Customer's Complaint

IT is getting so that I cannot buy anything any more. This is due chiefly to a newly popularized, and ever spreading, variety of merchandising technique. I do not know how to designate this technique exactly, unless I say that its promulgators appear to assume that the customer’s sales resistance is in inverse ratio to the extent of his embarrassment.

Once upon a time, things that you bought in a store were proffered upon the counters with a kind of homely honesty. ‘Gents’ Pants,’ an aisle sign would say, or ‘Extra Heavy Corsets,’ and this same spirit of bluff and hearty forthrightness was exhibited in magazine advertisements. Only this afternoon I was leafing through some twenty-year-old magazines I found in a neighbor’s attic, and they confirm my recollections admirably. They fill me with a sad nostalgia for those days when a man could walk into a store and tell the clerk, without a quiver, that he wanted some Krementz Collar Buttons, or some Rushforth Hair Curling Pins for his wife, or even a Mackintosh Dress Skirt.

It is all changed now. The realities are fled away, and instead the goods of the world are beshrouded in such coyness and whimsy, such smirkings and oglings, such verbal nudgings and grimacings, as may well make a strong man blench. Alexander Woollcott has already called public attention, with a visible shudder, to those two breakfast foods for children known respectively as Beckus Puddy and Lishus, but I am here referring to an even larger and more deeply afflicting noxiousness. It is distressing, to be sure, to see a large manufacturing company reduced, by the touch of a baby hand, to a fit of simpers, but all save the strongest of us have ever tended in the presence of infants to become a little subnormal. What bothers me is that new and pervasive temper in merchandising circles which is responsible, for instance, for a species of women’s underwear called Scandalettes.

I should not, of course, have said ‘underwear.’ Nobody — except perhaps a few superannuated and incorrigibly earthy scrubwomen — wears underwear any more. The feminine form is now encased in foundation garments, and, unless my ad reading deceives me, the fashionable male is now happily sheathing his lower torso in Short-Eez.

If coyness is sufficiently trying, how much more so is that merchandising method which affects a kind of genteel leer. For a number of years it has been my custom to remember the birthday of an elderly aunt of mine with a bottle of scent. For a decade or more I used annually to march matterof-factly into a drug store and purchase a bottle of Florida Water. It was a simple, dignified, and virile occasion, like ordering a bale of hay. Of late years, however, my aunt having rushed into modernity in a rather more wholehearted and headlong way than her nephew’, and being accordingly no longer delighted by so stodgy a token as a gill or two of Florida Water, I have had each year to shop around for some other gift than scent. It may be that I am exceptionally queasy, but I have a very odd feeling in my stomach and my knees become as jelly at the thought of entering a drug store and attempting to ask, in anything like a normal voice, for a phial of My Night of Ecstasy. Sometimes, as in a nightmare, I am obsessed by the fear that one day my wife may twist an ankle or contract the measles or be otherwise temporarily prevented from doing her own shopping, and that I may have to do it for her. It would never have fazed me a whit to chaffer with a saleslady about corsets or drawers, but I am certain that never — unless through the gulping of many a hearty dollop of Dutch Courage — could I stammer out a request for a set of Snugglies.

One need not be completely a peasant to be irked by this flight from reality. And one need not be a sentimental nostalgiac, either, to think kindly of those vanished days of trade when commodities were what they seemed, and a collar button, for better or for worse, was a collar button still. Indeed, as I think of it now, it almost seems to me that there is a kind of austere beauty in those plain old unornamented words, like ‘pants’ and ‘suspenders’ and ‘hair oil,’ which now are vanishing from the world, in a vapor of evasion.

I have a plan. When next I enter a department store, and the pallid floorwalker comes fluttering around me to ascertain if I wish something (fancying, it may be, that I am in search of Tighties to clothe my loins), I intend to reply to him, in a rumbling lumberman’s basso: —

‘A pair of long flannel underdrawers, sir, and a pound of Drayman’s Plug.’

I suppose it will kill him.