All Fun and Cool Clothes? Youth Workers’ Consumer Identity in Clothing Retail
通过访谈55名青年服装零售工人，发现他们的消费身份并未补偿低薪和恶劣工作条件，反而帮助他们应对服务工作的互动并找到成就感。
Retail offers notoriously bad jobs that exist at the nexus of work and consumption. Previous brand-based retail studies assert that youth workers see the stores’ coolness and the employee discount as compensating for the low pay and variable schedules. The authors use interviews with 55 former and current young clothing retail workers to examine how they experience retail work in relation to their consumer identities. The authors find that while some workers identify with the brand, all workers criticize the poor working conditions. Workers draw on their consumer identities to understand what good service entails and sometimes to resist managers’ orders that they interpret as bad deals for shoppers. This article concludes that youth retail workers’ consumer identities do not compensate for the low pay and poor work conditions but instead help them navigate the interactive aspects of service work and find fulfillment on the job.