Pavel Lhota

"My mother was the head of lingerie in Prior department store, [which is] the former Breda department store. They had such an interesting deputy. He once - it was 1965 or 1964 - he got an internship in Germany, and there he saw that they were doing self-service sales. So he thought that there must be self-service sales in the Breda department store as well, and on a trial basis it would be in ladies' underwear. My mother protested against it, that it wasn't that simple and that it had to be secured, that they wouldn't keep it secure, that people would steal it, because it was something new. Today it's commonplace, but in the '50s it wasn't commonplace at all. She protested, she didn't sign any material liability, she refused, he pushed it through, it was done there. Because there was self-service sales, there weren't that many saleswomen. He [the deputy] got a big bonus for introducing the novelty - my mother at the time said something like 20,000, which was a lot of money. After half a year, an inventory was taken and there was a huge shortfall; people just stole it. The criminal police came in, they investigated, my mother was responsible as the manager. It went to court and because [mother] didn't have a signed material responsibility and she also had [letters of disapproval that she wrote to the deputy], the court brushed it off, she was acquitted, the court didn't deal with it at all. The shortfall must have been attributable to Prior Opava. The deputy cancelled the self-service sales, filed it again as an improvement petition, and got 20,000 again as an improvement petition. That's the way things were done. It's so comical: he got it twice, once for introducing it and twice for abolishing it. The deputy always benefited from it."