Vertically Challenged and Red Ink

When you’re almost a foot taller than your wife, standing straight has its challenges. Unlike Fred and Ginger, we don’t dance cheek to cheek, even when Gilda wears heels. Where to hang pictures on the wall is a quandary. Her eye level is way below mine. Gilda raises the bathroom shade a mere 22”. I prefer a more comfortable 33”, so that I don’t have to bend over like a hunchback to peer outside.

My father used to tell his children to stand up straight and walk with shoulders thrust back so we wouldn’t bend over. I think he was reacting to the many hunched over men and women he saw in his youth in Poland. He didn’t want us to turn into hunchbacks. Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews have a tendency to suffer from scoliosis, a condition Gilda sees quite often among Hasidic patients who come to the spine surgery practice where she works. It’s a curable condition if caught early enough. 

I’m not really in danger of becoming a latter day Quasimodo, but I do sometimes envy those couples who are more vertically compatible.

Speaking of my father, I thought of him the other week when New York University received City Council approval to expand its Greenwich Village campus despite opposition from community groups and even members of its own faculty who feared the project would alter the character of the neighborhood. According to an article in The NY Times, “University officials argued that if they could not build on that parcel, they would have to continue buying up, tearing down or converting buildings, which would further damage the neighborhood’s character and infuriate residents.”

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, my father operated a lingerie factory on Broadway, shifting its location whenever his lease would expire, from 718 Broadway near 8th Street down to 692 Broadway (the old Tower Records building) to 683 Broadway to 611 Broadway at Houston Street (where Crate & Barrel now occupies the ground floor). NYU was the landlord for several of those buildings. Back then they converted many of the buildings in the area to loft apartments or office space. Doing so effectively put out of business many of the small lingerie manufacturers who for decades operated in the area. 

When it was 611 Broadway’s turn to be converted, my father organized a march on city hall. All the rally did was get him a few seconds on the local news, Channel 7, I believe. He moved his factory to Brooklyn, into the Howard Bros. building just south of the Manhattan Bridge. By then, in the mid-1980s, the lingerie business was not strong, nor was the polo shirt business he has transitioned into. He was losing about $1,000 a month. In his mid-70s, he couldn’t abide the thought of losing money. My brother and I counseled against closing the factory. It was, we told him, better therapy than seeing a shrink. It kept him active and out of the house, meaning, not in our mother’s hair 24 hours a day. As she used to say, she married him for breakfast and dinner, not for lunch. They had worked together for some 30 years, he in charge of the factory operations, she in charge of the office. When he ventured into her sanctuary, decibel levels invariably rose. Now in retirement, she had no desire to have him poking around her domestic domain all day. 

Despite our best efforts, he chose to close his business. All he could see was red ink. 

A Sense of Higher Purpose

Among the most e-mailed recent articles listed by The NY Times was a piece on Apple’s store employees titled, “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/business/apple-store-workers-loyal-but-short-on-pay.html?_r=1). 

As someone who covered retailing for more than three decades, I learned very little from the extensive reporting. It was not news to me that Apple, like most retailers, pays its store staff little more than minimum wage despite counting on them to rack up among the highest, if not the highest, sales per square foot among chain store retailers. 

Buried deep in the article was the following paragraph which explains to a large degree why Apple can get away with low hourly wages: “The phrase that trainees hear time and again, which echoes once they arrive at the stores, is ‘enriching people’s lives.’ The idea is to instill in employees the notion that they are doing something far grander than just selling or fixing products. If there is a secret to Apple’s sauce, this is it: the company ennobles employees. It understands that a lot of people will forgo money if they have a sense of higher purpose.”

That last sentence—”It understands that a lot of people will forgo money if they have a sense of higher purpose”—really got me. It brought me back several decades to a presentation by then CEO and founder of Crate & Barrel Gordon Segal. Asked by a Wall Street investment analyst to explain the success of his home furnishings chain, Segal attributed much of it to the dedication of store associates, men and women often with a degree in art or design or teaching. They had a talent for connecting with people and for feeling good about their work. That transcendent feeling, Segal said, allowed Crate & Barrel to keep salaries low because the staff received inner fulfillment from their work in lieu of demanding higher wages.

That’s the same management philosophy that for years buttressed the belief that public employees—firemen, police, social workers, sanitation workers, teachers, nurses, even the military—could be hired at low starting salaries. The tradeoff many of these workers, and government officials, accepted was better health care and retirement benefits. Now slash and burn governors, mayors and their legislative henchmen are trying to balance the books on the backs of government workers. 

Sure, there were and are some malingerers among them. What industry doesn’t have its share of goof-offs and people who take advantage of the system? But do we seriously believe teachers are not among the most important members of society and thus should be valued and paid appropriately? Does anyone seriously want to haul trash—even if it’s just their own trash— in the frigid dead of winter or the blazing hot summer? How about running into a burning building to save someone who might not even be inside the inferno, but firemen go in anyway because a family member or friend suspects a loved one is inside? How many of us are ready and willing to put our lives on the line each time we don a uniform to protect our cities or to safeguard our nation from attack in foreign lands? 

Perhaps what we need is a little more introspection about the good government workers bring to our standard of living.