For this Labor Day holiday we thought we should pay tribute to what may have been the strangest ways to make a living in its time: the so-called “fired man!”
I say “may have been” because there isn’t a whole lot of verifiable information on this job.
What we do know stems from an article from 1910 that was republished in a number of US newspapers.
It described a man named Tom who tells a colleague that he had an easy time at work that day: “I was fired only six times.”
Another man overhears this with (understandable) alarm and surprise, and the colleague explains that Tom is “the store’s professional fired man,” sometimes also called the “department store scape-goat.”
The idea was that, in retail, there wasn’t an hour that went by without some customer or other complaining about shoddy service or a shortage of a product or a damaged product.
In keeping with the old line attributed to department store giant Marshall Field that “the customer is always right,” this department store kept Tom on the staff so that, anytime a customer was upset, the manager could bring Tom over, dress him down for causing whatever the problem was, and then fire him on the spot.
Tom’s job was to apologize and then look glum as he walked away to “leave” the store.
The customer would feel like the manager had taken action to address their concerns, and would then stay loyal to the store.
(What a strange LinkedIn profile a “fired man” would have: the same job listed like 400 times!)
Of course, if this was actually going on, I suppose they had to hope the same customer didn’t come back more than once to complain and notice that the same worker they’d gotten fired after their first complaint was somehow back on staff and still messing everything up?!?
Today in 1903, Scott Perky applied for a patent for a bidirectional typeface.
His idea was that you could read one line from left to right and then the following line from right to left, which would lessen “the strain upon the eyes and brain, which results from much reading.”
Fact-Checking Steve Jobs: Was “The Customer Is Always Right” Really Coined by a Customer? (Slate)
Scott Perky’s Bi-Directional Text (Weird Universe)
If you don’t back us on Patreon today, we’ll have to fire Tom, because it’s his fault
Image via Wikicommons
