Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequity

Abstract

Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequity Christine L. Williams. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. For approximately six weeks, sociologist Christine L. Williams worked as a salesperson at two chain toy stores in Austin-a big box superstore on outskirts of town called Toy Warehouse and an exclusive, upscale, urban shop called Diamond Toys-in an attempt to study ways in which attitudes toward race, class, and gender operate in conjunction with modern American toy store. The result is her book, Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequity, title of which reveals what she found and echoes conclusions of Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. However, instead of focusing on a particular sales venue, such as Wal-Mart, she addresses a large industry as a whole. Her book does not include as much in-depth information on specific toys as other classics in field, such as Cy Schneider's Children's Television: How It Works and Its Influence on Children, Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus's Toyland: The High Stakes of Toy Industry, and Ellen Seiter's Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. Instead, it takes a business organization's approach, addressing dynamics of relationships and interactions among store managers, sales employees, and customers. One senses that Williams's findings are not exclusive to toy industry but could be applied to any number of other corporate retailers. Her goal, she writes, to understand how shopping was socially organized and how it might be transformed to enhance lives of workers and consumers (20). Conducting research as a participant-observer, Williams found that in many ways two toy sales venues were very much same. Both sold similar merchandise, although Diamond shoppers thought they were getting exclusive items, and both offered similar pay and working conditions, even though Diamond Toys was unionized while Toy Warehouse was not. Both were more likely to employ male managers and demonstrated a preference for putting white or lighter-skinned women in more visible, customer-interactive positions in store. Both stores had a gender ratio of 60:40-60% women and 40% men. This ratio was repeated with race; however, at Toy Warehouse, it was 60% minority versus 40% white, whereas at Diamond Toys figures were reversed. In general, Williams writes, the more upscale store and high paying position, more likely employee will be a white, middleclass woman, or man (38). …