The Tirocchi customers were covetous of the sisters' time and attention and unhappy when they felt they weren't getting enough of it. Another Fall River client scolded, "Now if you cannot promise me that time let me know immediately and I will look elsewhere. As I have a house to get furnished as well as a dress and wedding to look after." The issues of time and attention could provoke a genteel guerrilla war: when this woman paid a surprise visit to the Tirocchi workshop, she complained that she was told that Anna was "gone and I could not find out when you return." Not to be outdone, she left postage for Anna's reply with the boy - possibly Louis J. Cella, Jr. - who answered the door. A frequent customer perennially complained that Anna was neglecting her clothing, and, after being told one time too many that a fitting was to be delayed, she wrote, "I cant [sic] understand why I am constantly put off," and demanded a fitting at the scheduled time because she needed the dress for a luncheon engagement. Customers had a double standard about time. They made unilateral demands on the dressmakers' time, wreaking havoc with their work schedules, but they insisted that the dressmakers respect their own social schedules, thus inverting the business-oriented attitude of the day that time was money and should be valued according to its market rate. Customers' time, an unpaid commodity, took precedence because of the clients' social position. The time of the Tirocchi sisters and their employees, although compensated by wages, was devalued because of their class, painfully recalling the testimony of domestic servants who had no quarrel with the work they did, but resented bitterly that they were on call around the clock at their employers' whim.(21)

Despite customers' determination to exact deference and coddling from the Tirocchis, in the end the relationship was still a commercial one, and the bills had to be paid. Those bills were substantial, whether compared to the cost of ready-made clothes or to the incomes of the working-class majority. Mrs. H. A. (Margaret) DuVillard ran up an account of $668.50 at the Tirocchi establishment in 1921, about sixty percent of what a male factory worker earned in that year, and the Tirocchis' work for Dorothy Newton's June 1923 wedding came to $1797, a sum substantially higher than most Rhode Island working-class families then lived on for a year. Some customers felt they were getting good value for their money. At least twice, they wrote to request bills for work done. DuVillard made a clumsy joke of asking, "Where is my bill? I have never had to ask for it before - you must be on easy street and maybe are going to make me a present of clothes etc." This sort of joking inversion of the relative financial positions and power of client and dressmaker was apparently part of the verbal byplay of the relationship. Primrose Tirocchi recalled clients - whom she called "ladies" - saying to Anna, "You know, Anna, you have a better house than I do" [fig. 51]. The luxury and beauty of the establishment at 514 Broadway may indeed have galled some of the customers, who perhaps felt that Anna and Laura were putting on airs inappropriate to their social position. Another source of resentment may have been Anna's obvious success and prosperity as an astute businesswoman. Customers uncomfortable with their own financial dependence on male kin may well have resented Anna's independence and resolute adherence to high standards of work.(22)