It is related of a certain provincial draper that seeing a customer depart having made no purchase, he called up the assistant who had waited upon her. “Why did not that lady buy anything?” “We hadn’t what she wanted, sir.” “Anybody can sell people what they want. Remember that I keep you to sell people what they don’t want.” That in a nutshell is the present condition of retail shopkeeping—especially, perhaps, in the department of drapery; and that condition is one reason why some customers find it preferable to deal at co-operative stores. The business of the assistant in a private shop is to sell, reluctantly perhaps, but under stern compulsion, articles that the shopkeeper desires sold to a customer who does not really desire to buy them. Can any employment be imagined more straining to the nerves, or more trying to the temper of a refined and delicate minded person? And there are many shop assistants of refinement and of delicate feeling; some of them daughters of clergymen and of other professional men who have died leaving their girls unprovided for. At this point some reader will certainly be found to demand why these young ladies do not, in a body, abandon the shop and enter domestic service. The answer is a simple one enough. These girls, like the vast majority of their compatriots, will endure much hardship rather than lose caste; and, whatever may be the opinion of the wage-payers, there can be no doubt that among wage-earners domestic service ranks as a low-caste occupation. The middle class mother who will not send her little girl to a public elementary school, the middle class father who would rather see his son making a small income as a professional man than a large income as a tradesman, ought rather to applaud than to condemn the “young lady in business” who refuses to exchange her black uniform and her title of “Miss” for the cap and apron and the name without a handle of the domestic servant. The question of class distinction has, as Mr Charles Booth has pointed out, a marked influence upon the choice of employment; and this influence, the authors of _Women’s Work and Wages_ truly observe has led to curious economic anomalies, which are generally beneficial to the employers.[23] An observation somewhat to the same effect may be found on pp. 67, 68 of _Women in the Printing Trades_.[24] In Scotland “living-in” is not customary, but the advantages of freedom have been, in the past, sometimes counterbalanced by serious drawbacks. Here are some instances from one of Miss Irwin’s reports:—