Shopgirl Paper
The Retail Society: Understanding Mirabelle’s Workplace in Shopgirl
The signs of money and success are in excessive abundance in Hollywood, California. Rich people from all over the world converge on this celebrity hotspot to socialize, tour, and shop. It is because here, like other fabulous major cities in the world, important designer clothes can be purchased with a credit card passport. In contrast, most people do not consider the fate of those who work behind the counter, selling the luxurious, fashionable items of the day. In the story Shopgirl by Steve Martin, a woman named Mirabelle is introduced, where it is shown what it might be like for someone to work retail in a land of the rich and famous. Here Mirabelle experiences what it is life for someone to be removed from everyday society and hurled into a world of alienation, stratification, and dehumanization.
Located in the glove department of a Nieman-Marcus department store, Mirabelle is separate from her fellow employees physically and mentally. She spends most of her time daydreaming and staring off into space from behind her counter. This is her Siberia, her place in the company as far from social contact as possible. Few customers, most of whom pass her by with merely a glance at her wares, break her sheer boredom. Sometimes she wishes she worked in the perfume department, where she would actually be able to talk to people. At the same time, her lack of work allows her to leave the store precisely on time, walking right through the perfume department and away from those who stay late to catch errant shoppers.
Working behind a counter separates someone from reality and places them into a role that is not of their crafting, in a new society where the rules are all for serving the customer. Mirabelle sees the perfume department as being a higher ground at the first floor, while she herself works on fourth floor. There is meaning in her physical location on the fourth floor, being farthest from the entrance, and perhaps farthest from contact with the real world. At one point she comments to a coworker, Lisa from cosmetics, that almost everyone is her boss. This same woman also sees herself as being above and better than Mirabelle, and doesn't see her as deserving any man who has financial success. Mirabelle also looks up to the perfume girls, wishing that she could be so lucky and get a chance to be social.
Even though she does have the odd customer here and there, however whether looking for gloves or not, the customers still disregard the person behind the counter as being a person. To them she represents the product within her counters, nothing so much as a fellow human being that would be wanting or deserving of social contact. Mirabelle stands at her station, waiting for the end of her shift like an automaton. In this automatic response mode that she uses for her time at work, she probably doesn’t even think about trying to talk to the customers and instead merely does her job. More often than not she goes unnoticed in the company itself except by her immediate supervisor and Lisa.
Lisa also dehumanizes Mirabelle, though Mirabelle is hardly aware of it. Through her elaborate process of making herself perfect, Lisa cannot understand why any man would settle for the lesser qualities and skills that she herself has to offer. Mirabelle in her own way sees the other girls at Nieman-Marcus not as girls she would socialize with but merely as coworkers, also slave to the demands of customers and company. Since this job is nowhere near what she would really love to do for a living, which is to draw, Mirabelle has no inclination of putting forth effort at her job or into getting to know the other girls she works with. It is because of this that Mirabelle becomes an automaton at work: she is carrying out exactly what is required to keep the job, and no more. She does not put herself into her work since it has nothing to do with her.
Regardless of location or specific occupation, many people have experienced all or some of the dislocation from society that comes with the experience of working in retail. Being on the other side of the counter from a customer at McDonald’s, for example, means nothing more than a person to take the order and the money from a hungry customer. A lot of shoppers probably don’t consider that the representatives approaching them for their interest in an item could merely be an attempt at human contact. Mirabelle gives us an inside scoop on the detriments of working in retail, even in a prestigious locale, while reminding us of the things people are willing to do to make certain the all-important bills are paid.