Poll of the Day > So what's it like to work retail?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I could look it up online, but I'm most likely going to find some garbage and false answers, and I consider PotD to be a better source of experience info they places like Reddit.

So what's it like to work retail? Such as Wal-Mart, Target, etc, but also Retailers that specialize in different industries, like Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.

bump

Sucks ass would be my guess

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Before or after the pandemic?
Doesn't matter it sucked ass and probably still sucks ass.
Jobs that only exist because robots are more expensive than minimum wage..

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They're essential. Its very prestigious.

I worked overnight, but either way it

dud posted...

Sucks ass

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Its not the worst kinda job, but also your soul gets sucked out of your body.

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Either bored out of your mind, walking up and down the same aisles looking for items that are slightly ajar and fronting them, while listening to the worst music imaginable on repeat.

Or extremely hectic with people everywhere, constantly shouting and blaming you for stuff way beyond your pay grade... while listening to the worst music imaginable on repeat.

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Working retail can be good or bad, but it depends on where you work.

I worked at wal-mart for 7 years and hated it. I work at a smaller, gov't owned liquor store now and I love it. The difference is I get paid more money at the liquor store to do far less work, and less things can go wrong at the liquor store.

Wal-Mart played up my anxiety for a lot of reasons, the two big ones being lack of staff and the service desk.

When I started at wal-mart, staffing was never amazing but it was adequate. When I left we were so understaffed. On busy days like Saturday and Sunday we'd have only a handful of registers open despite 5,000 people wanting to check out, and we did not have a huge self checkout area. So being the cashier in those scenarios was painful. I was great at my job and can hold down a line, but knowing at any moment a customer could throw a temper tantrum because not enough lines open(and nobody to help out) got to me. That is the reason I quit. Staffing got too thin and I was tired of walking into an anxiety fire most days.

The service desk just sucks because of the general nature of it. In my personal life, I never make returns unless absolutely necessary, and I try to do my research into products to see if thats the one I need. Some people I feel like have nothing better to do than to not research anything and just buy stuff and if its wrong they know they can bring it back. Then you get into all the fraud associated with the service desk(returns, check cashing, moneygram, bill pay, moneycards, etc) and people wanting to melt down because their item is 78 years old and our return policy is 90 days....ultimately if I got a job at one of these places I would REFUSE to learn the service desk. All I did at Wal-Mart was fill in for breaks and even that got to me.

At the liquor store its much better. Very few returns(and we arent taking returns at all now because of covid), and it isnt as busy. Business isn't the problem, but when it is busy we generally have the staff to handle it.

The biggest challenge is always customers. Every single person I've worked with in retail has always had shit to say about customers. In general, customers are fine, if a little stupid on average.

Ultimately retail can be alright if you can put up with idiocy and repetitiveness. I'm pretty good at both. I stuck around so long in retail because I don't make life changes often and it was a job. But I am happy where I am now, where I never was at wal-mart.

When I worked at Walmart for two days before quitting, I had had a most distressing experience. I do not blame the retail environment in its entirety for how I had felt then. I was already a figurative bundle of nerves that had trouble with interacting with people in general. I'm generally timid, shy, and I have terrible social anxiety that has stayed with me for almost all my life. Whenever a customer approached me to ask me about where some good is, I'd freak out internally while trying not to show my nerves in my face, whenever I told them that I was new there and that I still did not know where everything was in the store. This was most counterintuitive to Walmart's guideline that its employees must be friendly and welcoming towards its clientele whenever they came within ten feet of a given employee. This made me even more uncomfortable staying there, since I knew I was incapable of showing such hospitality. I was in a position that required me to interact with customers often, which did not make matters better. I'd often lose heart in whatever task I'd been assigned to do because of some earlier social faux pas that had caused me to start freaking out. I'd feel nervous around my co-workers, for I had always felt they would judge me for either not knowing what I am even doing or else being a slacker who cannot be bothered to accomplish simple tasks that required some semblance of concentration and calm, which I'd almost always lose whenever faced with social adversity. The fact that I usually did my best to look at the ground whenever a customer or employee approached me only drove up my anxiety; I was always worried that anybody who sought help from me then would think me rude and incompetent, and that there was something wrong with me, which they would not be mistaken in thinking. In short, I did not belong in a retail environment. Now unemployed, I'm beginning to lose faith in my ability to find work that I can actually do properly, given that I was incapable of succeeding in a workplace environment that did not have many, if any barriers to entry to get hired in.
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Not as bad as people say it is but I guess it's all based on opinion. I worked for at Wal-mart for 8 years. It's definitely a job, not a career. If anyone's expecting to make decent money, they would have to really push to be at least an assistant manager. I stayed much longer than I had intended, mostly because the schedule was flexible enough for when I was getting my bachelors. I worked as a cart pusher, floor associate, and pharmacy clerk. When I left, I was only making 11.40. The worst part about working in retail is that the managers really do operate in "the customer is always right." They could treat you like trash and the manager will give them what they want. At the same time, I got away with a lot as a cart pusher. All the cart pushers would go hide somewhere until someone came to find us and tell us the cart rail was empty. Favoritism is definitely a thing, but I feel that is true anywhere you work. Managers will let you get away with things and offer promotions if they like you. I don't regret working at Wal-mart because it was a useful job for me at that time in my life.

Now eclair

Weve talked about paragraphs

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It's like working at the Krusty Krab.

Your mindset plays a big role in how much you enjoy your job.

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I worked at a Safeway liquor store for a few years. I actually enjoyed it, for the most part.

Customers are the absolute worst. I had a guy complain to my manager because I wouldn't go serve as a cashier to help him avoid a 2 person line up, because I was very clearly already busy cleaning up broken glass and whisky from a bottle a customer just knocked off a shelf. My manager sided with me and the customer went into a screaming fit of rage about it.

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"This was most counterintuitive to Walmart's guideline that its employees must be friendly and welcoming towards its clientele whenever they came within ten feet of a given employee"

Nobody I know followed this rule and nobody enforced it. It's insane to ask of this as a rule, but moreso at the end of my days there when you have 4 people running the entire front end at wal-mart from 6PM or later on a saturday. You don't even have time to have time at that point. If you were properly staffed then you could attempt to help people like this.

"Now unemployed, I'm beginning to lose faith in my ability to find work that I can actually do properly, given that I was incapable of succeeding in a workplace environment that did not have many, if any barriers to entry to get hired in."

Customers are odd, and I suspect the main part of your hang ups. In an office environment people shouldnt be assholes to you ever, and if so you can talk to your boss or HR or something. Customers can be assholes. Ive been in retail so long it has legitimately helped me grow socially more than ANYTHING ive ever done. But interacting with co-workers is always way easier, and an office is mainly co workers. You can generally predict them whereas you cannot predict customers who are random.

thats the way I see it. At the liquor store I can interact just fine with my coworkers as there are only 6 of us. Even customers are fine because what could go wrong at the liquor store? Not much. People are sorta fine at this job.

Zangulus posted...

On the other hand was the woman who would find some small appliance her husband bought literally years before and put in the garage and never once used. So she would bring it back and demand a full refund even though we had a 30 day return/90 day exchange policy. It was actually a hazing method for new employees. They had to argue with her for like an hour before someone would finally give her like 25% in store credit or something. The appliances were so old they didnt even exist in the system anymore...

Wait, the store set that up? That's fucked up.

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Most retail jobs I worked in my younger years sucked for a variety of reasons. Customer-facing roles in general tend to be lousy because people are pretty frequently lousy. And then most retailers are chronically short-staffed so you have to bust your ass a lot (although other places can be slow enough that you have a lot of free time -- my cousin managed a cigar store for a while and watched movies most of the day). The one thing that always bugged me is *every* single retail job I had they tried to promote me to management when I was in either high school or college and had zero intention of making a career out of retail, not even when I was in retail sales (although you could certainly make a good living doing that).

On the flip side, you have retail sales which can vary tremendously depending on the place and what's asked of salespeople. Retail sales in general often combines the worst elements of sales with the worst elements of retail. Unlike traditional sales, there's not a hell of a lot you can do to grow your business yourself (unless you're the owner) and you're often reliant on door traffic.

The only kinda benefit to something like retail is that it offers unconventional hours and some amount of flexibility. However, you kinda have the same with other fields like real estate, which can also have an easier schedule. (Although the drawback to something like real estate is that the money can be inconsistent.)

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It's soul-destroying, but if you don't care if you get fired there's some serious opportunity for instant gratification.

You become a zombie. You start to hate people and humanity itself and see them for what they truly are.
You also learn how trashy people can be. Youll also learn to hate the ever loving fuck out of Christmas music and never want to listen to it again until about 20 years or so when you can actually start to enjoy it again. The higher ups doesn't also ever care about you and how hard you work...

Lastly people... Ive been saying this for years and also its been passed down to me as well so its a saying on how I got to where I am today in a better position. The saying goes "Its not how hard you work. But how smart you work."
Learn to exploit your position into something else. Find the loopholes that allow it and it will make life of yours that much easier, especially in a place that doesn't give two shits about you.

If it weren't for customers, it'd be fine. Just don't expect a lot of money.

Imagine you are a HUGE racist.

Now imagine there is a race of people called "customers".

And Scene:

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Zangulus posted...

On the other hand was the woman who would find some small appliance her husband bought literally years before and put in the garage and never once used. So she would bring it back and demand a full refund even though we had a 30 day return/90 day exchange policy. It was actually a hazing method for new employees. They had to argue with her for like an hour before someone would finally give her like 25% in store credit or something. The appliances were so old they didnt even exist in the system anymore...

See people do that because they get their way, I can say at least I don't recall ever having a situation like that. People bring in shit like once a year or so where I currently work but it's a "We don't carry that" recall a guy shortly after I became a supervisor who brought in some random power tool batteries and I just go "I don't carry that" there is the "but I was told they bought them here" "Not a brand we sell" comes back 3 times over an hour trying to get a hundred bucks for these batteries. Tries to throw a fit the 3rd time and I put my foot down "I'm not buying these batteries from you" and he finally leaves. For all I know could have been a brand we used to sell, but I'd been working there for 2 years and we haven't had them. But that is a situation where you're completely unable to look up a purchase history or verify it. I've had situations where people got a replacement plan and it's been expired for months and still gone ahead and do it because if they called corporate we would just get told to do it anyways.

Anyways the worst part of retail is they expect you to know everything. Gotta be a chef, a hunter, a auto technician, a welder, a carpenter, a mason, a kid who has owned every toy known to man past and present, or god knows what else. It's so hard not to tell people sometimes when they as for really obscure or specific stuff "If I knew how to do that I wouldn't be working here" like no pal I've never replaced an engine, the most I've ever done is an oil change once on my first car. No pal it's unreasonable that you expect me to know how to do all aspects of vehicle work. What? Why would you think a random employee at a store would know the answer to all your questions?

People are so fucking entitled, the first month after covid restrictions I was getting cussed out every time the store closed because I was the closing manager 5 nights a week. I remember one guy who waited 20 minutes outside for me to let the last customer out (who took a long time to finish checking out) to cuss me out because I deserved that because I could have just let him in and he would be out in 5 minutes (literally impossible since I only had one cashier) The level of entitlement there was staggering. Actually got a call earlier tonight from someone wanting me to wait 10 minutes for them because they were coming from x town. Side track I'm so fucking tired of people saying I came all the way from x. I've literally had people tell me they drove from the city the store services (it's technically out of city limits) It's ignorant I don't care where you came from and I don't even know how far x is anyways how am I supposed to care when I get people constantly telling me how they drove 10 or 15 minutes and it's unreasonable for me to be out of stock of what they came for. Anyways I actually am up there till 15 after giving dude an extra 5 minutes and no one shows up, phone starts ringing off the hook at 20 after. Didn't pick up, I got money to count might get a complaint but it won't go anywhere because my boss is good.

Varies and depends. First job was answering phones at a family ran store. Had it's perks down side is had some robberies. Shortly after I graduated and did a year of community college I got into retail. Felt ok. Got into other jobs. Had ups and downs. Made friends but got physically hurt too. Seems like someone was bound to attack me per job unfortunately.

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Worked as a cashier at kroger for a few months when I was like 16. I remember it being way more stressful than it had any right to be for a job that paid 7 bucks an hour. Their system keeps track of how long each transaction is and divides it by the items scanned to get your speed and if your speed is slow they chew you out. The thing is, those numbers don't tell the whole story.

My shift always happened to line up with the special needs bagger (literally special needs, hired through a special needs program). He bagged VERY slowly, like 1 singular item per 10 seconds) so I'd scan quickly and use up literally all the space and then even start helping bag stuff to free up room to scan the rest of the stuff but I was basically doing the work of 2 people and being judged against people that didn't have that handicap. I actually was quite fast. Anyway, management was always getting on my case and threatening to fire me if I didn't go faster so I quit because fuck that noise for 7 bucks an hour.

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BlackScythe0 posted...

Anyways the worst part of retail is they expect you to know everything. Gotta be a chef, a hunter, a auto technician, a welder, a carpenter, a mason, a kid who has owned every toy known to man past and present, or god knows what else

I've helped SO MANY people figure stuff out about products they buy by reading the box and making my best impression of it, I should have a PHD in Box reading.

i've had good and bad experiences in retail, but the fact remains that it's low-pay and usually crummy hours. still, in my experience it's all about the people you directly work with. a toxic work environment makes everything about it suck. i've had a few bad experiences with customers (including a man who was much larger than me physically threatening me) but nowhere near on a daily basis

i worked at walmart for 4 years and a dollar store for 2

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Just like any job it has its ups and downs. Personal attitude and how you respond to people and situations will greatly affect your enjoyment.

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I honestly feel it should be mandatory for everybody at some point to work a minimum of 3 months (and I'm being extremely generous with that minimum) in retail and/or food service for school/college/other job purposes.

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thedeerzord posted...

So what's it like to work retail? Such as Wal-Mart, Target, etc, but also Retailers that specialize in different industries, like Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.

What's it like to work in retail?

Humans are the most disciplined when they're 10 when their parents put them in the corner for being bad. After that, it's all downhill in terms of not being a spoiled brat.

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Smiffwilm posted...

mandatory for everybody at some point to work a minimum of 3 months

You mean so everyone can appreciate the difficulty of being on the other side of the counter, and so they would know to act better the next time they stop by.
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Smiffwilm posted...

I honestly feel it should be mandatory for everybody at some point to work a minimum of 3 months (and I'm being extremely generous with that minimum) in retail and/or food service for school/college/other job purposes.

There's not really much value in it and, pragmatically speaking, most people kinda do.

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EclairReturns posted...

You mean so everyone can appreciate the difficulty of being on the other side of the counter, and so they would know to act better the next time they stop by.

It does help when someone has been on the other end, I did a lot of phone based customer service and technical support in my young days. Even when I am justifiably upset over an issue I never take it out on the customer service rep or tech support agent. Those jobs can be very rough since a ton of customers are complete fucking assholes, even though it's 99% of the time not the fault of who you are talking to.

I imagine retail is the same way, now if the retail employee directly fucks something up for you badly that is one thing, but 9 times out of 10 the blame doesn't fall on the shoulders of the person you are dealing with.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Just like any job it has its ups and downs. Personal attitude and how you respond to people and situations will greatly affect your enjoyment.

The toxic positivity guy

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SunWuKung420 posted...

Just like any job it has its ups and downs. Personal attitude and how you respond to people and situations will greatly affect your enjoyment.

lol

It just drains you, you just do the same monotonous task and help the same stupid customers every day.

The food industry is much better (aside from McDonald's)

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Monopoman posted...

It does help when someone has been on the other end, I did a lot of phone based customer service and technical support in my young days. Even when I am justifiably upset over an issue I never take it out on the customer service rep or tech support agent. Those jobs can be very rough since a ton of customers are complete fucking assholes, even though it's 99% of the time not the fault of who you are talking to.

I imagine retail is the same way, now if the retail employee directly fucks something up for you badly that is one thing, but 9 times out of 10 the blame doesn't fall on the shoulders of the person you are dealing with.

Having worked in retail actually gives me less sympathy for retail workers, because I'm better able to weed out the fuck-ups from the people merely put in a hard spot. The same goes for other professions. I had a salesperson who followed up with me three days after my initial interaction. I told them that they should find a new line of work because they have no fucking business in sales. Sure enough, the next time I visited that business, they had either been fired or quit.

While retail jobs generally suck, the reality is that most people working those jobs also don't take them seriously. Your average retail employee is almost always far more Randall than they are Dante. And a large amount of why retail jobs suck is because you're working with washouts.

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Maybe people wouldn't be such "washouts" if their retail jobs actually paid a livable wage, didn't have shit benefits, and weren't constantly discouraging their employees from taking time off. I know that it really sucks to work with flaky people but you could have a little more sympathy. I've only had to do such jobs knowing they're temporary for me, but if I was someone who basically reached the point where I was convinced "Yep, this is pretty much going to be your adult life now" I would probably have an extremely hard time giving a shit too.

Some people make mistakes and poor decisions when they're children, then we expect them to pay for it the rest of their lives. It's fucked up. Sure, some of them are able to turn it around, but still not without being pretty much told by society they're on their own to fix everything in their life.

I went a little bit on a tangent there but knowing Zeus, his post just seemed like it was dripping with his usual contempt for poor people

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thedeerzord posted...

So what's it like to work retail? Such as Wal-Mart, Target, etc, but also Retailers that specialize in different industries, like Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.

I worked in Argos that is a retail store in the UK and I actually enjoyed it. I was busy and not always doing the same job each day. Sometimes I'd be on the shop floor meeting and greeting other days I'd be doing the warehouse stuff and/or online orders. It helped that the folk I shared my shift with were friendly too. The pay was only minimum wage and you do work your arse off. Even more so during this time of the year but it's still good for me. I'm currently looking to work in retail again.

Muscles posted...

The food industry is much better (aside from McDonald's)

I've only worked fast food joints. KFC and McDonald's to be specific. I hated them. KFC was my first job at 16 though when I left school. Having money was great but I quickly left after my first wage because the job sucked as did the work force. I didn't serve customers though so just cooking in the back.

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dud posted...

Maybe people wouldn't be such "washouts" if their retail jobs actually paid a livable wage, didn't have shit benefits, and weren't constantly discouraging their employees from taking time off. I know that it really sucks to work with flaky people but you could have a little more sympathy. I've only had to do such jobs knowing they're temporary for me, but if I was someone who basically reached the point where I was convinced "Yep, this is pretty much going to be your adult life now" I would probably have an extremely hard time giving a shit too.

Some people make mistakes and poor decisions when they're children, then we expect them to pay for it the rest of their lives. It's fucked up. Sure, some of them are able to turn it around, but still not without being pretty much told by society they're on their own to fix everything in their life.

I went a little bit on a tangent there but knowing Zeus, his post just seemed like it was dripping with his usual contempt for poor people

lolwut? That's a lot of circular troll logic in there. First, if your argument is "oh, well, the problem is these employees are poor and really need money" then they should be taking the job MORE seriously, not less seriously because they'd be looking to take extra shifts and for advancement, instead of calling out during the shifts they do have (at which point a worker who actually does want or need the money steps up) and slacking off when they're supposed to be working.

I'm not sure whether to bother dissecting the rest of your troll post, although you've rather ridiculously conflated retail workers with poor people when in fact most retail workers are temporary, as even you acknowledge you were and suggest that's why you didn't take your job seriously at the time -- yet, for some bizarre reason, defend others for similarly shitty work ethics. Most people in retail tend to work short spans in retail before going off to do other things, so there's a constant turnover. However, life-long retail workers who take their job seriously DO eventually a living wage (sometimes very quickly -- you have some kids in management roles at the age of 20 pulling in over $50k which, even in my state, is livable), because they wind up in either in management or have raises over time. Meanwhile the ones who don't tend to flit between jobs because they can't stay anywhere.

But keep making excuses for poor behavior while simultaneously acknowledging you behaved poorly because you didn't take it seriously yourself then taking offense when I criticize people for not taking people seriously and then advancing completely disingenuous defenses that you know damn well from personal experience aren't true.

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I didn't slack off lol read it again. I said if I was resigned to that being a permanent thing I would probably have not given a shit, implying I did try to actually do everything right instead. And it was food service, not retail, but I didn't make that clear and pretty much same thing in the context of this convo.

Zeus posted...

they'd be looking to take extra shifts and for advancement

Zeus posted...

DO eventually a living wage

Thanks for agreeing that it's a non-livable wage, and confirming that you think people need to overwork themselves and hope that vague promises will be fulfilled at some unknown time before they can be paid the means for basic functioning

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It sucks. It fucking sucks.

I guess how much depends on the type of retail though. And the company. I only know grocery. And it fucking sucks.

The pay is shit for the amount of work I do and for how long Ive been doing it. The customers suck. Management sucks. The commute sucks (because as a full time employee they can send you to whatever store in the chain they want to, so instead of working fifteen minutes away from home, I get to work forty minutes away )

It does have good benefits though, and our union offers a free college program for an Associates (which I took advantage of and just finished).

Still. Stay the fuck away from retail.

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dud posted...

Thanks for agreeing that it's a non-livable wage, and confirming that you think people need to overwork themselves and hope that vague promises will be fulfilled at some unknown time before they can be paid the means for basic functioning

Well, considering you can live on it, technically it's a living wage. It's just not a comfortable wage although, if you put the *tiniest* amount of effort in it then it could become one, which is what I was really driving at.

dud posted...

I didn't slack off lol read it again. I said if I was resigned to that being a permanent thing I would probably have not given a shit, implying I did try to actually do everything right instead. And it was food service, not retail, but I didn't make that clear and pretty much same thing in the context of this convo.

...and yet you still disagree with my assessment. Countless people in retail, food service, etc, are you like you were: they know (or think) it's temporary, so they don't give a shit and they phone it in. And while you bring up nonsense like increasing wages, you yourself rather indirectly admit that it wouldn't be effective measure *because* it doesn't connection to the underlying lack of motivation. You'd just have people paid more to half-ass (or, honestly, quarter-ass) it.

They make the job worse for their co-workers, and make things worse for customers/patrons.

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