I think it’s ridiculous to assume that because someone isn’t wearing what you think they should be wearing, they’re somehow unfit to perform their job, or that they don’t deserve your patronage.
My first real job was telemarketing for a large Canadian newspaper. After I’d been there for a couple of weeks, word came down that we now had a dress code. This meant skirts and dress shoes for the women. I’d just hit town (Edmonton) a day or so before getting the job. (Actually, me and Mr zoogirl got drunk and hitched from Surrey BC, at the beginning of April. In a snowstorm. Edmonton was as far as we got. What can I say, I was 21 and adventurous!) Anyway, my wardrobe consisted of two shirts and two pairs of jeans, so I had to hit the Goodwill and come up with a couple of skirts and shoes. The stupid part was, no one ever saw us. We just sat in a little room and made calls all day.
I always feel more comfortable around people who are dressed casually. I even wear jeans in church, as does everyone else from the Pastor on down. As long as a person makes an effort to appear neat and clean, the actual material and style don’t matter.
I work at a BIG corporation and we have a business-casual dress code. It is very relaxed, and some people come in looking like they slept in their clothes! My jeans look way better than wrinkled dockers any day. I do think that when meeting with a client, you should dress more formally, but that’s just for the people who are directly meeting. Everyone else should be neat and casual.
Which is why my boss doesn’t mind that I paint my fingernails and my desk looks like it was hit by a cyclone.
“I expect it with creative types,” he said.
I get turned off by bare-legged women in places of business. Despite what they might think, painted toenails do not make cellulite and varicose veins disappear. No matter how hot it gets, I wear long pants, socks, and shoes to work- so should the women.
We have business casual attire here Monday through Thursday, and completely casual Friday. Most of us have no visual customer contact; my group never does.
Though it’s stretching the rules a bit I usually wear black jeans during the week. I’d probably dress up more if not for the fact that I’ve pretty much given up finding dress or suit pants that fit. I’m of average height, and in better physical condition than most of my age cohort, but it seems like whenever I buy slacks, or a suit, the pants fit me as if I were a “portly short”. They have a way-too-long rise and zipper, and the crotch seems to hang between my knees. That’s probably an exaggeration. But it feels that way.
For many low wage workers, dress codes present an economic problem.
I’ve known people to spend their last cent on an outfit that counts as a uniform just so that they could work. Things like unstained khakis are hard to find in thrift stores, and buying a new pair can easily cost a full days work. I had one job once where we had to wear black shoes (my tastefull navy blue ones were deemed not okay). The only pair of black shoes I had were hard boots a size too small, but I didn’t want to spend several hours of wages on a new pair of shoes when that money was desperately needed for food. I ended up working (and working meant eight hours a day on my feet- god forbid the cashier be sitting down!) in shoes a size too small all summer. Ugh.
Feh.
If management can’t figure out how to hire people who can be trusted to dress themselves in a way that doesn’t impede their work (and I agree that projecting an image to clients/customers may very well be part of their job), the problems run deeper than what can be solved by writing a dresscode.
IMHO, any effort spent in defining and upholding a dresscode is an effort that could’ve been put towards reaching the company’s core goals instead. We work to make money, no ?
I’ve never had a job where I could dress casually, and after all these years, it really makes me want to stop working all together. I worked in supermarkets for years moving freight and stocking shelves, and gathering carts in the rain and organizing coolers and walk-in freezers - all in khakis, button-up shirts and ties.
Now I’m in the military and I only wear regular clothing one day out of ever one or two weeks. I find uniforms very uncomfortable.
One day, I shall have a job where I can wear human clothing, and all will be good. Oh, yes.
Unless your clothes are part of your job (uniformed police, staff at an upscale restaurant, anybody who is a “castmember”), what you wear should have no bearing on your job any more than it does when you run to the grocery store.
I don’t have so much of a problem with dress codes. If you don’t have them, some people tend to abuse that.
What I absolutely despise is having to wear a tie. It’s uncomfortable, archaic, and it’s making the skin on that part of my neck leathery.
I think the same way about pantyhose, though I don’t wear them (to work, anyway) 
.
I don’t mind wearing a company polo shirt at my retail job, but I hate the fact that I had to go out and specifically buy black dress pants and black leather shoes with no heels. No denim - black jeans are right out - and my general manager told me I shouldn’t wear black Dockers-type pants (I think his rationale was “they fade quicker”) so I had to buy two pairs of hideous polyester dress slacks that I’m never going to wear outside of work EVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
Like it’d make every customer leave the store if the person working the copy machines was wearing jeans.
More and more large companies – of the Fortune 500 caliber – are moving to “business casual” dress without any marked decline in professionalism. Very few tech companies have much of a dress code, certainly not a “professional” dress code, but they make fine products. (If you think that the brilliant minds who created the operating systems and browsers you’re using to read this were wearing neckties or pantyhose while they churned out that code, I want some of what you’re smoking.) I’m not interested in a mindset that’s “professional” – a term which means vastly different things depending upon who you ask – I’m interested in a mindset of attention and interest in the task at hand. That goes for my doctor, my waiter and my cabbie equally. (You know there’s some move to install a dress code for NYC cabbies. I’d think that making sure that they all know how to speak English and know how to get to basic city landmarks would take precedence. That’s just me.)
In the service sector, I’m interested in service, and what someone is wearing has nothing to do with service. I want the coffee drink that I ordered, and if you’re wearing a $2,000 Armani suit but give me a mocha frap when I wanted soy caramel, you’re still a schmuck and a bad employee. If I’m asking you where in the store I can find the book I want to read or if you’re checking out my purchase, I want you to be knowledgable, polite and friendly. You can do that in jeans, you can do that with pink hair or a nose ring. It’s not attire that matters, it’s attitude.
And as someone else said, someone with a good attitude is going to wear clothing that’s approrpriate for what they’re doing. That’s part of the attitude.
Be clean, have clothes that fit and are safe for your workplace, and know how to do your job. Anything less is incompetence, anything more is superfluous.
More and more large companies – of the Fortune 500 caliber – are moving to “business casual” dress without any marked decline in professionalism. Very few tech companies have much of a dress code, certainly not a “professional” dress code, but they make fine products. (If you think that the brilliant minds who created the operating systems and browsers you’re using to read this were wearing neckties or pantyhose while they churned out that code, I want some of what you’re smoking.) I’m not interested in a mindset that’s “professional” – a term which means vastly different things depending upon who you ask – I’m interested in a mindset of attention and interest in the task at hand. That goes for my doctor, my waiter and my cabbie equally. (You know there’s some move to install a dress code for NYC cabbies. I’d think that making sure that they all know how to speak English and know how to get to basic city landmarks would take precedence. That’s just me.)
In the service sector, I’m interested in service, and what someone is wearing has nothing to do with service. I want the coffee drink that I ordered, and if you’re wearing a $2,000 Armani suit but give me a mocha frap when I wanted soy caramel, you’re still a schmuck and a bad employee. If I’m asking you where in the store I can find the book I want to read or if you’re checking out my purchase, I want you to be knowledgable, polite and friendly. You can do that in jeans, you can do that with pink hair or a nose ring. It’s not attire that matters, it’s attitude.
And as someone else said, someone with a good attitude is going to wear clothing that’s approrpriate for what they’re doing. That’s part of the attitude.
Be clean, have clothes that fit and are safe for your workplace, and know how to do your job. Anything less is incompetence, anything more is superfluous.
Computer geek checking in. Suits and ties are a definite sign of not being good at computers. The slobbier the better (up to a point of hygiene). Customers know this, so the fear of customers seeing sloppy geeks is the opposite of reality.
Many computer companies know this is true. But management hates it to an irrational degree. It used to be tolerated, but with the crash, tech people are a dime a dozen so dress codes are coming back.
Remember The Tie is a sign of submission to The Powers That Be. But, at least among geeks, such submissiveness is contrary to being creative.
You can’t have it both ways. You can have a successful computer company or you can have nice looking employees to lay off when you go belly up.
<applauds ftg>
Well said!
More and more large companies – of the Fortune 500 caliber – are moving to “business casual” dress without any marked decline in professionalism. Very few tech companies have much of a dress code, certainly not a “professional” dress code, but they make fine products. (If you think that the brilliant minds who created the operating systems and browsers you’re using to read this were wearing neckties or pantyhose while they churned out that code, I want some of what you’re smoking.) I’m not interested in a mindset that’s “professional” – a term which means vastly different things depending upon who you ask – I’m interested in a mindset of attention and interest in the task at hand. That goes for my doctor, my waiter and my cabbie equally. (You know there’s some move to install a dress code for NYC cabbies. I’d think that making sure that they all know how to speak English and know how to get to basic city landmarks would take precedence. That’s just me.)
In the service sector, I’m interested in service, and what someone is wearing has nothing to do with service. I want the coffee drink that I ordered, and if you’re wearing a $2,000 Armani suit but give me a mocha frap when I wanted soy caramel, you’re still a schmuck and a bad employee. If I’m asking you where in the store I can find the book I want to read or if you’re checking out my purchase, I want you to be knowledgable, polite and friendly. You can do that in jeans, you can do that with pink hair or a nose ring. It’s not attire that matters, it’s attitude.
And as someone else said, someone with a good attitude is going to wear clothing that’s approrpriate for what they’re doing. That’s part of the attitude.
Be clean, have clothes that fit and are safe for your workplace, and know how to do your job. Anything less is incompetence, anything more is superfluous.
(Note to self: do not refresh the wrong Mozilla tab or you will double post. D’oh!)
The reason for uniforms and dress codes is simple – some people just don’t get it.
I worked at an advertising agency that had an almost non-existent dress code. Despite that we had a female employee who couldn’t tell the difference between dressing for work and dressing for ladies night at a strip club. Even when she was asked to go home and change, the next day she’d be back in clothes that were too tight, too short, and too low-cut.
The same goes with jeans. Too many people don’t understand the difference between clean and comfortable, and stained and ripped.
Think a simple word to the fashion-impaired will do the trick? Ask a human resources director who will tell you exactly what the company’s recourse is if there isn’t a clear, written dress code.
I can live with your hair and your piercings, but I don’t care to see your tatoo. And I don’t particularly care to entrust my money (or in the case of a “professional,” my business) to people who don’t know how to dress themselves.
I think dress codes are required because of people like Kuniluo mentioned. At McDonald’s we wore casual button-up shirts and docker like pants, it didn’t seem to bother anyone. Sometimes an employee would wear jeans, and no one gave them any flak, unless it became a habit. One day, the boss was expected, though, and I had to wait 45 minutes for an employee to show back up after the store manager sent him to get his pants out of the dryer. The store ran understaffed till he got back. This seemed so stupid, to me.
At a convience store I worked at, I had to buy a long-sleeved white shirt to work there. I am hot natured and wore the sleeves pushed up over my elbows, cause the store was plenty comfortable without the long sleeves. This was fine, but a short sleeve shirt wasn’t. It reminds me how Will Smith’s character on Fresh Prince of Bel Aire wore his school uniform coat inside out, and got away with it.
So it seems to me that dress codes work well, as long as you forbid things, but don’t require things, Unless you require the minimum. I am a cook now, and my uniform consists of a clean apron, and hair net, and anything else I wear. Wal-mart employees have thier company vests. People in retail stores should have name-tags, just to mark them as employees.
And if they can’t get it through thier head that this looks unacceptable by company standards, and that doesn’t, just fire them.