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?
But a pilot, like a doctor or police officer, is someone who is expected to wear a uniform.
I beg to differ…
A couple years ago I needed to have some surgery done. I went to an office I’d never been to, to meet a doctor I had no idea about, to talk to him about removing steel from a previous surgery in my leg. The nurses and receptionists, etc, in the office were dressed business-casual, mostly scrubs and the like. Didn’t think anything of it at all. They led me into a room to wait for the doctor.
Couple minutes later this guy comes in, wearing a generic guy-type shirt and bluejeans. In his hand was a folder.
I knew immediately this was someone i’d feel comfortable chopping my leg open and yanking out hunks of metal with a pair of vice grips, which he did a week or so later. Wearing jeans.
As a customer, I really don’t care how the employees dress, as long as they’re clean and ready to serve me.
I work in fast food. As management, my uniform is a Wendy’s shirt, dark dress pants, and dress shoes. I have leeway with the pants…really, as long as they’re clean nd professional, I can wear whatever. Khakis usually don’t stay clean, so we opt not to wear them. It’s always an option though. For crew, they have to wear black non-denim pants. No exceptions.
Over the years, I’ve bought over 30 pairs of work pants. Very rarely do I wear them outside of work. I hate that.
My mom, on the other hand, has a real professional job…she works for the state, and makes at least 3 times my salary…her office is the most laid back place I’ve ever seen. She wears jeans and tshirts, her senior management wears sandals, they play chess all night.
I agree completely, and if I were more articulate, I probably would’ve said that.
When I go to the store, I want everyone with purple hair, wearing a t-shirt of their favorite band, and whatever pants they want. Someone else wants them to tbe wearing pressed black pants and polo shirts that have “Ralph’s” embroidered on the breast. How come that someone else wins?
Wow. I seem to have really opened up a hot topic here, even though we’ve discussed the same issue from other angles before.
I would agree with the neatness advocates. I believe your work clothes should be clean and in good condition, and fit you. I don’t believe that T-shirts are appropriate office wear. Neat jeans and a polo shirt are fine in my book, though. The anti-jeans position, I think, is really a holdover of long, long ago when only miners and farmers wore them. The people who advocate more conservative dress codes seem to have this notion that you can’t be anything but sloppy, grubby, and probably actually dirty if you’ve got jeans on.
I’ve got quite a few female friends who went on to become high school teachers and the only thing they have in common when buying clothes is “nothing low cut”. They all seem to reach this decision after the first week of teaching teenage boys.
I had one dead-end, low-paying job with a dress code. We couldn’t wear t-shirts (even plain-colored ones) and we couldn’t wear pants with “flat-felled seams”. (This was their way of getting us to not wear jeans or khakis or any “casual” pants.) I think they also had a policy against twill weaved fabrics, but I don’t think they really enforced it. Some very fancy fabrics have a twill weave. And of course, we were paid like shit. It seems like the more strict the dress code is, the less they pay you.
Fortunately, it was a fabric store where I worked, and I sewed (a main reason I worked there!). I got an employee discount on fabric and patterns (and a lot of free patterns) so I basically sewed my whole work wardrobe. I was lucky that way.
I made a point of sewing a whole lot of comfortable pants that were made of twills or other “casual” fabrics. Since they didn’t have those flat-felled seams so they were suddenly “OK”. I especially remember a pair of “jeans” (made of a luscious brushed indigo denim) that I made for work. They didn’t have the flat-felled seams, so I got to wear them.
We all bitched about the dress code, though. One coworker was rather a clothes horse and had many very nice (and expensive) outfits, but some of them had the dreaded flat-felled seams. She wondered how it made sense that she couldn’t wear her very nice outfits (because of the seams) but someone else could wear a tacky, tattered pair of nasty polyester pants because they didn’t have flat-felled seams. It was stupid, I tell you.
Consider me in the “as long as it’s neat and not overly tasteless and tacky” crowd. Nothing wrong with a nice pair of comfortable jeans in most workplaces. Personally, I think in a lot of cases, a dress code is just another way to make the employees miserable. Paying them like shit isn’t enough misery.
For those who think t-shirts, jeans, or any item that is otherwise clean and hygenic are not appropriate for a given occupation- Why not? What specifically, translates t-shirt to unprofessional/unacceptable in your mind? Why?
(Things that have offensive/ sexual/ political/ inflammatory images or words are excepted.)
Troy, it’s simply not an issue of comfort. For me it’s an issue of image.
My husband and I own a small business. When our customer comes through the door, they expect (and appreciate) our staff dressed “appropriately” for their job.
As someone has earlier pointed out, it’s not necessary or appropriate for a person working on the loading dock of the grocery to wear a 3-piece suit. It is appropriate, IMO, for the checkers and stockers to wear their white shirts and black slacks.
I personally don’t believe jeans/t-shirts are appropriate in the majority of white-collar jobs. YMMV. My experience has been that the geek crowd believes it’s their right to wear jeans. I tend to disagree. Business casual is OK but I don’t think jeans are. As for why. I can’t tell you, it just is. [sub](didn’t your mother ever tell you “I told you so?” :D)[/sub]
I’ll concede that under some circumstances where the job does not require any face to face contact with the public, jeans would be OK.
Whether it’s fair or not, people make judgements based on the the image you project to others. If you come to an interview in goth clothes, tatoos, piercings, and purple hair you are making one statement. (not necessarily a bad one…but a statement none the less). Society expects you to dress appropriately for the job, whatever “appropriate” means in the given situation.
Actually, if you were to get a franchise and open up your very own Hot Topic[tm] store in the local mall, and you had employees wearing t-shirts and jeans, that’d be rather conservative. Mostly the employees at Hot Topic have on leather, chain wallets, ass-kicker boots, tattos, unatural shades of dyed hair, and vibrating tongue rings.
I 've already told my “Dress Code Horror Story”. Things are a lot more comfortable nowadays. My current morning job is telemarketing for a carpet cleaning company. Again, no one but the rest of the staff sees us. I almost always wear black jeans and simple t-shirts, longsleeved in winter. I go straight from there to the Zoo so I don’t have much of a chance to change. I just wear the same clothes. I keep a t-shirt with the zoo logo and a pair of clean jeans handy in case there’s a big tour, but most of our business is outside presentations and movie/TV work. The critters don’t care what I wear as long as I stuff food in the front end and shovel up the “offerings” from the other end!
…and it is nothing but ignorance to think that they are anything but qualified for the job based on that appearance.
I think the difference here is that you think individuals should conform to this standard just because it’s the way it is, and there’s no reason to change. Is that more or less correct?
I don’t think that “the way it is” is inherently correct, in any situation. I think this standard caters to ignorance- that the girl with purple hair is somehow unworthy of serving me (unworthy to serve?!). This standard needs to be relaxed to be more inclusive so that all can benefit- employers have a wider pool of prospects, workers are more comfortable and are able to perform better, and customers reap the benefits of that improved labor. And if someone chooses to reject the hard-working yet creatively dressed drone, screw 'em. Their ignorance, their loss.
I subscribe to the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold get to make the rules.
If a job related dress code requires me to wear full body armor, then I wear full body armor. If the dress code requires me to wear a suit and tie, then that is what I wear. If there is no dress code, then I wear Docker type pants, Rockport shoes and a polo type shirt.
One thing I don’t do, if a dress code is in place, is to complain about it—I accepted the job and will abide by the rules. If the rules become too onerous, I will resign from the job.
There are studies that indicate that non-verbal clues are important in how others perceive you. Some studies even say that if verbal and non-verbal messages appear to contradict one another people perceive the non-verbal message as the true message.
Different professions may well want different perceptions. I can see how an art shop would probably not want an employee wearing a suit and tie because it doesn’t seem “artistic”.
There’s no one answer and the fact that people take verbal clues is not ignorance. It means that people perceive things differently than you. You’ve asked why you “lose” when you want everybody with purple hair and band t-shirts. Well, you “lose” in many cases because more people don’t want that and the business owner wants to make as many customers happy as possible. On the other hand, you might “win” in a skateboard shop where the clientele might expect that sort of dress code.
Given the differences, it’s reasonable to me for a business owner to require a certain dress code. It’s not the purpose of a business to try to change ingrained psychological effects.
I don’t think I’ve ever even taken note of how employees are dressed, except when trying to puzzle out whether there was a dress code or not during interviews. If you just look a person in the eye, you won’t have to stare at their shoes and wonder why they’re allowed to wear scuffed ones.
How do you “know” this? Are you psychic? Are you conducting unbiased interviews of your customers? Or are you, as I suspect, just projecting your own attitudes onto your customers?
I personally don’t believe jeans/t-shirts are appropriate in the majority of white-collar jobs. YMMV.
And I personally don’t believe your attitudes are appropriate for people who own or manage businesses, but YMMV.
My experience has been that the geek crowd believes it’s their right to wear jeans. I tend to disagree. Business casual is OK but I don’t think jeans are. As for why. I can’t tell you, it just is.
Could it be … sheer ignorant prejudice on your part?
**Society expects you to dress appropriately for the job, whatever “appropriate” means in the given situation. **
Society=you, “appropriate”=whatever you think. Bzzzt, nice try, but thanks for playing.
In an ideal world, which this ain’t, competence alone would be the benchmark. Unfortunately, comptence is far from a given, much less willingness. Visual cues like appearance just stir the rotting stew.
As a customer my minimum line is being able to figure out exactly who the hell’s actually working someplace. I’m not opposed to comfort, self-actualization, etc. etc. but I find it frustrating, not to mention embarrassing, driven bumbling from stranger to stranger asking, “Excuse me, do you work here?” No, I don’t automatically know. You’re comfily dressed down; I’m just the average hapless schmuck off the street, interested in your business but laboring under my own pressures. What’s the actual benefit, to anyone, of this confusion?
As a manager, it’s hard, damned hard, to even retain jobs in this brutal economic climate. Battling off layoffs, “RIF’s”, requires the miraculous. We’re lucky to maintain the basics; forget uniforms, clothing allowances or even COL adjustments for wages, etc. Too many employees are working two (or more) jobs already and barely getting by. They’re honest, hard-working people who just plain don’t have one spare cent for extras.
No one answer fits all but this is my best so far: clean, and as appropriate as possible for the work situation. (They vary widely.) Alertness, competence and willingness trump clothes every time. It seems to me that some crucial aspect is a basic respect for honest work, employee and consumer alike, with dress as just an outward expression.
