The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [54]
“A good cigarette girl,” Abe Ellis has said, “is far and in between. She has got to know just when to lay off and when to knock the customer down. And selling stuffed dogs to grownup women is an art in itself.”
The chief technical problem of the hatcheck industry since its inception has been the safe conveyance of the customer's quarter to the pocket of the concessionaire. The girl receiving a tip can seldom conquer the atavistic notion that it was meant for her personally. Even hiring a watcher for each girl would not preclude collusion. Since there are no fixed rates of tipping, it is impossible to tell from the receipts on any given evening whether the girls have held out anything.
When the Susskind brothers ran virtually all the concessions in town, they used a commonsense personalconfidence sort of system which kept their help from robbing them too flagrantly But since they obtained their leases cheaply, they could afford a good deal of tip leakage. Competitors, bidding against the brothers, reduced the margin of profit. Consequently they worked harder to protect their receipts, putting the girls in tight, pocketless uniforms and making them drop their tips through a slot in the counter as soon as they got them. Under the counter was a locked box.
Modern concessionaires, more efficient, use a variation of the Bedaux System. They keep charts from which they establish a norm of production for each girl and location. The concessionaire knows, when he goes into a new restaurant, approximately what to expect. If there is a minimum charge of $1.50, for example, the tipping should compare with that at the old Paradise. He will then expect, from each hundred tippers, a return of about thirteen dollars. The first crew of girls he puts in his new concession are reasonably safe if they approach that standard. The girls do not know exactly what their boss expects, so the assumption is they will try hard to make a good showing. After a few weeks, the concessionaire switches the girls to another place and brings in a new set. If the receipts fall off noticeably, he suspects the replacements. If receipts rise, he suspects the first group. He shifts individual girls in the same way. If a hypothetical Billie, checking hats at a certain club for a month, turns in an average of eleven cents a customer, while an equally hypothetical Mamie over a similar period averages sixteen cents, he bounces Billie. By continued shifts, he establishes an average for the place. This may not turn out the same as the average at the Paradise, however. The new club may get a high ratio of Southern patronage, which brings the average tip down, or of “collegiates,” notoriously poor tippers, or of racetrack men, notoriously good ones.
After each tour of the house, a cigarette girl turns in all the cash she has received. In this way she has no chance to hoard her tips for the evening. She might decide, if they were unusually good, that she could safely knock down a dollar for herself. Even at that, most cigarette girls manage to keep some part of their tips. Concessionaires never know exactly how much, but if the girl is a “producer,” they don't care.
“Better a kid who takes ten in tips and knocks a buck,” a pillar of the industry once said, “than a dummy who gets half the tips and turns in all she gets. But please don't use my name, because on such a question I hate to quote myself.”
• The Boys from Syracuse •
ommonly, when a family achieves such fame that it has a street named in its honor, it moves to a better part of town. There are no Roosevelts on Roosevelt Street, no Astors within blocks of Astor Place, and no Vanderbilts