Shopping as Symbolic Interaction: Race, Class, and Gender in the Toy Store

Abstract

Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in San Francisco, California, on August 15, 2004, this article discusses the relevance of symbolic interactionism for understanding labor processes. Based upon the author’s clerking experiences in two toy stores, she proposes that interactions between clerks and customers reproduce social inequalities based on race, gender, and class. Erving Goffman (1967, 1977) claimed that face-to-face public encounters with strangers typically rely on ritualized scripts to make them go smoothly. In service work, this insight has been transformed into a maxim. Visit McDonald’s and you are likely to encounter the “six steps of counter service” (Leidner 1993), beginning with the question, “May I take your order please?” and until recently ending with “Do you want to supersize that?” Usually, this scripted server-customer interaction comes off without a hitch. When it does not, the result is often conflict. If customers linger too long over their food order or request some special item not on the menu, they will likely face disapproval, mostly from the customers behind them. Workers who refuse to say their lines will likely be fired. This approach to understanding service work has been enormously popular and fruitful, especially in the gender literature where the “doing gender” approach (West and Zimmerman 1987), which was influenced by Goffman’s theory, has become practically hegemonic. I would argue, however, that Goffman’s perspective is limited for reasons that Herbert Blumer (1969) identified years ago. The meanings of these rituals are not self-evident. It is only through a process of symbolic interaction among active, creative, knowledgeable participants that the meanings and consequences of these rituals emerge. This article focuses on the rituals of toy shopping. But it also examines the ongoing innovations, negotiations, and reinterpretations of shopping from the perspective of salesclerks. I was employed for three months, a total of more than 300 hours, in two large stores that were parts of national chains. One of these stores, which I call Toy Ware