Sometimes it feel as if everyone who works in retail has the same attitude towards their job: negative.
I understand the feeling, my job in retail was always the most dreaded part of my day in high school. I would shlep to a store filled with overpriced clothes I was tempted to buy, and end up spending half my paycheck on them under the “employee discount” justification. I dealt with a manager that would leave me to run the store by myself to take a nap and get excited when “we” made our sales goals. My knees took a beating from wearing the cute vintage kitten heels my uniform required and standing for 8 hours at a time. Let’s just say that I was more than happy to hand in my resignation when I moved away to college.
However, in retrospect, I learned an incredible amount in my six months as a sales associate. I firmly believe that everyone should spend at least a little while working in retail. Apart from spending a ton of money on clothes that I eventually sold on eBay and probably causing permanent knee damage, I learned people skills. I’m sure you think you have people skills—you probably do—but not the kind a successful sales associate must have. A sales associate needs to feel out a person in about three seconds flat and figure out how to best approach them to increase her chances of selling them something. Plus, I bet your ability to talk to PNM’s is nothing compared to my ability to convince a 5-year-old that she wants purple shinny pants instead of the sold out pink ones. Retail workers also deal with a ton of complaints, many of which are outside their control. There is not much you can do when an item doesn’t come in someone’s size or a color they prefer. The amount of patience one needs to have with certain customers shouldn’t even be called “people skills”, it’s more like “princess management skills”.
I also learned what goes into a successful business. Did you know that stores have sales goals every day? If a store is regularly not making their sales goals, it’s red flags for corporate. Which means a visit from the regional manager, review of the security footage, additional training and all sorts of consequences. Not only is it important to set and make sales goals, it’s also vital to hire good management in a business. I never realized the importance of a good manager until I worked under an awful one. If the manager honestly doesn’t care about the store, shows up late and hung over on the regular, steals clothing, and other such ridiculous things, a business is not going to succeed. Plus, when the management encourages sales associates to sit and chat by the cash register instead of helping out customers, people don’t really want to buy things. How many times have you had to track down an employee to let you into the fitting room? How many times did you decide you didn’t want the item badly enough when you couldn’t find someone? Good business is about good management that ensures the rest of the business to run smoothly.
Most importantly, I learned that presentation is everything. (Okay, maybe not everything, but it’s very important.) We spent an extra hour after closing the store folding clothes and aligning the hangers. I learned to use more types of cleaning supplies than I ever wanted to in order to clean the various surfaces of the store. Did you know that the little green part of a Swiffer wipe will remove 3-day old gum from under a clothing rack? Well, it can. If you thought there was some kind of cleaning crew for the bathrooms of a boutique, I’d like to inform you there isn’t. But in the end, the “after” was a much more welcoming environment than the “before”. Now, every time I have a presentation, I take the extra 15 minutes to format it cleanly. If you present the same clothes (or ideas) in a dirty store, they’re worth a lot less than in a clean store (or well-designed presentation).
Maybe you don’t actually need to work in a store to figure all these things out, but it’s not an opportunity I would recommend turning down. If nothing else, at least you’ll learn to be nice to retail workers.
