Erikka Askeland: Incentives you can get incensed about

My first real job was as a Saturday girl in a shop in the mall. It was a new, somewhat upmarket chain that sold ethical and “natural” cosmetics and potions, which was, back in those dark days of nylon ubiquity and other petrochemical by-products, a sheer novelty.

I have no idea what they saw in me. A moody teenager, I did not pledge to endeavour to wear anything other than black to work. But I was a committed vegetarian, and I smoked, an oxymoron which perhaps gave them indication I had some sort of ideals that weren’t just caused by food allergies.

We had loads of fun, actually. My boss was a straight-laced woman with a shock of cropped red hair and who played Edith Piaf on the store stereo when she was feeling a bit mischievous. The senior sales assistant, bottle blonde and glamorous, was a divorcee by 23 and would sometimes make secretive arrangements to meet some of my dodgier friends at the burger joint across the road to score weed.

But the problem we had was none of us could sell. Or at least, not very well. More often than not, the extent of my persuasive skills amounted to saying hello in a manner as cheerful as I could muster behind my eyeliner before the wary customer scurried out with a bar of gelatine soap.

So eventually, Peggy arrived. A tall, no-nonsense woman, who I realise in retrospect was parachuted in by head office to change the fortunes of what must have been an “under-performing” store. She was friendly at first, but then told us it was no longer acceptable to let customers just buy the cheapest thing and hare out. We had to “up sell” – if customers wanted a cucumber face wash, then they had to get the cucumber toner and cocoa butter moisturiser as well.

It was a hard sell in a sleepy town where most of our customers had previously tended to spend less than a fiver on a year’s supply of soap. Once, Peggy actually indignantly refused to sell a single bottle of cleanser to a woman who only wanted the smallest, cheapest thing she could buy. Peggy had a point to make. Me and the customer were both terrified. I didn’t last much longer.

But Peggy was not mean, or a bully. Rather, she was motivated in a different way than those of us making the minimum wage. That motivation was her bonus, a cut of the profits if she increased them. “Incentivising” bosses and managers this way was then becoming the corporate fashion.

Twenty five (gulp) years later, and the same sort of thing is happening in banks and boardrooms across the country, albeit with many more zeros attached. Which is why, when you are making a flat £7 an hour, or £300 a week, or even £30,000 a year, it is probably a no-brainer to want to hold up a sign and shout outside your local bank.

Why should he (it is almost always, unfailingly, a he), the guy who runs the bank, be getting a bonus of £1 million, or £10m, particularly when he and his cronies seemed to have laid waste to our ability to get a mortgage, a holiday or even a job that pays £7 an hour?

Peggy never had to promise to pay back her bonus if later the store had to shut down. And by the same token, Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, only gave up his near-£1m top-up after realising the public outcry wasn’t worth it.

Personally, I hope he stays in his job, because we will need him to deserve his bonus if we, the taxpayer, are ever going to get our money back.

Actually, maybe I lie. My first real job, before getting on at the shop, involved climbing a ladder to slide large letters on clear acrylic plates that spelled out slogans on a road-side sign for a local estate agents. I quit when I found myself hanging upside down, my foot crooked onto the rung of the ladder, having saved myself from breaking my neck after I lost my balance. And no, I did not get a bonus.