And these real costs must constantly increase, because the
attempt to exercise a control of human energy that can not be
exercised, is a waste of human energy that must constantly
increase.
I will illustrate what I mean:
Suppose that during the Armistice you bought a spool of
thread in a French department store. Not that it is a spool;
the thread is wound on a scrap of paper, for the thrifty French
do not waste wood.
It takes a few seconds to say, "A reel of cotton thread,
please; white, size sixty." With leisurely grace, the clerk takes
the thread in her hand, comes from behind the counter, and
courteously asks you to accompany her.
She escorts you across the store, perhaps half a block, and
indicates your place at the end of a waiting line. In twenty
minutes or so, you reach the cashier's grating. He sits behind
the bars on a high stool, a wide ledger open before him, ink
bottle uncorked, and pen in hand.
He asks you, and he writes in the ledger, your name, your
address, and—to your dictation—one reel of thread, cotton,
white, size sixty. Will you take it, madame, or have it delivered?
You will take it. He writes that. And the price? Forty
centimes. You offer in payment, madame? One franc. He
writes these amounts, and the date, hour, and minute.
You give the franc to the clerk, who gives it to the cashier,
who gives you the change, looks at the thread, and asks if you
are satisfied. You are. A stroke of his pen checks that fact.
The clerk then wraps the thread, beautifully, at a near-by
wrapping counter, and gives you the package. You have spent
thirty minutes; so has she; the cashier has spent perhaps five.
An hour and five minutes, to buy a reel of thread.
French department stores were as good as the best in the
world. The French are expert merchandisers. They knew
pneumatic-tube systems; the Paris government owned one
that carried special-delivery notes more quickly than anyone
could get a telephone number. Department store owners
admired the cash-systems in American stores. But if they had
installed them, they would still have been obliged to keep the
cashier, his ledger, and his pen and ink.
Why? Because in the markets of Napoleon's time, sellers
cheated buyers. Napoleon protected the buyers. He decreed
that the details of every sale must be written in a book, with
pen and ink, in the presence of both seller and buyer, by a
third person who must see the article and the transfer of
money; the buyer must declare himself satisfied, and the rec-
ord must be kept, permanently, to verify the facts if there
were any future complaint.
During this past century, French merchandising had grown
enormously. It had completely changed; but not this method
of protecting buyers.
I asked an owner of the largest French department store
why Napoleon's decree was not repealed. He said, But,
madame, it has been in operation for more than a hundred
years! It cannot be repealed; think of the sales girls, the cashiers,
the filing clerks, the watchmen who guard the warehouses
of ledgers. They would lose their jobs.
He was shocked. He saw me as the materialist American,
thinking only of profit, caring nothing for all those human beings.
I thought they were unemployed. They did not appear as
unemployed on any record, but the actual unemployment in
France and throughout Europe, was enormous. For every purchase
in a French department store, something like an hour's
time was unemployed; millions of hours a day. And the
cashiers, the filing clerks, the watchers of those records, never
did a stroke of productive work.
All this enforced unemployment made it impossible to do
anything quickly. European life was leisurely; it had to be.
This charmed the Americans gaily passing by, all the tedious
waiting done for them, all the red tape untied, all the police
stamps got onto their papers by Cook's or Amexco or their
bankers or hotel porters. How serene, how cultured was European
life, they said. No one hurrying, everyone with time
for meditation and enjoyment, walking through the parks,
sitting at cafe tables under the plane trees. How harassed, how
hurried and rude and crude was American life in comparison,
they said.
You recognized an American as far as you could see him, by
the way he walked. Chin up, head high, briskly going somewhere,
with an unconscious mastery of the earth he trod. No
European moved like that. Europeans walked prudently,
slowly. Their every gesture consumed time in merely letting
time pass. That made their lives and their countries seem so
restful, to Americans. And you can see precisely that same
way of walking, that same sense of useless time, in the prisoners
in any American prison-yard.
