Death of the salesmen: Salutin
I’ve been trying to watch Mr. Selfridge, a British TV series about the American who created a legendary department store in London during the Downton Abbey era. Mr. S is played by Jeremy Piven who, believe me, was more riveting as Ari the obnoxious agent in Entourage.
I persevere since I’ve got a stake in salesfolk. My dad and his two brothers sold dresses at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide for 46 years — wholesale not retail, as the sign in the window said. They were agents for Montreal factories. My brother and I viewed them as the Marx brothers of the dress business. Now the Darling Building is a heritage site with new media startups and galleries. Darling Lunch downstairs, where the shmata guys conspired, is a Dollarama.
There was romance and tragedy to selling then. Two great U.S. plays, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, dwell on the pathos, or just pathetics, of salesmen. Those qualities existed here, too. I met a Montreal supersalesman, Jack Gold, with the moxie and sexual swagger of those characters. A dress line, Jacques Doré, was named after him. They had a core sense of dignity, based on their role in an “hourglass” shaped economy, as Terry Flew and Richard Smith say in their text, New Media. They functioned at the “bottleneck” between producers and consumers. Now that connection has been “distintermediated” or “remediated” by more direct, online relations. Today many young people work in “retail” (not wholesale), but it’s just a stop, even if it lasts a lifetime, en route to something cooler. The same for servers: waiting was once a proud, lifelong profession.
Canada was basically set up as a sales operation by European powers who coveted its “staples,” (cod, beaver pelts, timber, wheat) and in turn sold us their finished products. It was a stable arrangement since demand for Canadian goods was set by the buyers. They told us what they needed and we supplied it. We didn’t have to convince them. Then, in the late 1800s, John A. Macdonald’s National Policy used tariff barriers to build up manufacturing here. That led to regional (east-west) and labour tensions but they were healthy, nation-building tensions.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/05/10/death_of_the_salesmen_salutin.html
