It's summer time and that means summer jobs. If you are anything like me, you need to work retail in order to support your shopping addiction. Working retail has played a huge role in who I am today. The lessons I've learned working retail have followed me to college and are applied to my life every single day. If you have never worked retail before there is no better time to try it than summer break!
Here are just a few of the life lessons you will learn while working retail:
1. The importance of self-control.
You are in a store filled with things you want to spend your money on and use your employee discount on but you can’t buy everything. Trust me, buying 30 pairs of shoes in one summer is a bad idea, no matter how good the discount is. Working retail teaches you self-control. You learn the importance of only buying what you need and the occasional “want” treats. In retail, you can easily lose just as much money as you earn without realizing it.
2. How to talk to strangers.
You have no choice but to interact with a room full of people you have never seen before. The first few times you go up to a customer and ask if they are finding everything all right, you will have to muster up courage until you blurt it out. Soon you will be a pro at customer service and can talk to any stranger you see inside and out of your store. Until I started working retail, I couldn’t even order a pizza over the phone. Now I can order pizza, call student life or work the school's phone-a-thon without blinking an eye.
3. The importance of dressing well.
If you are working retail you have no choice but to keep up to date on fashion trends and dress appropriately. For many retail interviews, you have to pick out an outfit from the racks before you will even be hired. If you walk into retail without a solid fashion foundation, you will soon learn exactly what is in style and what people are looking for. I worked in a shoe store for a year and to this day, I can look at someone’s feet and tell you exactly what brand they are wearing. This will inevitably happen no matter what line of retail you work.
4. How to really multi-task.
Your job comes with a list of things that you do…all at one time. When you work the register you are talking to customers, trying to sign them up for your rewards program, answering phone calls, managing go-backs, checking sizes and keeping the register clean all at the same time. And your manager expects you to do it all well. Learning how to multi-task has proven useful in school. Now I can listen to a lecture, take notes, text and plan my week in my planner all at one time (very successfully might I say).
5. How to think on your feet.
Sometimes you have to improvise. A customer may have a ridiculous request like sandals with a back strap, that is a thong but also has arch support and heel support, and is blue but not too blue and she has an unreasonable time constraint. And let me tell you, that shoe just does not exist but you somehow find something that pleases this difficult customer. The more you know your inventory the easier, it is to think on your feet. A little quick thinking can solve any problem you may face. Improvising is a necessary skill to have especially in retail and college.
6. The importance of being on time (or five minutes early).
In retail if you aren’t five minutes early, you are late. As someone who is chronically late, learning this “golden rule” of retail has helped me become a more punctual person. Yes, of course sometimes I am still late to things but I do a much better job at being on time by planning on being five minutes early.
7. How to grin and bear it.
Sometimes you are going to be asked to do things that you just don’t want to do, but you will have to do it anyway. Sometimes your manager will ask you to take out the trash or vacuum the clearance section or worse, clean the men’s bathroom. Sometimes you will have the world's most difficult customer trying to return something they purchased a year ago and have clearly worn many times and you just want to run away. And inevitably you will have the customer that comes in two minutes before you close and stays 15 minutes late making a mess. In these moments, a good attitude goes a long way. Keeping a smile on your face even when you are yelling inside, grossed out by what is in the trash or gagging in the men’s bathroom does get noticed and makes the task a little better. There are plenty of things you will have to do in life that you would do anything to get out of. Keeping a positive attitude and just getting it done is the only way to get through it.
8. How to hold your tongue.
If you are even a little bit sassy you will sometimes want to say sassy things to customers, coworkers or managers but you know that you can’t. You will have a customer that holds up an item and asks you how much it costs with the price tag hanging right in front of them. As much as you want to say something about the price tag, you politely take the item and pretend to look hard for a sign of a price before telling them what they could have easily found themselves. Leaning to hold your tongue with strangers will also help you learn how to hold your tongue with friends, family and professors. Sometimes what you want to say may be the truth, but it may not be the best thing to say to a customer and even more so to your mom.
9. How to be a considerate shopper/ the value of retail workers.
After working just one week in retail, you learn how to be a considerate shopper. You refold the shirt you were looking at, take the clothes you tried on out of the dressing room with you and put the shoes back in the box. You know what it is like to work retail and you will do anything you can to lessen a retail worker's load while you are shopping. You will never turn your nose up at a retail worker, even a grouchy one because you have been there and you know how difficult it can be.
10. The value of hard work.
No customer service job is easy. You work incredibly hard to be good at your job. You stand for six hours at a time until you feel like your feet will fall off. You fold and refold the same display five times in a shift or have a line at your register 10 people deep. At the end of the day you really earn what you make as a retail sales associate. There is something special about knowing that every penny you made you really earned.
