How to Survive Working in Retail With Your Sanity (Mostly) Intact
No, you don’t get paid enough. Yes, customers can suck sometimes. No, it (probably) won’t kill you.
I can’t believe I made it over 20 years working retail. Two decades of changing and often conflicting directions coming down from corporate. Two decades of demanding customers who never seem to be satisfied. Two decades of not getting paid enough to check off tasks on a list that never ends.
It hasn’t gotten any easier since I started my retail career back in 1998. If anything, it’s much worse. Many companies have slashed payroll over the years, expecting more and more out of a shrinking store-level staff. And wages haven’t kept up with the increasing workload. Retaining customers, always among the top priorities for any service-based company, is even more important now in the age of Amazon. This leads many customers to be even more demanding than ever when they do shop at a brick-and-mortar store, and frontline employees and managers have to bear the brunt of their imagined slights.
Whether you’re a retail newbie or a grizzled veteran like me, there are things you can do to make the job more bearable.
