Grab the Lapels

Minding the Store, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge

But the minute I found out people liked me and I liked them, I started selling. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You have to like every slob that ever was. There’s something in every guy. — Studs Terkel interview

Minding the Store, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge is a collection of mostly stories, with a couple of non-fiction pieces, about business. The introduction notes that Minding the Store started as a list of readings that Robert Coles chose to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Albert LaFarge explains the five sections of the book: selling, being in an office, white-collar domestic spaces, failure in business, and what happens after people in business are near death or dead. I absolutely love how the authors’ bios focus on work that they’ve done as opposed to a list of publications. If a publication is relevant, the bio mentions it, but the focus really is job related. Authors include Studs Terkel, Ann Beattie, John Cheever, Gwendolyn Parker, Leo Tolstoy, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.

Each story in the section about selling made a clear point without feeling preachy. In the first, a bankrupt couple must sell their little convertible by Monday when they have to go to court where all their assets will be seized. Next, a young businessman who buys a hardware store outsells the competition, which was established before the civil war. It’s a battle of sales between tradition and innovation rather than the familiar giant corporation versus small-town independent businesses. Next, is a novel excerpt about how light bulbs aren’t just light bulbs; they’re on metaphor that takes on more significance than simply buying a product. Following that, we get a story about a man who promises the moon and the stars to an important bigwig, but it’s all founded on lies related to China and his former coworker from China, set in the US in the 1970s. If you know, you know.

It’s interesting how we’re still having the same conversations. In one piece in which the author writes about her experience working for American Express in 1978, she writes, “Among the large workforce there were Hispanics and Asians and blacks, Pakistanis and Frenchmen, Barbadians, and Italians — everywhere faces that bespoke difference. It was easy, particularly in contrast with the strangled conformity of the firm, to imagine that this was truly a microcosm of America, that we were, in fact, creating the new American community. Of course, at the upper reaches of the company, the faces were as nearly uniformly white and male as they had been at the firm.” What the author experiences in 1987 is still the case today, making Minding the Store a relevant collection about where we are and where we were hoping to be.

The section about being in the office wasn’t what I expected. The first story was about how a certain number of employees are afraid of one person, and then those people scare other people, etc. I thought that was really interesting, this idea that office space intimidation spreads like the office space flu. But then, there are two pieces about nonfiction Black women who got into the business field in the ’70s in the US, that were more about making it as minorities and a white man’s domain. Strangely, there are only three or so nonfiction pieces in the whole collection.

The story that surprised me the most was Joseph Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress,” which was at times hilarious and dark, yet foreign in a way that smartly keeps white Western readers on the outside of African politics. After trying Heart of Darkness so many times and failing to get past the first chapter, I was pleased by the readability of this Conrad’s story and am inspired to try his famous novel again. If you’re interested in business from various perspectives (none that I remember focus on the corruption of conglomerates and giant corporations) of how business affects the individual, then you’ll love Minding the Store.

books of winter ❄️⛄🎄

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