Harvard Business School

9-191-002
Rev. October 15, 1999

Nordstrom: Dissension in the Ranks? (A)
The first time Nordstrom sales clerk Lori Lucas came to one of the many
“mandatory” Saturday morning department meetings and saw the sign—”Do Not
Punch the Clock”—she assumed the managers were telling the truth when they said the clock was temporarily out of order. But as weeks went by, she discovered that on subsequent Saturdays the clock was always “broken” or the time cards were not accessible. When she and several colleagues hand-wrote the hours on their time cards, they discovered that their manager whited-out the hours and accused them of not being “team players.” Commenting on the variety of tasks that implicitly had to be performed after hours, Ms. Lucas said, “You couldn’t complain, because then your manager would schedule you for the bad hours, your sales per hour would fall, and next thing you know, you’re out the door.”1
Patty Bemis, who joined Nordstrom as a sales clerk in 1981 and quit eight years later, told a similar story:
Nordstrom recruiters came to me. I was working at The Broadway as Estee
Lauder’s counter manager and they said they had heard I had wonderful sales figures. We’d all heard Nordstrom was the place to work. They told me how I would double my wages. They painted a great picture and I fell right into it. . .
The managers were these little tin gods, always grilling you about your sales.
. . . You felt like your job was constantly in jeopardy. They’d write you up for anything, being sick, the way you dressed. . . . The girls around me were dropping like flies. Everyone was always in tears. . . .
Working off the clock was just standard. In the end, really serving the customer, being an All-Star, meant nothing; if you had low sales per hour, you were forced out. . . .
I just couldn’t take it anymore—the constant