Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930

8. The Customer Is Aways Wrong

231 Creating advertising and promotional campaigns that reflected revolutionary ideals and endorsed visions of a modern working-class consumer society were relatively easy tasks. Commercial officials faced more intractable problems , however, in implementing egalitarian operational policies and procedures and creating a working and shopping environment that inculcated conscientious attitudes and restrained, purposeful behaviors. Although advertisements promoted state stores as spaces where the customer’s every desire would be fulfilled , trade union activists argued that in both state stores and cooperatives, workers, not consumers, should be prized. As a result, state stores like GUM became places where consumers asserted their rights to goods and courteous, efficient service and where workers declared that living in a workers’ state meant a modicum of respect, as well as freedom from consumers’ personal demands. By the late 1920s, the ambitious marketing campaigns of state and cooperative enterprises had stalled while their sales floors turned into arenas of struggle in which consumers and retail employees locked horns in a battle of wits and words. In the complaints they penned, consumers protested the shortages, lack of selection, shoddy merchandise, pricing irregularities, rude service, and arbitrary , inefficient, and bureaucratic procedures they encountered in their daily pursuit of bread, shoes, clothing, and other essential goods. In turn, retail employees charged that complainants were temperamental, self-centered shoppers 8 The Customer Is Aways Wrong Consumer Complaint in Late NEP-Era Russia 232 the customer is always wrong who abused the employees, expected special treatment, and tried to circumvent Soviet laws and regulations. The culture of complaint that developed in the NEP era became institutionalized in the retail sector after 1926, when the state established a formal system for receiving and handling complaints. The tide of complaints gained momentum at the end of the decade, when economic conditions worsened. Evidence of the situation may be found in the grievances that consumers registered in mass-circulation newspapers and in GUM’s complaint books, as well as in the responses of state and cooperative retail employees. Although consumers did register complaints about private retailers and market vendors, especially about their murderously high prices, state and cooperative retailers—institutions founded to serve the working classes—came in for the most abuse. In fact, nearly half of the complaints in the sample used for this study were directed against cooperative stores, and about one-third targeted state stores.1 Only 10 percent of complaints involved private retailers, although editorial commentary and other kinds of reportage in the press offset this imbalance.2 Together, letters to the editor and complaint entries relay the conflicts that arose in the seemingly routine activities of buying and selling. They also demonstrate recognition by both the state and society that consumers had the right to complain about the material and sociocultural conditions of life, such as the price of butter or a sales clerk’s insulting rebuff, and that workers also had the right to counter that a customer’s request for help amounted to intolerable or unlawful behavior. Moreover, the designation of public forums that accepted complaints indicates the existence of public spaces, albeit circumscribed to some degree by state and party organs, established to call attention to and, in the case of newspapers, circulate criticisms.3 In registering complaints and responding to them, consumers and retail employees, along with activist journalists, worked their way toward outlining the behaviors, attitudes, and practices they believed consistent with a socialist society. Consumer complaints fit into a narrative genre dating to Muscovite Russia .4 Throughout Russia’s history, but particularly in times of economic trouble, political upheaval, and social unrest, Russian subjects attempted to come to terms with change by writing various types of narratives to those in positions of power. In the late imperial period, writers composed letters, poems, petitions , and other narratives in an attempt, for example, to comprehend changes to the law or to express their experiences of revolution. In the process, they reflected on widely accepted understandings of social identities, values, and relationships by mixing older images, ideals, and forms of address with new concepts of citizenship, freedom, and justice.5 In the 1920s and 1930s, citizens who penned petitions, denunciations, and other narratives likewise tended to the customer is always wrong 233 rethink older concepts by combining previously resonant language with revolutionary terms and ideas.6 These various narrative genres gave individuals ways to call attention to corruption and abuse, appeal for relief or clemency...