Turnaround is Fair Play

The recession is changing the composition of the service economy, especially those doing the serving. My check-out person at Trader Joe's a few months ago was a licensed architect who had recently been laid off. "I used to design Starbucks," he told me. "Now I'm happy to earn a paycheck."

Last Sunday, the New York Times carried a similar story in the Business section about a freelance writer who had taken a part-time job in a retail store, to help make ends meet as well as to give her some human contact in what can be an isolating profession. Some of the lessons she has learned are surprising.

"Sometimes I feel like Alice slipping though the looking glass, toggling through both worlds," writes Caitlin Kelly. "I slip from a life of shared intellectual references and friends with Ivy graduate degrees into a land of workers who are often invisible and deemed low-status."

Yet, for all their stereotypical "low status," the workers she encounters in her retail job are anything but. "Our employees include nationally ranked athletes, a former professional ballet dancer and a former officer in the French Foreign Legion," Kelly notes. Their status seems to be troublesome only to those customers who feel entitled to treat them as "inferior." "When you wear a plastic name badge, few bother to read it," Kelly writes.

The objective in the retail marketplace is clearly defined: volume, and for this journalist by trade, the surprising objectivity is refreshing. Egos, perceptions, who you know, all play a part in getting ahead in the cut throat environment of journalism. In retail, its all about how much you sell. "Our retail sales floor is the levelest playing field I've yet seen," she writes.

Now before you rush out and get a part time retail job, be forewarned that Ms. Kelly can only afford to do this part time. And in this economy, those retail jobs may, in fact, be harder and harder to come by. But the bottom line is this: treat everyone with respect, not because the clerk who is hanging up all the clothes you left on the floor of the dressing room may have a college degree in economics, but because that is the way you should treat everyone.

You never know when and how you might have to redefine yourself.