Retail Store Credit Cards

Articles written by the ASA President Joya Misra provide convincing evidence against the value of sociology. Her article, “Store Credit Cards Generate Corporate Profits and Disgruntled Workers” is a Marxist screed about exploitative companies forcing cashiers to aggressively and deceptively push their store credit cards on clueless vulnerable customers.

Misra’s article “Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work”, published in “Marxist Sociology”, shares “sociological findings” about harmful and discriminatory ‘racialized beauty hierarchies that are built into the 21st Century services workplace’.

These two articles contain one incorrect assertion after another. I can attest to this because I am a store worker who has offered the card to thousands of customers, and have studied the experience of cashiers at other companies in the industry. Prior to working at the store, I learned about credit card solicitation and risk management as as part of the sales organizations of enterprise technology companies.

Some of her ‘findings’ based on sociology’s ‘objective scientific pursuit of knowledge’ include:

  1. Sociological Finding: Store workers aggressively pitch credit cards to young people who don’t realize that cards hurt your credit score. “They are 18 years old and a credit card sounds awesome”. Reality: Very rare. Young customers are wary of cards, don’t trust business and have attuned BS detectors. Few cashiers ask them and few young people apply.

  2. Sociological Finding: Customers are unaware of the high interest on the store credit cards. Reality: Most know and pay their balances in full avoiding the crazy high interest and fees.

  3. Sociological Finding: Stores discriminate against Black and Hispanic card applicants. Reality: From my work experience and research, cashiers know this is illegal and against policy. Also there is no reason to do this. Cashiers are incented on the total number of card applications opened. In my prior work in the technology industry, I sensed that banks and credit card companies sometimes discriminated in a sense. When they built predictive models predicting, for example, which credit card customers would pay the most in interest and fees, I saw a disproportionate number of African American and Hispanic surnames.

  4. Sociological Finding: Management uses ‘electronic surveillance’ to see how many cards each worker and store opens. Reality: Most businesses and NPOs use enterprise software to track performance. They are not watching all the time.

  5. Sociological Finding: At one retailer, a supervisor was required to sell 2.5 cards for every 10 transactions. Reality: Completely made-up. No one achieves that.

  6. Sociological Finding: Cashiers who perform above expectations “may get a gift card, a bonus of $1-$5 or a pack of gum”. Reality: Every store is different. Cashiers can receive $20 gift cards, $10 for every card opened, or gifts. High performing cashiers are fast-tracked for promotion. Their success also opens up job opportunities such as banking or sales.

  7. Sociological Finding: Cashiers who don’t sell enough credit cards “may find themselves off the work schedule and without a job”. Reality: They may be assigned to non-cashier roles. It is unlikely they will be terminated or their hours significantly reduced.

  8. Sociological Finding: Store managers rarely admit to workers that credit cards are profitable. Instead they claim they are ‘for brand awareness’. Reality: Wrong. This may be one person’s experience. Managers themselves don’t know the retailer’s business model around cards.

  9. Sociological Finding: Store workers believe that credit cards are “the worst things ever”, “morally not what’s best for customers” and “leads them to financial ruin”. Reality: Wild exaggeration. It is partly true to a limited extent because there is pressure put on cashiers, and in turn on customers.