I worked at Wanamaker’s department store in downtown Philadelphia for about three months in late 1975. I had finished college and couldn’t find a job so I became a stockboy for $2.25 an hour in the curtains, bedspreads, and draperies department.
The building was really old. It opened in 1911. It had a hand-operated elevator which I learned to use. The treads on the escalator were wood. One time, a lady’s shoe broke off part of the tread and disappeared into the guts of the escalator.
Department stores are notoriously cheap. Wanamaker’s expanded their hours but not the stock staff. We worked in split shits so we were only fully staffed in the middle of the day. The downtown store served as a warehouse for the suburban stores. For example, a customer would go into a suburban branch and pick out a bedspread. The salesperson would call us and we would ship the bedspread to their store if it was in stock. Trucks carried merchandise from many store departments.
One day we had a big sale of stuff that hadn’t sold and was just piled up. It was all mixed together. We counted the number of curtains and took it out to the store floor in trays. A mob of customers would rip the curtains out of our hands before we could even get them to the tables.
I remember one lady who had miraculously found three matching sets of curtains. She wanted a fourth We had no idea if there was another set. She was just about in tears, saying “Baby, baby just one more pair!”
Sad! 