Working

by Studs Terkel

  And Orientals, they’re another. They want something for nothing, for sure. Everybody thinks that the Jewish guy is hard to sell. Sure, he wants a break, he wants everything cheap. But he’s realistic. These Orientals and Indians, they want everything for nothing. They want to buy for less than the dealer paid for it. A Jewish person, you say, “It cost me a thousand dollars, I’ll give it to you for twelve.” They want it for eleven fifty, fine, eleven fifty. But you tell an Oriental, “Here it is, in black and white, it cost a thousand. I’ll give it to you for ten fifty.” He’ll say, “No, no, no. I want it for nine fifty. I want it for less than you paid for it.”

  The black guy doesn’t care what you paid for it. He’s concerned with what he can afford. Can you keep the payments for around fifty dollars a month? Can he afford it, that’s all. But you know who I’d rather sell to more than anybody? The professional people. It’s a challenge, and I like challenges.

  “I’ve always wanted to be the best in whatever I did. I would tell people, remember something as you go through life: Bosworth is Best. I even had cards printed up with that, just to joke with guys at the pool hall. Anything they could do I could do it better. That’s why I got into automobiles, the challenge.”

  Say I’ve been working at this place twenty years, okay? Most people’s jobs, after twenty years you got seniority. You’re somebody. After twenty years at this job, I go in tomorrow as if I started today. If I don’t sell X amount of cars a month, I’ve gotta look for another job. It’s not because they’re bad people, but they’re in business. If you got a bad egg, you get rid of it. I don’t like it. I’m young, I’m healthy, I’m strong, I can do just about anything. But for my family, I’d like a little more security.

  People are out to gain whatever they can. If sometimes it means stepping on someone, they don’t think too much about it. I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily out to take advantage of others. They’re just out for personal gain. Me, I don’t like to step on people. I’ve had money. I’ve had opportunity. I could’ve been a gigolo. I could’ve married a Jewish girl, her father is a multimillionaire. I took a pass. I’m not a goody-goody, because I’ve been in jail, I fought, I stole.

  The only one that could be a threat are the people who can cost you your job. Because that would threaten my family. They can kill me. I could care less if they killed me. I like my work. I have to like it, I must like it. Otherwise I’d be miserable. It’s not what I’d like most to do, but I like it. If you’re not happy, you can’t sell. You have to be ready: let’s sell, sell, sell. You’re all gung ho.

  Most people in the business drink. Mostly they talk about wine, women, and song. In some places they talk about horses, which doesn’t interest me in the least. I’m not gonna bet on four-legged animals. Most of my friends—or acquaintances—are people I’ve known for a long time. We play Monopoly, we go to the movies, go to a play like Fiddler on the Roof. I don’t play pool with ‘em, cause I refuse to play for nothin’. It took me a long time to get good at that game. If anybody wants to beat me, it’s gonna cost ’em money. I like gambling. I like playing cards for money.

  Selling cars is a gamble. Every customer that walks in there, they’ve got a twenty-dollar bill or a fifty-dollar bill in their pocket. It’s up to you to get it out of their pocket. The only way to get it out is to sell ’em a car. It’s a gamble. If I had more education I’d be a little better at it. I wish to God I could turn back the clock and go back to school. That’s why it’s a challenge to sell a man that’s been educated, been through college. I can make him come to me instead of me going to him. They see it my way.

  Could the world survive without my work? No. There has to be a salesman. Oh, if a man put his mind to it—and I’ve thought about it myseif—that could all be computerized. All a salesman does is find a car that suits you, which has the best features and which has the worst. All that can be put into a computer and you’d have a questionnaire that people would answer. The only thing that would require a salesman is the price. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people are price-conscious. That’s all they care about. You could sell ‘em a bag of potatoes if the price was right. You could sell ’em a 1948 Chevy if the price was right.

  How do you feel about Ralph Nader?

  Pardon me?

  How do you feel about Ralph Nader?

  We could do without him. He’s taken the choice away from the people. He doesn’t give them the choice of having head restraints or belts. Or having emission control systems. He took that choice away. Carbon monoxide, all that poisonous stuff, leave that to the manufacturers that know such things and what it would cost to build all that new equipment. I think he’s an alarmist. Chicken Little or whatever. He’s driving my wife crazy. She’s afraid to breathe air and everything, ’cause of him.

  Sure, cars could be much better if it wasn’t for the oil companies and the gas companies. They could run on air, they could run on water—or electric. There’s no end to what they could do right now, but they won’t.

  My wife’s been wanting a Volkswagen for two years and she’ll wait two hundred before she gets one. It’s an unsafe car. That’s why I watch commercials—to see if I can find something I can use in my next sales meeting with a customer. I watch how TV commercials affect people who watch it with me.

  I wish the public would realize that I’m a human being, too. You meet some guy at a party and its, “Aw, you guys are all alike.” “Watch out for him,” blah, blah, blah. I tell ’em, “Stick it in your keester.” The public thinks the automobile salesman is a rat. Some of the customers are the real animals. Why must they wait? Why can’t they be number one? “How come I’m not getting good gas mileage?” They beat a car to death and they wonder why it doesn’t perform for them. All they do is make you eat your guts out. Then they’ll go right down the street and they’ll do it to another guy and they’ll wonder: Is everybody a rat? And they’re the rat.

  They don’t have to be animals. It’s the whole system that makes ’em animals. Everybody goes on strike, they want more money. The wife needs more money to buy groceries because groceries are higher because the delivery is on strike, the trucks are on strike, the factories are on strike, everybody is on strike. The car salesman can’t go on strike. I have no union. I go on strike, I say, “I’m not gonna do this.” They say, “See if they want to hire you down the street.”

  I’ve been fired from this place five times because of my mouth. And they call me back every time. They realize they were wrong. You can’t hate a man for being honest. Jesus, I feel if you can’t be honest, what’s the sense in doing anything?

  BOOK FIVE

  APPEARANCE

  SAM MATURE

  He has been a barber for forty-three years. For twenty-one years he has owned a shop at the same locale, an office building in Chicago’s Loop. “A master barber may have a couple of other barbers that are better barbers than he is, but they call him master because he’s the boss.”

  Long hair is nothin’ new. We had some fancy haircuts them days the same as we have today. I did a bit of musicians and they had long hair. But not like the hippie. I have no objections as long as they keep it clean, neat, a little light trim. But you know what gets me? A fella’s got a son in college, he’s got long hair, which he’s in style. Here’s the old man, he wants to get long hair. And he’s the average age fella in the fifty age bracket. He wants to look like his son. Now that to me is ridiculous. Happens quite often. The fella’ll come in and he’ll say, “I’m gonna let my hair grow, Sam, because my daughter or my wife . . . ” Daughters and women tell their husbands how to cut their hair. The guy’s been married for twenty-five years. I don’t see the sense in him changing. We still like what they call the he-man cut. Businessman haircut. Not all this fancy stuff. It’s not here to stay.

  It hurt the barber quite a bit. I know about nine barbers went out of business in this area alone. A man used to get a haircut every couple weeks. Now he waits a month or two, some of ’em even longer than t
hat. We used to have customers that’d come in every Friday. Once a week, haircut, trim, everything. Now the same fella would come in maybe every two months. That’s the way it goes.

  We used to have five chairs here. Now there’s only three of us. We used to have a manicurist here that works five davs a week. Now she works one day a week. A lot of people would get manicured and fixed up every week. Most of these people retired, moved away, or they passed away. It’s all on account of long hair. You take the old-timers, they wanted to look neat, to be presentable, and they had to make a good appearance in their office. Now people don’t seem to care too much.

  You take some of our old-timers, they still take their shampoo and hair tonic and get all fixed up. But if you take the younger generation today, if you mention, “Do you want something on your hair?” they feel you insulted them. I had one fella here not too long ago, I said, “Do you want your hair washed?” He said, “What’s the matter? Is it dirty?” (Laughs.) A young guy. An older person wouldn’t do that.

  In the city of Chicago a haircut’s three dollars with the exception of the hair stylin’ shops. They charge anything they want. It runs up to as high as twelve dollars. We don’t practice it. The three of us can do it but we usually don’t recommend it. We have to charge a man so much money. I don’t think it’s considerate, that kind of price for a haircut.

  In stylin’, you part his hair different, you cut his hair different. Say you got a part and you don’t want no part. You comb it straight back, you’re changing his style. Say his part’s on the right side. All right, you want to change his style, you put the part to the left side. Then you wash his hair and you cut him down and redress his hair over again. That’s hair stylin’, I actually never went much for that myself.

  When I came here twenty-one years ago, I had a separate chair here in the little room, in which I cut all ladies’ hair. We’d run about six or seven or eight cuts a day in women’s hair. I love to cut women’s hair. At one time I won second prize cutting ladies’ hair, which was back in 1929. The wind-blown haircut. Their hair was all combed forward. It was like a gush of wind hits you in the back of the head and blew your hair forward. Today young girls don’t know what it is. I think it’s a lot easier than cutting men’s hair. They’re less trouble, too.

  “Most of your new barbers today, actually there isn’t too many taking it up. Take these barber colleges. It used to be three, four hundred students. Not any more. You maybe get five or six there. Not only that, the tuition has gone up so high. It cost me $160. Now it would run you about six hundred dollars or better. Young barbers today, unless they go in for hair styling, it isn’t enough money in it.

  “So many of them, they get disgusted for the simple reason that it takes too long to be a barber. When I took up barberin’, it took six months. Today you have to apprentice for almost three years before you can get your license. You work for a lot less—about thirty dollars less a week than a regular barber would get.”

  You can’t think of other things while you’re working. You concentrate on the man’s hair or you’d be talkin’ to him whatever he wants to talk about. A barber, he has to talk about everything—baseball, football, basketball, anything that comes along. Religion and politics most barbers stay away from. (Laughs.) Very few barbers that don’t know sports. A customer’ll come in, they’ll say, “What do you think of the Cubs today?” Well, you gotta know what you think. You say, “Oh, they’re doin’ swell today.” You have to tell ’em.

  Fans today in sports are terrific, hockey, all those things. That counts in bein’ a barber. You gotta know your sports. They’ll come in, “What do you think of that fight last night?” Lotta sports barber has to watch on TV or hear about it or read about it. You gotta have somethin’ o tell him. You have to talk about what he wants to talk about.

  Usually I do not disagree with a customer. If there is something that he wants me to agree with him, I just avoid the question. (Laughs.) This is about a candidate, and the man he’s speaking for is the man you’re not for and he asks you, “What do you think?” I usually have a catch on that. I don’t let him know what I am, what party I’m with. The way he talks, I can figure out what party he’s from, so I kind of stay neutral. That’s the best way, stay neutral. Don’t let him know what party you’re from cause you might mention the party that he’s against. And that’s gonna hurt business.

  I disagree on sports. Fans are all different. TV plays a good role, especially during ball games, real good. All the shops should have TV because the customer, he wants to look at something, to forget his office work, forget the thing he has in his mind that he has to do. Watchin’ TV relaxes his mind from what he was doin’ before he came in the shop.

  A lot of people sit down and relax. They don’t want to have anything to do, just sit there and close their eyes. Today there is less closin’ their eyes. We had customers at one time that if they couldn’t go to sleep, they wouldn’t get a haircut.

  Customers call me by my first name—Sam. I have customers twenty years old that call me Sam. I call the customer Mister. I never jump to callin’ a man by his first name unless a man tells me himself, “Why don’t you call me Joe?” Otherwise I call him mister.

  About tips. Being a boss, sometimes they figure they don’t have to tip you. They don’t know that the boss has to make a living same as anybody else. Most of your master barbers, they don’t bank on it, but they’re glad to get whatever they get. If a man, through the kind heart of his, he wants to give me something, it’s all right. It’s pretty hard to keep a person from tipping. They tip a bellhop, they tip a redcap, they tip a waiter.

  If bosses in these shops would agree to pay the barber more, I’d say ninety percent of them wouldn’t do it. They’d rather the customer to help pay this barber’s salary by tipping him. I’m in favor of not tipping. I’d just as soon pay the man ten dollars more a week than have him depend on that customer. This way he knows that he’s got that steady income. In the old days you kind of depended on tips because the salary was so small. If you didn’t make the extra ten dollars a week in tips you were in had shape.

  I’ll tell ya, by tipping that way it made me feel like I was a beggar. See? A doctor you don’t give him a tip. He’s a professional man. You go to a dentist, you don’t give him a tip because he fixed your tooth. Well, a barber is a professional man too. So I don’t think you should tip him.

  When I leave the shop, I consider myself not a barber any more. I never think about it. When a man asks me what I do for a living, I usually try to avoid that question. I figure that it’s none of his business. There are people who think a barber is just a barber, a nobody. If I had a son, I’d want him to be more than just a barber.

  What’s gonna happen when you retire?

  They’re gonna be just another barber short.

  “Barbers that work on the outskirts of downtown are different. Outskirt barbers are more chummy with their customers because they’re friends. They go bowling, they go fishing, they go hunting together. Here you see a fella, an executive, maybe every two weekends, then you don’t see him any more, and you don’t know where he lives. The outskirt barber has more authority than we would here.”

  EDWARD AND HAZEL ZIMMER

  Mr. Edward is a beauty salon in a suburb close to a large industrial city. “She works with me. Twenty years we’ve been here almost. They demand more from a hair stylist and you get more money for your work. You become like a doctor becomes a specialist. You have to act accordingly —I mean be Mr. Edward.”

  At a certain point she joins the conversation.

  Some people go to a barber shop, you get an old guy, he hasn’t kept up to date with the latest styles, newest cuts. They’re in a rut. They cut the same thing no matter what’s in. A barber should be a hair stylist himself. There’s some male beauty shops, they deal more in your feminine men and actors. Most actors prefer going to a beauty shop because a barber might just give you the same old cut and you might look like the ja
nitor down the street or the vice president of a bank. Appearance is importance.

  There are beauty operators, there’s hairdressers, and there’s hair stylists. A hair stylist is more than a beauty operator. Anybody can fuzz up hair, but you ask them, “Do I look good in this Chinese look which is coming in now, Anna May Wong?”—they don’t know.

  You have to sense the value of your customer. If the jewelry is a little better and she’s accustomed to services, such as maids, her husband makes a good dollar. If you’re getting a woman with five kids and her husband’s a cabdriver—which is no fault in that—she is not the kind that’s gonna come in here every week. Or the little lady down the street, who lives with her cats and dogs or even her husband, who doesn’t care. They say, “Just set it nice. I can’t wash my hair because of my arthritis.” They’re not fussy. You say to the beauty operator you employ, “You take Mrs. Brown because she’s not fussy.” You pick out the fussy one that’s been around, they’ve been to Acapulco, Hawaii. They expect a little more from you than the beauty operator. Then you become the stylist. You have to know which customers are for whom and which are not.