Zambesi retail assistants Jarrad Turpin and Briar Neville say the secret to success is building relationships with customers. Photo / Babiche Martens

Zambesi retail assistants Jarrad Turpin and Briar Neville say the secret to success is building relationships with customers. Photo / Babiche Martens

We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls".

That's American author O. Henry pleading for a fair go for retail assistants back in 1906. He was wasting his breath. O. Henry was one of the first authors to attempt to document the experience of women who flocked to find work in the department stores springing up in the great urban centres of America - Chicago, San Francisco and, most of all, New York.

He illuminated the lives of this first generation of shop assistants, or clerks as they were then known; documenting their struggles, their lives and their loneliness with a wit and sensitivity that earned him the title "the little shop girls' knight".

He even developed a whole new form of literature in which to do it; the short story. O. Henry has long since left us (he died in 1910) and with him has departed one of the few champions of that most reviled of career women - the shop bitch.

Whether it's the hilarious counter hags from Kath and Kim or those slanty eyed clothes-horses who finally get their comeuppance in Pretty Woman, shop-girls have become an easy and inevitable target for satirists and disgruntled shoppers everywhere.

What is it about retail assistants that drives us crazy? The attitude? The grooming? The discounts? Those on the front line aren't really sure themselves.

"It's like people expect you to be rude because you're selling expensive clothes, but I find that way of thinking really difficult to understand," says Zambesi's Jarrad Turpin, a veteran of six years in high-end retail.

"I mean, why on earth would we? The secret to doing a good job isn't that one-off $1000 sale, it's having people come back into the store and build up a relationship with us. Why would we be rude when we want them to come back?"

Those of us who've found ourselves on the pointy end of salesgirl superciliousness are probably asking the same question. Why are so many salespeople so, well, nasty?

While not exactly evading the question, Turpin's Zambesi colleague Briar Neville points out that not everyone is at their most comfortable entering a high-end retail space.

"People can be quite stand-offish when they first come into a store, but that's often a defense mechanism. The job is about reading people, so you try to get a sense of what they're like from the first moment they say hi! And from there on it's about interacting with them and listening to them and helping them find what they want."