Also, if you, Ralph’s require me to wear your specific shirt and a very specific subset of pants, then you, Ralph’s, should pony up for it at the time of hire, and every so often after that. Two and a half years worth of chicken grease, fryer oil, roast beef blood, assorted chemicals, and othe nasties will not come out in the wash.
I’m here to work and get paid, not to fulfill your contract to a uniform company.
Actually, some studies and surveys show that many Fortune 500 companies are finding decreased productivity and professionalism. But business casual remains attractive because it’s a free benefit businesses can offer to employees.
My firm is business casual. If we meet with a client, we need to dress in business attire. I went to a meeting the other day with about 10 people from other firms and was surprised to see that most were business casual.
I don’t really care either way. I wear a suit and tie fairly often because I think it looks better and it’s not uncomfortable to me.
So you’re saying that if you got on a plane and the pilot was wearing flip-flops, cut-off sweatpants and a T-shirt that said “Legalize it!” it would not give you pause?
When I started working at K-Mart as a cashier, we were forbidden from wearing tennis shoes, which I found to be utterly illogical, especially since customers never saw my feet. Standing in one spot behind a register for eight hours in dress shoes was agony. I started wearing othopedic “granny” shoes. Eventually, complaints and employee turn-over caused management to relax the rule to allow black tennis shoes, as long as they were leather and “new-looking.”
But when it comes to “common sense” dress codes, you often find that common sense isn’t common at all. A friend of mine works in a prison, and he said that they’ve occasionally had problems with women employees who dress like they’re heading out for a night of club-hopping. Personally, I would not wear a low-cut blouse and skin-tight pants in a place in which convicted rapists are housed, but many of the women grew angry when the management had to tell them they needed to dress more conservatively.
In other jobs with a casual dress code, I have seen my fellow employees come to work wearing clothes in which I wouldn’t be seen painting the house. Dirty, torn, and rumpled . . . they looked like they should be holding a “Will Work For Food” sign beside the highway.
I have also seen people come to work half-naked. When I worked in a small mom-and-pop convenience store, one girl came to work wearing a spandex bra top and cut-off shorts in which the cheeks of her ass hung far below the hem. She was puzzled and angry when told she’d need to go home and change, though our policy clearly stated that no midriffs could show, nor could shorts be higher than mid-thigh.
I guess dress codes should depend on the nature of your industry. If you’re working in a discount store, I think jeans are fine. A smock and name badge should be enough to identify you as an employee. However, if you’re working in a more upscale department store, or a nice resturant, jeans wouldn’t be appropriate. If the customers are dressed casually, I see no reason to force the employees to “dress up,” especially when the employees are being paid close to minimum wage, and dress clothes might be a financial burden.
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But a pilot, like a doctor or police officer, is someone who is expected to wear a uniform.
Hey, when I walk into a place of business, if I don’t see tattoos, nipple rings and tight spandex on the women, I have to wonder – do they really care about their jobs? Are they professionals? If they aren’t willing to dress to please me, the customer, they’re self-indulgent slobs who should all be fired.
And a guy who doesn’t wear a big black cape with silver lining – how can he call himself a professional?
I would think it was weird in a good way.
I don’t have a great distinction between business casual and business professional attire for most brick and mortar businesses. When properly presented, khaki’s are just fine.
The OP mentions blue jeans and that is where my first post was directed. Jeans are casual, period, and I still stand on my original statement. I don’t believe jeans are appropriate in the workplace. (Including you geekheads. Damn rebels, anyway. :D)
Also, ANY attire that is sloppy is not acceptable. You can wear a 3-pc. suit and tie but if it’s torn, it’s still sloppy. The reason the dress codes are in place are for the ID10T’s that can’t seem to understand the concept of “neat”.
It depends on the company, the industry, and the department.
Generally, tellers, cashiers, people that need to deal with the public should maintain an image for the company. People in the back (accounting etc.) has no such need.
Quite honestly, no. Although I would expect/demand him to be stone-cold sober, but I think that issue is settled before it’s started.
Why should the fact that the girl behind the deli counter has purple hair matter? Why should I care that the bank teller has a nose ring? As long as they’re identifiable as employees (name tag, hats, aprons…) and they use soap every once in a while, 
it’s all good to me.
But why? What exactly puts you off about it?
This raises another point… who are we dressing for? A bank requires tellers to wear dress shirt & tie / blouse & skirt. You, vougey, might see a professional, dedicated group of workers. I would see an uncomfortable group of workers, and a company that doesn’t care about the well-being of their workers (admittedly, this would be a minor issue). Neither of which really gives us any insight into how well any of them could serve us. I’m sure there’s plenty of well-dressed slackoffs, and plenty of “dressed-down” hard workers.
For me, it’s an issue ONLY of what the employee is being paid to do.
Deal with customers in a sales or customer service type role? I expect you to be in at least some kind of clean, decent form of business like clothing. It can be jeans and a polo shirt - even sneakers too, but appropriate to the business. At a bank, I expect to see people in slacks, skirts, etc. At an auto-repair shop, I expect to see a decent uniform that isn’t completely covered in grime for the service writer - the mechanic, obviously, is another matter. Hell, even at the local Harley shop, the service techs try to look decent even if they are dressed in jeans and a “Ride It Like You Stole It” T-Shirt. Landscaper? Then I’d expect work boots and a uniform. Hardware store person - those handy-dandy aprons seem just fine to me.
If you work “out back” or in some other role where you don’t deal directly with the customer, then as far as I’m concerned, anything goes - up to the limits of safety, hygene, co-worker tolerance, etc.
It really is a shame everybody can’t wear scrubs. They’re cool and comfortable, and there’s a big pile of clean ones in the surgery locker rooms for the taking!
I’m working the night shift this month, and I thought it was odd earlier when I was wearing jeans and a String Cheese Incident t-shirt and I had to change out of the jeans and into much less attractive scrub pants before coming to work. (I’m still wearing the t-shirt–regular t-shirts are more fashionable under the white coat around here for docs than scrub tops.) I don’t think anyone would even say anything if I wore jeans–it would just be weird.
There are some residency programs–such as surgery at U. of Louisville as of a few years ago–that forbid residents to be seen in the hospital in scrubs outside of the OR. Even in the middle of the night, they’re expected to change back into a shirt and tie. Residents’ lives are shitty enough without crap like that, and I really don’t think patients care if their doctor is wearing a tie or not. If my doc came to see me in a tie at night, I’d figure he was on his way to or from somewhere else.
I would like input on how you would like to see a high school English teacher dressed. The principal was constantly after the teachers to weat suits, ties, heels, conservative dresses, etc. but he didn’t convince many.
The football students in my classes always had to wear nice shirts and ties on game days. I will have to admit that they were better behaved on those days.
I don’t know who you’re asking, Zoe, but lucky you, you get to hear MY opinion!
For teachers, I think politically-themed shirts would be inapproriate, given the need for unbiased education. But otherwise? Bring on the t-shirts! My geometery teacher in high school whipped off his tie as soon as the final bell rang. He did not suddenly forget geometry at that point, nor did he lose the ability to convey it to his students, and there’s absolutely no reason to think he did. He was simply more comfortable. Why deny him that?
A world in which English teachers are not allowed to wear T-shirts with witty quotations from world literature written all over them is not a world in which I want to live.
Well, actually, my point was that all these people who are insisting that employees should dress “professionally” or “neatly” are just attempting to impose their personal standards of taste on the rest of us. The notion that white shirts and black slacks are somehow more “professional” than other clothing is strictly arbitrary.
When I worked at a garage, we were required to wear grey work pants (treated with stuff so that if you spilled battery acid or whatnot on it, you’d have a few seconds to rip your pants off before it started to burn your skin) and a white buttondown shirt with your name over the left pocket (white patch red lettering) and a S**ll logo patch over the right pocket.
Actually, since I was a chick, I technically was supposed to wear a knee-length grey straight skirt, the buttondown was a weird Peter-pan type one, hose and dress shoes. But since I did oil changes and tire repairs, I got to dress like one of the guys. 
The one major thing that made me not resent this dress code was the fact that my boss paid for all the uniform clothing. I didn’t have to shell out money for the S**ll shirts or grey pants that I’m not gonna wear outside of work (even if they didn’t get grease-stained and stink like gas and motor oil). He might’ve been cheap when it came to paying employees, but he never expected us to shell out money for our uniforms to work there.
I don’t care at all, in fact I actually prefer people serving me to be dressed normally (rather than all wearing uniforms of some descriptions). Then again, I don’t own a shirt, tie or suit and am always wearing jeans and a T-Shirt and when I’m dealing with people they can have an air of superiority because they are dressed up (so to speak) and I’m not. This applies almost universally in the UK where I am now. Before that I was in San Francisco and nobody cared what the customer or the employee was wearing. I really miss that. The phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” always seems to spring to mind when talking about dress codes.
::creeps out of dark alleyway::
::looks to the left, to the right::
psst… What really happens is in order to increase Dockers sales among people who would ordinarily never buy them, Levi’s gives a nice sized chunk of change to the CEO of some company in order to “influence” the dress code. You get new pants, Levi’s gets new sales, CEO gets new boat.
…but you didna hear that from me.
I am definitely more productive now that I am once again allowed to dress in the same clothes (jeans, t shirt, sneakers) that I’d wear if I were not going to work. At the previous job, where a dress code was imposed and worsened over time, a certain amount of my energy went into silent rants and then attempting to soothe myself so as not to take my irritation out on people who were not responsible for the situation.