Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ to as “pampering.” Thorstein Veblen saw both abstention from labor and consumption of the labor of others as markers of the leisure class.³⁶ He would not have been surprised to find that guests in the luxury hotel are entitled both to avoid working themselves and to benefit from the unlimited labor of workers. But this available labor is not only physical; it also has an emotional dimension, indicating “care” to guests, just as a mother's preparation of dinner indicates love for her family.³⁷ I call these offerings “displays of labor”; they can involve visible human work or simply markers of labor.

      Many of the available services and explicit standards of the luxury hotel involve lavishing visible labor upon the guest. Both the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court, for example, offered packing and unpacking services on request. One of the service basics at the Luxury Garden insisted that all guests receive an amenity upon arrival, which “must be personally presented and not simply pre-set in the room.” Standards at both the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court demanded that workers “escort guests” to their destinations within the hotel. (At hotels such as the Four Seasons, even animals are entitled to consume human labor; room service is offered to guests’ dogs.) Available labor also inheres in the speedy service that characterizes the luxury hotel. The timely delivery of food or freshly pressed laundry indicates that plenty of people are ready and willing to meet the guest's needs.

      Managers encourage workers to use “proper verbiage” regarding their efforts, such as “my pleasure” or “I'd be happy to,” which minimizes guest perception that human labor is being exerted. They must respond enthusiastically when asked to run any kind of errand, from renting camera equipment to picking up chocolates for a guest's wife. They must be willing to wait on the telephone while the guest ponders the room service menu, for example, or confers with her husband about what type of restaurant strikes his fancy for the evening. Workers are exhorted to respond personally and immediately to any guest complaints; even if these are not the worker's responsibility, she should never tell the guest to call some other department. More than once in employee training at the Luxury Garden, Alice recounted a cautionary tale of sitting in another luxury hotel's lobby and listening in horror as a caller looking for a lost briefcase was bounced around from front desk to concierge to bell desk to housekeeping.

      When management praises workers it is often for “going the extra mile.” Managers at the Luxury Garden, for example, on separate occasions rewarded a doorman who called a taxi company after a guest left something in a cab, a front desk worker who taped a basketball game on her home VCR for a guest, and a business center worker who ran with a guest's package to the Federal Express office late one afternoon so it could be sent that day. Management at the Royal Court lauded a bellman for assisting a guest with her luggage when she moved to another hotel several blocks away.

      A corresponding luxury service convention dictates that the guest himself should never exert any labor. At the Luxury Garden, for example, a manager who was training me said, “Never let guests fill out their own forms.” Workers checking guests in at both hotels often requested a business card to save guests the labor of filling out the registration card by hand. One of the service standards at the Luxury Garden dictated that employees should pass on information about guest problems to their coworkers, so that “the guests will not have to repeat themselves.” I was also told that “a guest should never touch a door.” And, of course, guests should never carry their own bags, and the time they wait for any service must be minimized. The prohibition on guest labor is another way to acknowledge the guest's high status and limited time, thus recognizing his entitled personhood.

      Tasks associated with certain jobs involve extreme amounts of visible labor. In my sites, bellmen not only escorted guests to their rooms but also carried their bags, set up luggage racks, and got ice for them if they wanted it. In the restaurants in both hotels, busers (often older immigrant men, known as “back servers”) not only offered bread at each table every few minutes (rather than simply leave a basket) but also served it using the complicated method of manipulating two spoons or two forks with one hand rather than employ a simple pair of tongs. Concierges at the Luxury Garden were required to handwrite elegant cards giving guests pertinent information about their dinner reservations; at the Royal Court, all messages were delivered to the guests’ rooms, so they did not have to call the operator. Inspired by the St. Regis in New York, some hotels offer the service of butlers, who will tidy guests’ rooms during the day, run their errands, and draw them a bath, among other tasks.³⁸ Even some standard jobs, such as door attendant, function partly to indicate available human labor; automated technology is available, but the human touch is more luxurious. (Elevator operators and restroom attendants in other venues serve a similar function.)

      Labor can also be demonstrated in the absence of workers. It is present in a variety of touches in the guest's room, in displays of labor that go beyond the typical folding of the toilet paper. At both the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden, for example, the guest's morning newspaper not only arrived in a fancy cloth bag that announced “Good Morning!” but was also hung carefully on the guest's door handle. The personalized stationery that awaited frequent guests in their rooms demonstrated labor, as well as serving the aforementioned purpose of customization. Andrew recalled that at a luxury resort, he and his wife had returned to their room to find a package adorned with an orchid awaiting them. Thinking it was a gift, they were surprised to find it was their laundry. Even objects in the room are indicators of labor, giving the sense that an invisible (caring) hand is constantly replacing bathrobes, slippers, ten or more different bathroom amenities, mountains of towels, fruit, fresh flowers, and so on.

      Turndown service is an especially striking display of labor. Literally folding the corner of the bedding down, of course, serves no useful purpose; the gesture indicates, rather, that an invisible hand has been at work. Other elements of the elaborate turndown service in luxury hotels include switching on lights, turning on the radio, closing drapes, emptying trash baskets, cleaning the bathroom, replacing used towels, arranging the laundry bag and room service menu on the bed, and filling the ice bucket. At both hotels guests received, with their evening cookies, a card predicting the following day's weather; at the Royal Court, these were filled out by hand. These gestures primarily let the guest know that someone has been laboring on his or her behalf. As a butler at the St. Regis hotel told a reporter, “It's nice for the guest to see that the butler's been in.”³⁹

      Although they did not refer to it explicitly as such, guests I interviewed saw labor, both visible and invisible, as a key element of luxury service. Asked what they thought constitutes luxury service, they often invoked indicators of labor, speed, and eagerness to serve. Herbert defined luxury hotels in part as places where someone will “pop up to help unload your car and offer to put it away for you.” Bob, a young management consultant, said, “It's the little touches they do that impress me…. There's always a circle of people around you, and depending on how good the hotel is, it's either further away or closer to you and doing more or less for you.” Linda, a leisure traveler, was impressed that little boys were available outside her room all night at an Asian resort hotel if she and her husband wanted anything.

      Many guests, in interviews and on comment cards to the hotel, approved of workers’ speed in tasks such as checking in, delivering room service or luggage to the room, or bringing their car from the garage. Mike, a businessman in his late thirties, mentioned speed of service as a difference between luxury and nonluxury hotels: “[Nonluxury hotels] are very bureaucratic in their handling. You know, you have to wait in line when you are checking in, even if you are a super-preferred kind of customer. The one that drives me completely nuts but is characteristic, particularly of the big convention [hotels], is that it takes twenty minutes to set up a wake-up call…. You know, room service takes an hour and a half to get there.”

      Workers’ attitude about providing labor was considered important. Guests enjoyed getting the sense from them that “nothing is too much trouble,” characterizing luxury service as “can-do.” Virginia, who had stayed in a luxury hotel for three months because of damage to her home, described asking a worker for more dishes in her kitchenette: “If we were running СКАЧАТЬ