SHOPPING
WHILE BLACK
But at a luxury retailer like Barneys, elitism and brand culture may
be particularly potent catalysts for
racial discrimination.
THE LEGACY OF THE ELITE
“It’s elitism — racial profiling is
just one expression of that elitism,” former Wall Street Journal
reporter Johnnie Roberts told HuffPost. Roberts, who is black, said
that 23 years ago, he was detained
after shopping at the Barneys store
on 7th Avenue and falsely accused
of stealing a tie. “It’s just the most
obvious way to identify and collect
and segregate people that you don’t
want in your store.”
Barneys was not always elitist.
When Barney Pressman founded
it in 1923, it was a discount men’s
clothing store called Barney’s
Clothes. Pressman’s son, Fred
Pressman, took over in the late ’50s
and transformed it into a purveyor
of high fashion, filling it with topname, international designers.
Barneys has been a fixture of
Manhattan’s luxury shopping scene
ever since, a monument to opulence
for New York City’s most affluent.
“Barneys is an identity package,
an icon, the hub of hip,” New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd
once wrote of the store. “It is an
HUFFINGTON
12.08.13
NOCD (Not Our Class, Darling)
joint that would scorn the bargainhunter from its early days.”
At Barneys and other high-end
stores, salespeople regularly “size
up” customers, judging what kind
of cash they think they will shell
out, said Steven Dennis, a former
According to numerous
studies... black customers
who dress up get a lower
level of service than white
customers who dress down.
senior executive at Neiman Marcus
who now runs retail consulting firm
SageBerry. Many of the sales staff
are on commission and don’t want
to waste time with customers they
assume won’t buy anything.
A 2004 New York magazine profile of four experienced salespeople
in the city included a quote from a
Barneys shoe salesman, speculating
on what a customer might buy: “A
woman might come in wearing a Tshirt and jeans and you’ll think, Oh
she’s not going to buy anything, she
has no money, but then she’ll purchase the whole store!”
“When I was at Neiman’s, we
would hear these complaints all
the time from customers who
weren’t waited on,” explained Dennis. “Too young, not dressed nicely,