Parenting & Family Quote by James Cash Penney

Managerial tenderness is doing double duty here: it’s a statement of method, and a statement of moral legitimacy. Penney’s line pairs two groups who rarely share a sentence - salespeople and children - then insists they deserve the same core treatment: attention, patience, respect. That’s not accidental sentimentality. It’s retail philosophy disguised as character.

The first clause is about control. “Under my direct supervision” signals a hands-on hierarchy: training isn’t outsourced, culture isn’t delegated, and standards aren’t left to chance. In the early 20th-century department-store boom, “salesmanship” was a technology as much as a skill - scripts, manners, presentation, an engineered friendliness designed to convert foot traffic into trust. Penney frames that as “practice,” a discipline, suggesting repeatability and consistency across locations.

Then he pivots to children, the unlikely moral barometer. Treating kids “with the utmost consideration” functions as a reputational anchor: if you can’t condescend to the smallest, most powerless customers (or store visitors tagging along), you can’t justify condescension to anyone. It’s also canny: families are the unit of consumption, and a child’s comfort can determine whether a mother lingers or leaves. Consideration is ethics, but it’s also dwell time.

The subtext: kindness is a system, not a mood. Penney is selling a version of capitalism that wants to look principled - where supervision produces service, and service produces loyalty, and loyalty can be described, without blushing, as decency.