Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to contribute with an ethnographic account of a deceitful everyday mandatory financial practice called “upselling,” performed by an English foreign exchange multinational corporation in Denmark. It is highly insightful for understanding our contemporary ideological time.

Paper long abstract:

Within a crisis context, "upselling," as a case study of a particular practice of an English foreign exchange multinational corporation, enlightens one about the financial ethos anthropologically. I encountered this practice while residing in Denmark, having been myself a "native" cashier from 2007 to 2009, and I have been taking it obsessively as my research topic ever since. "Upselling" is both a unique and mandatory practice and its goal is to maximize profit in every buying transaction done with every single one of its customers, which, furthermore, is not to be spoken of to no one, ever. It is, nevertheless, a common topic of conversation among the workforce. The majority of the international cashier workforce of the corporation in Denmark is constituted of foreigners, with a few so-called andengenerationsindvandrer (second-generation of immigrants); moreover, there is a general unhappiness concerning this employment, to the point of being actually a hated one. Drawing from fieldwork with my former colleagues, the interviewed cashiers blatantly perceive "upselling" as a cheating practice: it deceives customers - contrasting sharply with the corporation's discourse. It will be described how this practice is performed. Furthermore, customers often complain about this particular transaction and it has dreadful consequences: insults, curses, spits and punches towards the cashiers on the other side of the bulletproof glass, some material damage, and it even ends sometimes extremely with the local police being called, either by the customers or the cashiers' themselves, to the bureaux de change too.