Working in Retail Has Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About People.
People say that “everyone should work in retail or service at least once in their life.” I could not agree with this. Like many people, one of my first jobs was in retail services. One in a department store, another in a bookstore. I left a long time ago, but I learned a lot about the nature of humans and that this battle between selfishness and empathy is something we all struggle with every day.
A long time ago, I was a cashier at a large local supermarket who made his employees wear red vests. It was terrible. I eventually moved to a bookstore in a local mall with a wonderful group of people. I still consider this to be one of the best work I have ever had. Then I moved on to another type of service: IT support. I could write an article about this. Working in retail teaches you a lot about people – and not just that they can be terrible. You will learn a lot about how to maintain composure, the privileges of money and status, your personal boundaries, and how to deal with severe internal stress. Plus, it all works well in the future, even if you never work in the service industry again.
The most wayward people and the weakest
One thing I’ve learned while working in retail is that the people who act the most self-confident are the people who really deserve the least respect. You know these people, they scream, “I will never go back to the store and I will not come back here again” with such blind conviction that it makes you wonder if they really believe that “customer loss” really matters these days and today. , and even more so for someone working at the cash register in a large store or at the waiting tables.
I mean, we all know “I’ll never shop here again” is bullshit. The people who told me this usually returned early the next morning. Even those who say this should know that at some level this is bullshit – but without this weapon in their arsenal, they must admit that they are not a special snowflake, their money is not greener than others, and they are willing to spend money, while the poor man who endures their insulting banter gets paid for it.
This is a decisive argument. When you are confronted with this realization, you understand yourself and others better than ever. None of us are important enough for our consumer needs to outweigh basic human decency and the realization that it makes you a stronger person — far more powerful than someone who relies on the customer / servant dynamic to feel important. It’s not that you’re not important, but that no one is important enough to go for someone else . The retail industry taught me this lesson loud and clear, very early on.
Self-help is extremely important because no one else cares about you.
Speaking of assholes, the most important thing a service job has taught me is that I need to take care of myself. But seriously, taking care of yourself is important not only at work, but throughout your life. If you are in an environment where someone doesn’t give a damn about your mental health or emotional stability, you are very fortunate.
This is not to say that people are heartless (although some certainly can be), it is just that everyone is so busy taking care of themselves that it is difficult to transfer mental energy to others, especially people with whom they are not close. If you work in a team where everyone looks at each other , grabs drinks after work, or listens to each other’s sayings, that’s great. Be happy when you find such colleagues. But keep in mind that the limit for everyone else’s kindness is usually the amount of energy they can save. Everyone has difficulties, including you, and everyone is struggling to cope with it. Don’t expect someone to help you. You must learn to deal with stress in your own way.
We talked about how to deal with stress , but working in the service forces you to learn these tricks early. You learn to get out of the situation before you say what you regret. You will learn that no one cares if you dined out, worked in a row, skipped a family event, funeral, or wedding to work overtime. You’ll learn that even the best bosses will still make you work if you don’t say anything. You will find out that no one cares that the client was a racist jerk to you, even if they saw him, unless you make it clear that you didn’t like it. You learn to absorb it and keep walking because the world keeps moving and no one is interested in stopping to help you get up.
Yes, it sucks. But you also learn to rely on your own strength, push your own strength, and then retreat to your safe places later to recuperate. If you don’t have safe places, you will find them. Any job can teach you these lessons, but something like retail can teach you pretty quickly – and pretty early on. For which I am grateful.
Each hero of his story
Likewise, you quickly realize that few people see themselves as wrong. Everyone is the protagonist of the drama of their personal life. When you think about it, it makes sense: the only existence we really experience is our own, so the only feelings we really feel are ours. The only point of view that we can really understand is ours. It also means that we will bend over backwards to make sure we rationalize our actions. When we behave in a certain way, we usually forgive ourselves because there is a reason for it.
Even when we are absolutely terrible to each other , we always have a reason for this, at least in our mental stories. Maybe we were tricked into being terrible, or we were in a bad place in our life, or we thought that what we were doing was normal at the time, or we were badly brought up, or something in this kind. This does not make these explanations bad or our actions justified. But they are still innovative. An understanding that gives us context and should remind us that others do not understand this context – they just understand our actions.
With this in mind, we do not dwell on the bad behavior of others. It does give you insight, however, so you can deal with it quickly. Later, this level of empathy will reveal why people make bad decisions or react poorly to stressful situations. When you realize that a coworker is changing deadlines and keeps giving you work because his boss is a nightmare to deal with, it gives you the mental space to realize that this is not personal and to solve the real problem. If you know their boss is terrible, you can openly tell them about it and maybe earn some empathy of your own. Remembering that they act like the heroes of their own story, bravely holding back under pressure and performing miracles, it can help you rethink your own actions (and your reactions to them) as a result. After all, you are the hero of your story, right?
The “service mentality” is real whenever you have a “customer”
The “service mentality” describes the strange way people think when they are “customers.” This is when someone suddenly has a terrible sense of self-righteousness, based on the idea that because he is a “client”, it means that he is not just “always right”, but really a better, better person compared to people. who serve them. …
I didn’t really believe in this before I started working on the service. I thought this behavior must be unusual. Instead, I’ve learned that more people believe it than they don’t (at least in one form or another), and that doesn’t make them bad people, it just means that we all lack empathy. Think about it: you probably shudder at the thought that you are a “better person” than the one waiting for your table, but you will still have a heated debate about tips . You’ve probably rolled your eyes more than once when you felt the cashier wasn’t showing you the “respect” you deserve. We all go to the kitchen every Monday to read Behind Closed Ovens , and it is inevitable that someone will protect even the most terrible people – and not “this person must be really worried, and this is sad”, but “I think that it was right and appropriate. “
Keeping this front and center in your head is the first step to dismantling it. This is not limited to maintenance work. Even in IT, I learned that because IT “customers” are other departments in the company, the same mentality emerged. Even when I was a project manager, I could see this in the stakeholders to whom we had to report. This mindset is widespread, and the best of us know when to suppress it and treat everyone like other people.
You are never “too good,” and people who think they are are not
When things escalated at my first retail gig, I told myself, “I’m doing this now, so I’ll never have to do it again.” That is, someday I will be better than all of this, and I will look back and down on this as a necessary character development. It helped me get through some tough times, and I still switched to retail to get work experience and move on to other things. I was happy that I would never have to pretend that I didn’t care if anyone could find comforters or that we ran out of his favorite pens. It helped me get through those days, but in hindsight I know it was bullshit.
In part because, even today, I remember some of the best places I have had, and the years I worked at the bookstore were some of the best. These were not Black Books , but I worked with wonderful people, read a lot and had a lot of fun moments. This brings me to one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from working in retail: you are never “too good” to do it again.
There are good retail jobs and bad jobs. There are always bad clients, but there are also good ones, and what defines a job is the job you do and the people you work with. But this applies to any job. If you can manage to find a good mix of the two, even black jobs in retail may seem worthwhile. It might not make up for lousy pay and long hours of work, but at least it’s something you won’t hate. And you never know if the bottom falls out, you better not be so proud that you cannot go back and look for it again.