We’ve all been there. It’s one step above fast food and one step below dentist’s office receptionist. It’s dangerously close to being the most mundane, soul-crushingly menial job on the market. That’s right, plebeians, it’s retail. It drains every good quality out of you and spits out this empty shell of a person with a fake smile and a strangle compulsion to lie.
Retail is one of those jobs that you get when you’re a teen, but when you see a 40-year-old sales woman trying to squeeze every last penny of a rich girl’s allowance money, you pity the woman and wonder, like she does, where her life went wrong.
For a while there, I never though I’d escape. I was shackled to retail chain after retail chain for seven years. First, I started with lotions and face creams, then I slowly worked my way down the ladder to discount apparel with a side of washroom duty. I counted every minute, every hour, every smoke break until my arduous day of self-loathing was over.
For those of you who think your fast-food job was distasteful and your receptionist job made you grind your teeth, wait until you hear my proposal for why retail is the most sell-out job there is.
It’s too competitive
It’s especially competitive for those working for commission-based pay. You might be thinking, “Hey, I had the highest sales in my department, I made more money than anyone! I loved commission!” But let me tell you, everyone you worked with hated you — except your boss, maybe. Jealousy, bitterness and hostility run rampant when you are pinned up against co-workers
All sales staff are trying to slaughter each other daily. Talk about a hostile work environment. How are you supposed to like a job where everyone is untrustworthy or trying to undercut you?
Even if you like competition, there are days where you are going to be off your game, and you best believe your boss is going to be watching your numbers, passive aggressively telling you to step it up or worse, publicizing it to the rest of the team over the Leaderboard, or whatever it is they use to publicly shame salespeople these days.
The hours are horrendous
There are a lot of jobs out there where you have to work weekends, evenings, and holidays. So why is retail so much worse? Because you have to compete for hours just as much as you do for wage as well as fight tooth-and-nail to get a weekend off. Besides booking weeks in advance, I’ve only ever had one weekend off in my seven years in retail.
And I almost forgot the worst part: Christmas. No elaborations necessary, besides the obvious fact that working sales at Christmas time makes you want to lie in an eggnog-induced stupor until the summer solstice. I’m pretty sure that all those suicides that happen around Christmas are retail staff putting an end to the perpetual Christmas music and angry patrons.
A great segway to my next point…
Patrons are awful
I’m sure this applies to most of the service industry, but retail seems to carry a wide variety of malicious, sneaky and venomous individuals with absolutely no patience, courtesy or empathy.
I have many horror stories I could rattle off here, but I’ll spare you any gory details and just rattle off some generalizations instead.
People will do anything to save a buck including, but not limited to, intimidation, violence, temper-tantrums, tears, theft and a whole host of other things.
Even the relatively normal ones have their annoying assumptions about you. They assume you’re trying to swindle them, you’re senseless and/or incompetent and/or lazy, that this is your life direction despite the fact most of us are going to school, you can barely use a calculator let alone a till and they assume the faults of the chain are all faults of yours, too. Fun.
Managers are a crapshoot
In my years of retail, I’ve had some benevolent managers, but for the most part, they’ve been absolute morons that call themselves managers. Somehow, beyond any logical sense, despite all the rules of the universe, some fashion school drop-out was promoted to the job that dictates whether my life is hell or not.
These types of managers love to pass blame onto employees, motivate using scare tactics and genuinely disregard labour laws for their own gain. They are passive aggressive, they are transparent and they will find a way to fire you or force you to quit if your jib isn’t the right cut for them.
There’s a lot of bitterness about how their lives have turned out. Because of this, they like to throw around what weight they have to assert their dominance and authority over their indentured servants, I mean, employees.
They make up their own rules, enforce arbitrary ones and somehow leave themselves exempt from any rules themselves. It makes life interesting, but hardly fun.
Employees are dispensable
It’s not difficult to work retail, and often, the shining stars move on to better opportunities. Otherwise, staff are often fired over personal matters or disagreements with management. Labour laws don’t exist in this outlaw town of Skinny Jeans and Overpriced Wrinkle Cream.
The pay sucks
Usually, pay is barely above minimum wage and doesn’t typically have a commission attached to it, yet somehow you still have to hit goals. Pay can be a real sticking point between co-workers because there’s always one employee who’s paid way too much for her work (and more importantly her IQ), while one employee is exploited beyond legality.
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