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 ❄️⛄🎄

25 comments

  1. My farmer grandfather didn’t have a lot of books, but one that has always stuck with was The Go Getter, about a guy selling lumber I think and doing it better than anyone else. I don’t know why Granddad had it, it wasn’t relevant to the business of running a farm, but I think it may have been one of the earliest motivational books.

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    • I love the idea of a motivational book starring lumber. I do think the story about the established independent store vs. the new independent store was really interesting, something that you would enjoy. The new, young guy had better ideas; he wasn’t part of a massive corporation.

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  2. This collection sounds very interesting. I thought for a moment about whether I have read anything like it and realized that a few of my favorite books are basically textbooks that have a thin layer of fiction to help wash down dry material. Maybe if story problems were actual short stories, I might have learned to like math back when I was in school.

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    • So true! Maybe how much of something realistic we would do at work vs. Steve, who has 27 watermelons he needs to sell in equal shares to five people. I do like a focus on work and jobs in fiction because we are nothing if not our jobs in the U.S. I plan on listening to some Studs Terkel tapes soon. Not sure if you’re familiar with him.

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  3. I really like these collections that contain both fiction and non-fiction about a topic – it’s been a long time since I’ve read one, but Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (about solo cooking) was a favourite of mine for ages. This sounds like an interesting mix – glad you enjoyed it!

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    • I remember your review of Alone in the Kitchen! I was drawn to this work collection immediately, perhaps because in the U.S. we are so job focused. I was recently thinking about my upcoming surgery and felt relieved that I have to take time off. Isn’t that ridiculous? We don’t really get a lot of vacation time here, and if you do take a vacation, you’re now that much time behind and have to catch up anyway.

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  4. I think business fiction is a fascinating category, and I have read some short stories over the years about selling or shop-workers, but probably more that are about business more broadly. Given capitalism underpins our lives and culture business and selling are ripe topics for exploring really important issues. I would love this anthology.

    Like loulou, I like anthologies that mix fiction and nonfiction, particularly when they are subject related.

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    • The only anthologies I can think of that mix fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (because I still don’t know why we call poetry “nonfiction” in the US) are typically based on a time period, like Victorian Literature, or based on a subset of people, like Black Literature (which includes Black people in the US, though not all are from the US). All the books to which I am referring are academic textbooks, so finding one on the shelves for the general reader was a great opportunity.

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  5. This sounds like a neat idea to bring a topic together that I’ve not seen before in a collection like this. What year was this published? It is interesting that you point out how much still resonates but I also feel like there have been a lot of shifts in our attitude toward working in recent years.

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    • I’ve also never seen anything like this (see my response to Sue). It was published in 2008, so there isn’t much contemporary, like the gig economy or work from home, etc. However, I have another collection straight-up called Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs that I plan on reading (because I own it). That one was published in 2001, so not current either.

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      • I was thinking also of a shift in attitude towards work. A person’s job used to really define them in a way that doesn’t seem to be the case as much today.

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        • I literally just watched a news story about an man (78) who is door dashing. A woman set up a GoFundMe for him so he can finally rest. It raised about $1M. The man decided to keep working, just not as much. *SIGH* This is the second time I’ve seen a story about the same thing. At least in the US, we think we die if we stop working. I don’t get why there isn’t a shift to volunteering, which we need more than door dashing.

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          • I see news stories like that where they are presented as heartwarming but it actually feels like a capitalist hellscape because a 78 year old can’t afford medical care or something. At least that man sounds like he maybe enjoyed some aspects of it, if he opted to keep doing it. My town has a lot of retirees and they do volunteer a lot. Our thrift store is entirely volunteer-run.

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              • During the pandemic there was a group of seniors in my town who volunteered at restaurants and it was presented as this feel-good community story but really seemed like businesses taking advantage of free labour. It felt more like these bored seniors were taking jobs from people who might have needed them.

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                • That is also an issue. I saw it frequently in academia. In colleges, many professors will actually be in their 80s; meanwhile, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s aren’t able to get professor jobs. At one school, students actually went to the administration to report that they were concerned about their professor. It turns out that he had slipped into dementia and was saying strange things in class that was scaring/worrying the students. He had to be removed, is my understanding.

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                  • Yikes! I’ve seen that a little bit in education – not to that extent but where people stay too long in careers that they are no longer well-equipped for, whether that’s mentally, physically, or just that they’ve come to hate it and it shows. Unfortunately, I think we see this too often in politics too.

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              • Does she not want to get paid at all? I can see where workers deserve compensation, especially for challenging jobs. My town has a lot of arts events that rely heavily on volunteers and their payoff is usually that they get to participate and attend events for free. That seems fair to me. Our writers fest has tons of volunteers and if there ever comes a time when I’m not working at it, I would definitely volunteer.

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  6. What a fascinating little collection, and even more interesting is that mix of writers! Colson Whitehead and Joseph Conrad in the same book? Very cool. I personally like reading about business, probably because I’ve worked in an office for so long I find it ripe for story haha

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