Karl Marx used the petit bourgeoisie, which are the small shopkeepers in organizations of, let us say, ten or less-- the people nowadays who run restaurants and got such a hard time because of Coronavirus-- so as to distinguish them from the haute bourgeoisie, who are the entrepreneurs of wealth and with large organizations that have a significant impact on the means of production: the factories and the mines that make steel and locomotives. The petit bourgeoisie are not really important business people, just occupations that offer a living. But Marx was a genius at identifying a distinctive mentality that went along with a particular line of work. He later developed the idea of “functionary” to describe the civil servants and other hangers on that allowed France’s Second Empire to continue to survive despite its political and economic failures. The shopkeepers are also a type in that they follow a way of life determined by their economic situation that molds the way they live and think and feel. My father was one of these, though not started out as one, but rather as a baker, who is a member of the skilled working class, and he adjusted to the new role of running a ma and pa grocery store and then to the proprietor of a small supermarket.
The nature of his work was this. My father kept his stores open from 8am to 7pm six days a week but his time was always extended beyond that. He three times a week went to the main market hours earlier than the opening so as to get better produce at a cheaper price, something second generation Koreans were no longer willing to do in their markets and so the quality of produce in Korean markets went down. If there was trouble nursing the refrigeration system, my father had to stay at work or return to it until the repairs were done. But open hours also meant a certain degree of flexibility. He could visit my high school guidance counselor to be advised on college admissions because my mother could cover for running the store while the father of a friend of mine was a worker in a clothing factory and so did not go to the guidance counselor because losing work meant losing an afternoon’s worth of wages. The main anxiety my father faced was how many customers would cross the threshold and buy goods. A slow morning due to rain or snow could never be made back.
Storekeeping is considered a penny business. That means that you open up, pay rent and electricity and the upkeep of fixtures, so that you could make a few pennies of profit on an individual transaction, such as selling a can of peas. Frozen food had a little more margin and fruit and vegetables even more so because there was plenty of waste, which was the lettuce that had wilted and could no longer be sold. You tried to conserve things and so handled your tomatoes carefully even if customers roughed them up when looking at the display, and that annoyed my father, though he was always polite to the customers because his income depended on them. People who were storekeepers were and are always out to find a way to trim costs and to expand the product line. The neighbor of mine who ran his local luncheonette where the teachers in my elementary went in for tuna fish or BLT sandwiches and who impressed me that they carried the New York Times with them everyday without, I later suspected, ever reading them, when he got home in the evening, made ice cream for tomorrow because it was cheaper than buying it from a wholesaler. A relative who ran an ice cream and toy store had his wife made up baskets of balloons and toys and decorations so as to sell that item for birthdays and holidays, and had them made to order if offered and asked so as to get more purchases in the till. Always anxious about the bottom line, many storekeepers would have been happy to take a working class wage earner if they knew a skill but instead had to run a business so as to give themselves their livings. A local candy store proprietor sold soda fountain drinks and candy and had a shelf with composition books for young customers to buy when they needed school supplies. He got angry at me because I preferred to go a few blocks away to a fully equipped stationary store to buy those same school supplies because of the glamour I felt that was associated with the big store. The candy store owner was taking away my business from him and the owner’s wife had to calm him down. After all, I was just ten years old.
There are any number of stories to be told about how storekeepers economize. The hardware store owner told me not to be anxious to offer a customer delivery service because there was an individual charge to get it done and that might cut the profit of the purchase to nothing. Offer it only for larger purchases and where there is a sense that the purchase will not be made if there is no delivery. The same principle holds nowadays when small grocery stores are unwilling to use credit cards for very small purchases because the cost of the transaction will eat up the profit. That is very different from large enterprises like Amazon that get a yearly fee for delivery however many the number of deliveries and in part because there are tie-ins to others in their product lines, like streamed television. Large companies can use elaborate statistics to tell whether tie-ins bring related revenues but small shopkeepers can’t tell, just being aware that money goes out on handling a particular item.
Storekeepers, as a whole, mind their margin, their money, and think of time as precious in that every moment is a potential sale and so closing the day’s end will put an end to having yet one more transaction to add some pennies to your coffers. Working class people are very different because they think of time as to be passed as quickly as possible so that the worker can now be free to do what he or she will with his or her own time. At an office I knew, people lined up at five minutes before five so as to check out on a time clock so as not to waste their own time on work time. A relative who worked nights at the post office had plenty of time on his hands to read paperback westerns and call his sister in law to chat so as to make the time pass until the shift was over. Time to be wasted rather than used makes the entire mentality of one kind of work different from that of another kind of work and so is likely to be more important than the difference between two different tradesmen, the butcher and the baker, one engaged with the texture of cutting meat and covered with blood and wary of cuts and the other engaged with flour and cinnamon and raisins and wary of the heat in the ovens. The storekeeper, unlike the tradesman, is not about stuff but about buying and selling.That is its emotional life and it is difficult to turn off the day when you get home and your wife can look over the books to remind you which bills are due.
Storekeepers, as a rule, are transitional in that they fall into rather than plan for that work and occupy jobs for people who are themselves transitional: people in a new country who have smarts but no credentials, the children of Korean grocers becoming engineers and doctors, the exiles from China and then Cuba offering restaurants that provide menus for both cuisines. Greeks accomplish something when they move from diners to elementary school administrators and then their children get finance degrees and supervise a product line for a major industry. So shopkeepers are on the edge of doing something better, anticipating that, while the working class would seem happy not to adopt to a higher rung but stay at their factory or mine until they retire, as if the economic organization of life would not change from the time it was in high school, people in West Virginia still pining for the coal mines however awful they were because the mines provided a steady income, once the unions gained some influence. Shopkeepers, on the other hand, know that the economy is always unstable because businesses open and close all the time, forced to do that because stores are always subject to competition because of chains and changing tastes. There aren’t any more hat stores for either men or women and habadasharies have also dried up. The mentality of the storekeeper is uncertainty.
Another aspect of the fragility of the storekeeper is economic. Whether incorporated or not, there is little way to protect its wealth from the vicissitudes of commerce even if the enterprise is incorporated and so personal profits are protected from business liability. That may be of use in large firms but not in small shopkeepers who have used their accumulated savings and the value of a present business to be used to buy an additional business when the prior one is sold. Unlike big real estate, they can’t wait a long time until the time is right to buy again. The business, either an old or a new one, is necessary for an income. Any time wasted in going from one proprietorship to another are weeks or months without income, while the Bronx can go fallow for fifty years or more until it is time to build high rise condos in Mott Haven.
The Marxist view is that an inference can be drawn about the nature of occupations as they are situated within the overall structure. People in a kind of occupation develop a particular kind of consciousness. Store keepers, in particular, are less settled in their social class than are, for example, working class people who, over the generations, will replicate their social class unless the changing nature of industry forces them to find work elsewhere, while shopkeepers have in mind becoming socially mobile, their children supposed to do something else than the do. The idea is that a modal population, of whatever class, will feel this mentality more strongly or more of its members will follow that inclination, though it is difficult to say what will happen for any given or set of people and so the conclusion is only an inference rather than a proof.
What is the significance of the storekeeper class? Marx was correct in thinking it was relatively insignificant or transitory in that an age of storekeepers would quickly be replaced by family capitalists that Marx believed dominated the early part of the nineteenth century and it was replaced by corporate capitalism, where large sums of money are owned by organizational entities and engage in more or less independent enterprises, from building cities to inventing vaccines, as those are limited and supervised through government, whether in China or the USA. The risk in all these economies, whether called capitalistic or authoritarian, is that enterprises can go bankrupt and they can create major impacts on the overall well being of a nation’s populace. Moreover, the shopkeepers are not regarded as stable figures which provide the backbone of a society. The French thought the British a nation of shopkeepers because that would not provide the martial spirit found in the peasantry and the aristocracy, though Napoleon misjudged the English, who had been martial for five hundred years before Napoleon said that.
Marx inferred, and this was a dilly of an inference, that the working class in particular and perhaps the shopkeeper class as well, because they knew the economy was volatile and uncertain and so needed regulation, would be inclined to political revolution and that would accomplish the Christian like vision of those who are the most weak and despised become the rulers. But the working class is interested in replicating rather than changing the social and economic structure and, as S. M. Lipset said many years ago, are inclined to authoritarian tendencies and so not a force of progressivism anyway. The same is true with the storekeeper class. They are so involved in the freneticism of making ends meet that they do not engage in politics exce[t to try to prevent large supermarkets from competing with them. Only big retailers, like Hobby Lobby, can indulge in politics and Ben and Jerry set up a foundation based on their fortune so as to pursue their politics and philanthropy. Moreover, history provided that Marx’s hope of a working class revolution was not the way revolutions worked. The American Revolution was supported and lead by wealthy merchants in Massachusetts and large landholders in Virginia, The Nazi Revolution was the result of a collboration of Junker aristocrats and thugs. The Russian Revolution was created by a class of professional revolutionaries, having devoted their lives to the cause. Robespierre was a middle level attorney.
The hope of revolution has been dead for a while but there are those who cling with it because there seem no other ways to accomplish significant change. I, for one, think that a liberal not quite revolution that engages in legitimate electoral and legislative means, supported by a coalition of the educated and the minorities, such as that presented by Biden’s legislative agenda, would radically change the United States so as to separate income from employment because of large entitlements to child and elderly allowances and other assists, and that would in substance accomplish what Marx wanted, which was to make people free to pursue their individual lives in heroic combat against disease and ignorance as well as the fashioning of literary and material art, rather than engage in the drudgery of work. Shopkeepers would never have dreamed of that but, then again, this could be the pipedream of the son of a storekeeper, full of legalisms and the quest for improvement, handling governments as if they were a storefront to be well managed as they could have done better than their fathers.