With department stores locked in fierce rivalries over customers, the industry soon employed corporate espionage as a basic tenet of how it conducted business. Dorothy Shaver, for instance, was put in charge of comparison shopping at Lord & Taylor, one of the country's oldest and largest department stores. Comparison shoppers were store employees who posed as regular customers and "shopped" at rival stores, spying to discover what style of gloves was selling best, or what competitors were charging for Parisian evening gowns, or which items were headed for the clearance piles. Stores went to great length to conceal the identities of these comparison shoppers—not only from other stores, but from their own employees as well. This was because comparison shoppers were just as frequently tasked with surveilling their colleagues, wandering through various departments, and inconspicuously grading fellow staffers on friendliness and knowledge, then writing their findings in reports that provided the basis from which managers doled out bonuses or docked pay.
"I know one store that has a concealed entrance for its shoppers," a contemporaneous source recounted. "Ladies simply go up to the business office and are taken in to see the adjustment manager, presumably to register a complaint. He lets them out another door that leads through a hidden passage to a little room equipped with typewriters. They nip in there and get their assignments in the morning and leave their sheets there in the evening."
For her first day at Lord & Taylor, Dorothy chose a no-nonsense outfit that lent her an air of authority and discretion. The dark, conservative suit skirt, small gold earrings, and closed-toe pumps was to become a uniform from which she rarely varied over the ensuing decades, her one feminine flourish a sheer white linen handkerchief that she kept tucked into her sleeve. Within weeks of coming onboard, Dorothy realized that she despised comparison shopping. "The idea of 'comparison' struck me as ridiculous," she said. "We should spend less time finding out what other shops were doing and pay more attention to developing our own business." She began urging her boss to rethink the strategy, writing an unsolicited report recommending that the department be disbanded. |
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