While many (and probably most) of us spent our summer and much of the school year slaving behind a cash register, some of our cohorts have had the luxury of spending their vacations traveling, goofing off and being lazy in general. Sadly for them, they are really missing out.
Working in a retail job teaches important life lessons and solidifies the ones we already know, testing the limits of such basic principles as being nice to people who are not kind to you, the ability to hold your tongue when a customer (or an incompetent store superior) gets testy and other useful skills that will follow you through life.
Among these skills is the need to be at a specific place at a certain time. This may sound like a basic principle, but time management is something college students really struggle with. In college, you can show up to class or skip it. The decision is entirely up to you.
But when working in retail, or any other kind of job, you have to learn to limit your free time. If you don’t show up on time when working with a large group, it’s the group that suffers by scrambling to make up for the work you didn’t do, not you.
This leads to retail quality No. 2: consideration for others. Yes, we often have to do this on a regular basis, but being considerate of other people’s time is paramount in working retail. Your affinity for a product or brand may run deep, and you may want to engage customers in lengthy conversations about revolutionary, life-changing properties of your company’s product – don’t.
Your customers, your bosses and just about everyone in the store have reasons for being there. In all likelihood, they want to complete the task at hand smoothly and without too many deviations from the main course, which makes part of your job developing the ability to talk to someone in a friendly, convincing way in a short amount of time.
This quality is something that we all need to have. We will all have to sell ourselves to get jobs eventually, and the skill of quickly telling someone something that is intelligent and persuasive can be used in all vocations.
Also in retail, you are exposed to the wide variety of people there are in life, especially in service jobs where you provide people with a product that is essential to life, like groceries or books.
While in college, we are exposed to a much more diverse array of people than we may ever see again (especially at a university like Cal State Long Beach), but in retail, you meet a lot of interesting, strange, annoying and sometimes fascinating people.
From celebrities to people wearing so many buttons and pins that their clothes sag, the variety and differences between people, is vast. As a retail worker, it is your job to talk to them all while being friendly and courteous, even if they are snarks.
The most important virtue solidified by retail experience is patience. While in retail, you must often answer impertinent questions that are arrogant, rude and overall, irreverent. By dealing with people like these, you learn to be polite while assertive and how to calmly explain things like store policy and the qualities of a product to unkind people.
Working retail is a humbling experience. All those who haven’t had this pleasure need to. It will change the way you experience life and the way you see the people in it.
