It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I think everyone should experience having a retail job. It’s the perfect university job and it will teach you some valuable lessons too.
Most will tell you to avoid retail or hospitality. It’s almost always minimum wage, maximum effort and the hours are never friendly, particularly in the city. A retail job isn’t the dream, but it’s a job everyone should do at least once.
Work Experience
In secondary school, it’s more than likely that you were encouraged to take part in a week’s work experience. This might have been at a school, a newspaper, a museum or something else. Either way, it was probably a job that was related to your career aspirations. That certainly isn’t a bad thing and it’s a great stepping-stone into your perfect job. Getting to experience the ins and outs of what you think you want to do is a really useful insight. Even if you’ve changed your mind since then, it would have taught you a lot.
However, something schools don’t offer is work experience in retail or hospitality. Some (if you’re lucky!) can go their whole lives without stepping behind a till or having to serve food. And, sometimes, this has a detrimental effect. Not getting to experience a retail job means you don’t appreciate how hard it can be, and you might be more likely to get unfairly upset at your cashier.
That’s why I’m an advocate for experiencing it for yourself. After all, there’s nothing like hands-on insight to get you in the know.
The Perfect University Job
Throughout university, I had a retail job. I could do it at the weekends, do a little shift after my lectures and have a little extra cash when my student loan ran out. I was lucky in that my managers were really nice and understanding so I found it easy to fit in around my studies, but be warned it isn’t always that way…
Lots of the staff there were at university, so the management were used to people coming and going and having to prioritise their studies. Working in the city also meant the shops were open later, so there were plenty of hours going at all times of the day.
So, I fully recommend getting a retail job while at university, especially if you haven’t experienced it before.
A Retail Job Will Teach You A Lesson, or Two
Patience, in the bucket loads. You’ll soon learn that smiling through gritted teeth and a cutesy ‘Have a nice day!’ can see you through the toughest of customer interactions. And although you may not serve customers every day for the rest of your life, there will always be people around that annoy you or you won’t see eye to eye with them. Retail will make you perfect at dealing with people just like that.
If you’ve experienced retail then you’re more likely to be compassionate when you’re on the other side. Imagine, it’s Christmas and you’ve been queuing for 10 minutes, half the tills aren’t working and the store seems really understaffed. Infuriating right? Well, it’s more infuriating for the person behind the till who’s had the same “this isn’t good enough” conversation for the last eight hours. Doing it yourself teaches you not to shout, be passive-aggressive or through coins (it happens) at your cashier. Plus, you’ll remember how great it was when someone was simply nice to you.
Of course, you’ll learn teamwork, working at a fast pace, punctuality etc. These are all good skills to take forward, but nowhere near as handy as compassion. If you’ve never done it, I really (really) encourage it, particularly with the Christmas season (when customers are at their worst) coming up.
Trust me, I’m incredibly grateful that I will be leaving retail very soon, but I’m also glad that I did it. I’ll always remember that feeling of not being paid enough to do a job twice my pay grade.
Ah, fond memories.