem like a day at the beach.
Especially this time of the year.
Arlette Chaney-Cain is a salesperson for Marshall Field & Co. at its State Street store.
For many consumers, the Christmas season is the Super Bowl of shopping, and spending a day with Chaney-Cain is a way of seeing how someone on the other side of the counter plays the game.
It`s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in mid-December, a half hour before Field`s opens its doors for business. Christmas carols are already flowing from the store`s sound system, and employees are still streaming in.
Chaney-Cain has been here almost an hour. She always comes early. She enters on Randolph Street, punches the employee time clock, then heads for the men`s sportswear department, a large room on the main floor at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Randolph Street; it`s been her assignment for eight years.
Selling in any season, but especially at Christmas, is an endurance test for Chaney-Cain and the tens of thousands of her colleagues, the unsung and anonymous foot soldiers on the frontlines of America`s consumer society.
Sore-foot soldiers is probably more accurate. Many salespeople rarely get a chance to sit down.
For every minute of her seven hours of selling, Chaney-Cain is standing or moving about on a marble floor. There`s no place for her to sit down, even temporarily, which can be murder on the feet and spine. One of the first things she does upon arriving at Field`s is change into a pair of black, crepe-sole shoes with arch supports.
Even so, she`s bone-tired by the end of her shift, and as soon as she gets home in the darkness of the late fall and winter, she takes a bath and turns in for the night. No dinner, no unwinding in front of the TV set.
”Sometimes I`m in bed by 6:30,” she says.
From the day after Thanksgiving until the day before Christmas, the factors that contribute to fatigue are intensified. The crowds are bigger, and shoppers are feeling pressure too.
But guess what? Chaney-Cain loves the season.
”Oh, I get such a thrill out of everything,” she declares. ”It`s such a beautiful time of the year. I love the music and the traditions and the decorations. I love to see the children coming in to see Santa and to look at the window displays. When I see the kids with their noses pressed up against those windows-oh, that`s Christmas to me!”
This week, she`s working the Sweater Wall, one of the department`s four sections or ”counters.” She and her department co-workers change counters every week or two.
She is wearing an aqua blouse, aqua slacks, aqua earrings and a mauve jacket. A pair of glasses hangs around her neck on a plaited black cord.
At the moment she is folding and stacking sweaters, something she will do whenever she`s not helping customers, wrapping purchases or writing up sales tickets on a computer. Sweaters, imported and domestic, are arranged in seven large armoires of dark wood, on wall shelves and on several tables.
Crew-necks and V-necks. A sleeveless selection. All-cotton, all-wool, all-acrylic. Combinations of synthetics with wool or cotton. Sweaters for skiing, boating, golfing, preening. Colors from muted to loud. Solids, stripes, argyles, patchwork patterns with a variety of vivid colors. Pastels in pink, yellow, blue, green, coral.
Each day she gets a target total of sales she`s to meet. The store computer has set her goal today at $1,417, based on the average number of sales she can make in the hours she works and the department`s price structure.
She`ll probably have to sell between 40 and 60 sweaters. All are moderately priced in this department, and many are also on sale. The most expensive-cashmere V-necks-are marked down from $175 to $129.97, and some all- acrylic crew-necks are going for $24.97.
`Good morning, ladies`
Ninety percent of the time, she says, she hits her target, and when she falls short, she can add her surpluses from other days to make up the difference.
A Field`s manager says if a Field`s salesperson consistently falls far short of the daily sales goals over a long period of time, the person`s job could be in jeopardy. This seldom happens, the manager says.
Chaney-Cain holds up a subtly patterned tan crew-neck that`s made in Italy and sells for $150. ”Look at this one,” she says. ”This is my favorite. Isn`t it gorgeous? It`s lana wool (a soft fine grade) and alpaca. I`ve been pushing these. I`d love to have it, but I can`t afford it right now. Maybe there`ll be one left during the January clearance sales.”
It`s the quiet before the lull. ”It won`t be all that busy this morning,” she confides. ”The busiest time is between noon and 2 p.m. and then in late afternoon when people get off work.”
Sales clerks have much in common with baseball outfielders, for the rhythm of retailing is marked by long periods of downtime punctuated by brief bursts of frenetic activity.
She says the heavy action will come the next two days with a storewide sale designed to energize a populace chastened by fears of recession. Her sales goals also will rise. On the first day of the sale, her target will be $2,812.
At 9 a.m., many of the first customers coming through the revolving doors are mothers and their young children.
”Good morning, ladies,” Chaney-Cain says. ”Welcome to Marshall Field`s.”
”They`re on their way to the Walnut Room to have breakfast by the tree,” she says. ”Then they`ll go see Santa. It`s a tradition.”
The Walnut Room is the elegant dining room on the 7th floor with a ceiling that soars to the 8th floor. A 45-foot evergreen tree laden with 12,000 lights and 5,000 hand-made ornaments dominates the room, whose tables are filled throughout the day.
Best day in years
At 9:33 a.m., Chaney-Cain makes her first sale. A multi-colored, part-wool, part-synthetic crew-neck that comes to $36.45 with tax. Only 1380.55 to go.
As the lull deepens, Bryan Stawecki, who`s also working the Sweater Wall today, checks in. He and Chaney-Cain are among six full-time salespersons in the department, which is bolstered through the year with four part-timers and in December with 22 seasonal hires.
”Last Wednesday at our 13-hour sale,” Chaney-Cain says, ”we had the best day I`ve ever seen in my years with Field`s. Our department sold $78,800, and I made my $4,000 goal.”
Chaney-Cain started at Field`s 13 years ago when she was 43. ”It was my first job. I decided to get part-time Christmas work. Field`s was the first place I applied.”
She was thrilled. She and her family never shopped there when she was growing up. ”We couldn`t afford it,” she says. ”We shopped at the south end of the Loop, at Sears and Goldblatt`s. Even after I was married, I didn`t shop here.”
Her mother called her friends. ”She told them, `Arlette`s got a job at Field`s.` They`d go, `Oooooohhhh.` They were impressed.”
So were her employers, who asked her to stay on full-time. She began in women`s shoes. A buyer befriended her. ”He told me this was one of the great stores of the world, that kings and queens shopped at Marshall Field`s. He said to me: `Arlette, every day you should pick a different department and go there during your breaks. We may not be able to afford many of the things that are sold here, but we can learn about them.` ”
She still wanders through the store on her breaks, asking questions.
”He was right. It`s been an education. I`ve learned about fine furniture. I`ve learned about Oriental rugs and silverware and china, about how crystal is blown. I`ve learned that cashmere comes from the neck of the sheep and that Lacoste was a tennis player.”
George Frenette walks over. ”He`s our star,” Chaney-Cain says. ”Forty- one years at Field`s.”
Frenette, dapper in a tweed sportcoat, his eyes shielded by tinted glasses from the brightness of the store`s white walls and strong lighting, moves with a calm economy of motion, perhaps one of the secrets to longevity in selling.
He shows Chaney-Cain how the design of his new shoe soles is easing the strain on his feet.
At 9:56 a.m., things abruptly get hectic. Chaney-Cain sells three sweaters, each to be separately wrapped. She nimbly folds two sheets of tissue paper around each sweater, puts them into red boxes and places the boxes in one of Field`s distinctive green shopping bags.
Frenette is assisting Mrs. Eleanor Daley, the widow of Major Richard J. Daley and the mother of the present mayor. ”She has a lot of grandsons to shop for,” Chaney-Cain says. ”Once when I was in the Polo shop, she bought 12 Polo shirts for them. She`s a wonderful lady.”
A blond, middle-aged woman in an expensive camel-hair coat brings two sweaters to the counter, then whispers: ”Oh no, here comes my husband. I don`t want him to see what I`m getting him.”
She crouches behind the counter. A distinguished gray-haired man in a navy-blue topcoat walks past and exits through the revolving door.
”Isn`t this awful?” the woman says.
”Not at all,” Chaney-Cain says. ”What else could you do?”
The customer traffic from noon to 2 p.m. is as heavy as expected. People line up at the counters with sweaters in their arms, and Stawecki and Chaney- Cain become more cashiers than salespersons.
A lost shopping list surfaces. It reads in part (names have been changed to ensure Christmas-morning surprise): ”Sweater for Nancy. Gym shoes for dad and Bobby. Reality, Liz Claiborne. Boxers for Bobby. Obsession. Clinique nail polish. Sweats for Cindy. Wine glasses. Portable phone. UB40.”
Here eyes glisten
At 3 p.m., Chaney-Cain takes lunch. She has worked through her 30-minute break, which means she can leave a half hour early, at 4:30 p.m.
Her first candy bar has been consumed on the train into the Loop. She eats the second candy bar during the break and often buys a third for lunch, as she tours the store.
”These days I always go to the Christmas Court on the 6th floor and look at the beautiful ornaments,” she says. She first takes the elevator to the 8th floor and walks to an observation area overlooking the Walnut Room. Her eyes glisten as she looks at the tree. ”Isn`t it gorgeous?” she says.
Next is the Christmas Court. ”Isn`t this wonderful?” she says, as she walks through an incredible array of lights, candles, stuffed bears, Christmas cards, wrapping paper, snow globes, electric luminaries and nutcrackers.
At 4 p.m. and back at her post, she makes her final sale, a $130 sweater of many colors to a woman in her 20s. Chaney-Cain compliments the woman on her taste.
”It`s for my boyfriend,” the woman says. ”We watch `The Bill Cosby Show` together, and when he sees Cosby in those sweaters he wears, my boyfriend always says, `He looks sharp.` But I bet Cosby pays $200 and $300 for his sweaters, minimum.”
Chaney-Cain checks her sales total. It`s $1,590.11. She has surpassed her goal. Her computerized cash register flashes a message: ”Congratulations!”
She has sold 43 sweaters, has given directions to scores of people, has folded and stacked countless sweaters and has uttered the words ”beautiful,” ”gorgeous” and ”wonderful” something like 75 times.
”You can see why I love this, can`t you?” she says, as she heads for her train.
