The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-12-11

rms slogan mas been nldQe 1dIuOuS by the National Consumers League which, actuated by humanitarian reasons, has fought to modify the un- necessary hardships incident to Christ mas shopping. For two weeks before Christmas most department stores do a. capacity business and the pressure
 is intensified at every point. Anthem
 tic records from the lives of clerks,
 delivery boys and wagon drivers show
 that as a result the season of Christ
 mas festival and of charity for the
 lame, the halt, and the blind reduces
 to illness and exhaustion the young
 and faithful who serve us, seen and
 unseen.
 A kind of meannes in human rela-
 tions was witnessed by Miss Johnson, an inquirer for the Consumers League,
 who worked in one of the stores dur
 ing the week of Christmas goodwill. Her actual experiences are told in a volume entitled Making Both Ends Meet' by Sue Ainslee and Edith Wyatt, of which the Macmillan Com
 pany is the publisher
 "The rush. had begun when Miss Johnson was transferred in this Christ
 mas week from the neckware to the
 muffler department on the first floor of one of the cheaper. stores All the
 girls stood all day long-from eight to twelve and from one to eight at night
 on the first days; from one at noon to ten and eleven at night as the season progressed; and, on the last dreadful
 nights, from noon to the following
 midnight. The girls had 35 cents SUD-
 per money. Except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid for,
 The work was incessant The girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with one another. The manager, a beauti- full and extremely rough girl of nine- teen, swore constantly at all of them. The customers were gabbing, insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to midnight. Behind the
 counter, with the advance of the day,
 the place became an inferno of ner- vous exhaustion and exasperation. In the two weeks of Miss Johnson's ser vice one customer once thanked her; and one tipped her five cents for the
 rapid return of a parcel. Both these acts of consideration took place in the
 morning. Miss Johnson said that this
 was fortunate for her, as, at one word Of ordinary consideration toward the
 end of her long days work, she thought she must have burst into tears.
 There was a little bundler in the de- partment, Catriona Malatesta, a white, hungry-looking little North Italian of fourteen with a thin chin and a dark shadowed, worried face. She had an adored sick sister of four, besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a worshipped mother. to whom she
 gave every cent of her wages of three
 dollars and a half a week. An older brother, a day laborer, paid the rent and provided food for all of them
 Every other family expense was met by Catriona's three dollars and a half, so that she was in the habit of spend
 only five cents for her own lunch, and
 on the nights of overtime, five cents for her own dinner, in order to take home the extra thirty cents; and every day she looked winter and older At the beginning of the week before Christmas, the store raised Catriona's s wage to four dollars. Her mother told her she might have the extra half dollar for herself for Christmas.
 Though Catriona had worked for some
 months, this was the first money of her own she had ever had With
 pride she told the department how it was to be spent. She was going to surprise her mother with a new waist for Christmas, a waist that Catriona had seen in the store marked down to forty-nine cents. A ten per cent discount was allowed to employees, so that the waist would cost forty-five r~nts. With the remaining five cents