#338 1917 · Sincere Department Store (先施百货, Ma Yingbiao) · Retailcostly-signal
No woman would take the job of selling to strangers across a counter, so the owner's own wife put on the uniform and worked the cosmetics counter herself until the taboo broke.
the problem
a job needs to exist but the social stigma attached to being first makes no one willing to take it
background
When Ma Yingbiao opened Sincere's flagship Shanghai store on 20 October 1917, a five-story arcade building on Nanjing Road, he wanted to hire female sales clerks to better serve the growing number of women shopping there, an idea he had already tried once at Sincere's original Hong Kong store in 1900 before local pressure forced the clerks out on grounds it violated Chinese custom. In early-20th-century China, a woman working behind a counter, serving male strangers face to face for money, carried a reputation-destroying stigma; respectable women were expected to stay out of public commercial life entirely.
Ma posted recruitment notices for the position and waited. After more than a month, not a single woman applied — the job existed on paper, but the social cost of being the first to take it was higher than any wage Ma could offer to compensate for it, and no ordinary applicant was willing to be that example.
the move
Ma's wife, Huo Qingtang, the daughter of a pastor and a founder of Hong Kong's YWCA, resolved the standoff by taking the job herself: she put on the uniform and worked the store's cosmetics counter in person, bringing two of her husband's younger sisters to work alongside her. The story of 'three women standing together' behind the counter spread through Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau, precisely because Huo's own social standing as the owner's wife made the role visibly respectable rather than shameful — she absorbed the reputational risk that no hired applicant would take on herself.
the payoff
The stigma broke: other women began applying to work at Sincere's counters once the role had been publicly modeled by a woman of standing rather than left to whoever needed the wage badly enough to risk it. Sincere and its Nanjing Road rivals went on to make female sales staff standard across Chinese department stores through the 1920s and 1930s, a practice that started as an unfillable job posting.
what came after
Ma Yingbiao and Sincere are remembered in Chinese retail history as pioneers of the modern department store format generally, but the female-clerk episode specifically is cited as an example of how a founder personally absorbing a stigma, rather than simply offering higher pay or repeating the same failed recruitment ad, is sometimes the only way to break a taboo attached to a role rather than the job itself.
references
- [1]先施百货首创女店员：马应彪妻子霍庆棠打破禁忌澎湃新闻 (The Paper), 2022m.thepaper.cn
- [2]中国百货业的启蒙者：先施百货界面新闻 (Jiemian), 2016jiemian.com