The Customer Is Always Wrong: Consumer Complaint in Late‐NEP Russia

Abstract

T A o earn the public's trust and publicize his firm's commitment to provide customers attentive and courteous assistance, Philadelphia's pioneering retailer John Wanamaker coined the slogan Customer is Always Right. Enshrined as a cornerstone of the capitalist retail ethos, Wanamaker's slogan nonetheless brought no end of trouble to many proprietors and retail employees. As Susan Porter Benson has noted in her study of the development of the American department store, once services had become accepted features of department stores, certain customers demanded special individual attention. To some women of the upper and middle classes, the emphasis on amenity and luxury was not just an invitation to consume in style, but also a blank check for the exercise of their class prerogatives.1 While the image of the customer as queen?or king?continued to reign supreme in the United States, even as trade journals filled with stories of ill-tempered customers who defied the noble ideal, the installation of a socialist government in the former Russian Empire called into question the privileging of the consumer. As Benson's remark suggests, serving the customer connoted an unquestioning deference on the part of sales workers, who were expected to fulfill the personal requests of middleand upper-class female shoppers and indulge their whims. In the Soviet Union, a society founded to uphold the rights of the working class, this unequal relationship symbolized the reenactment of class struggle on the sales floor, and, therefore, would have to be reversed. The process by which the Bolsheviks tried to recreate the retail sector and alter the relationship between workers and consumers, however, was by no means as straightforward as simply inverting class and gender dynamics. Consumers were not always middle or upper class. Neither were workers and consumers always female. Moreover, socioeconomic struggle became only one factor at play on the sales floor. Equally important was the legacy of the pre-1917 retail economy,