vacation packages unilaterally without giving the appearance of having
negotiated the improvement with the union. Rather than call a strike, a
highly effective publicity campaign was launched in which the union
orchestrated unflattering stories about Nordstrom in the Seattle press and
theWall Street Journal. The union president stated that ‘blue collar employ-
ees governed by hourly wage laws were themselves having to make time-
management decisions usually reserved for white collar “professionals”.’^34
Several former employees testified to Nordstrom’s ‘dark side’. The fol-
lowing excerpts were published in the Wall Street Journal:^35
The first time Nordstrom sales clerk Lori Lucas came to one of the many
mandatorySaturday morning department meetings and saw the sign – ‘Do
Not Punch the Clock’ – she assumed the managers were telling the truth
when they said the clock was temporarily out of order. But as weeks went
by, she discovered that on subsequent Saturdays the clock was always
‘broken’ or the time cards were not accessible. When she and several col-
leagues hand-wrote the hours on their time cards, they discovered that their
manager deleted the hours and accused them of not being ‘team players’.
Commenting on the variety of tasks that implicitly had to be performed after
hours, Ms Lucas said, ‘You couldn’t complain, because then your manager
would schedule you for the bad hours, your sales per hour would fall, and
next thing you know, you’re out the door.’Patty Bemis, who joined Nordstrom as a sales clerk in 1981 and quit eight
years later, told a similar story:
Nordstrom recruiters came to me. I was working at The Broadway as the
Estee Lauder’s counter manager and they said they had heard I had wonder-
ful sales figures.We’d all heard Nordstrom was the place to work.They told
me how I would double my wages.They painted a great picture and I fell right
into it ...
The managers were these little tin gods, always grilling you about your
sales ... You felt like your job was constantly in jeopardy.They’d write you up
for anything, being sick, the way you dressed ... the girls around me were
dropping like flies. Everyone was always in tears.Where does the truth lie? There is no denying that Nordstrom churns
through thousands of employees each year in its drive to hone its compet-
itive edge. Its highly motivated cadre of sales personnel and managers
must prove themselves at every level or they are terminated. But for many,
the counterpoint is captured by an articulate and highly successful
women’s apparel salesperson in one of the San Francisco region stores. An
expatriate of Haiti, she states: ‘Nordies as the Moonies of retailing? I find it
amusing. It seems that some people don’t want to accept that we are in an
398 Relationship Marketing