Why I miss retail

I’ve been thinking lately about returning to the wild and crazy world of part-time retail. I miss spending my entire paycheck on employee discounted clothes. I miss the free samples of general tso’s chicken at the food court. I miss the sanity.  

Some background first.  

I became a single mom when my daughters were still tiny. What I got in child support would have paid for about a half year’s tuition at the private all-boy high school where my ex had gone. So for years, I worked all kinds of nutty hours waitressing, because teacher pay even at the start of your career with a master’s and ten years work experience in another profession, is insultingly low. 

Still, I somehow managed to stay involved  in my daughters’ lives.  Our house was always full of books, though we went without television for three years because I couldn’t afford cable. I never took my kids to Disney World, but we traveled across the country two times. My job as parent was THE job. Everything else was secondary.

I did a good job. My girls did too. They had solid college opportunities. Both of my daughters opted for competitive, nationally recognized universities with hefty tuitions. They both got great financial aid packages, with a mix of some loans and lots of scholarships. I had no problem swinging tuition for the first child. Her dad and I evenly split the costs. 

However, with the second, the dad decided he couldn’t afford to help. He informed me of this two weeks before her first tuition payment was due. Luckily, we had a court date coming up because he hadn’t paid child support in ages. At the courthouse, he produced some fascinating tax documents that supported his position and destroyed what was left of my almost-nil faith in the system.  Amazes me still, how someone who owned so much rental property could legally get away with showing they have absolutely no income.

So, I needed to get a third job so my kid could go to the college she’d worked so hard to get into. It was the least I could do for her. I say third job because for years I’d been working two: teaching full-time, and working in an after school program. I got a job working 10 -15 hours a week in one of my favorite stores at our local mall. 

Retail can be stressful to the point of nuttiness if you work it full-time.  But when you’re a part-timer like I was, it’s a lot of fun. You have to like working with people. You have to enjoy, for a little while at least, making small talk. Working in retail is social. Most of the time, I loved it. 

Sure, there were a few jerky clients.  There were customers who’d act like I was their personal slave, sending me running around the store for this color or that size, leaving empty latte cups behind, piles of clothes turned inside out on the dressing room floor. 

You’d get these head cases who seemed more interested in using you for body image therapy than in buying anything.  Then there were the creepy guys who’d want to sit in the dressing room while their significant others tried on new clothes, even though it was obvious that that section of the store was female-only.    

The worst for me were the moms, sometimes accompanied by dads,  who’d let their kids run all over the place, spill cookies and juice,  while they talked on their cell phones or obsessed over how a pair of pants fit, or which color sweater better matched their eyes. I had absolutely no problem speaking up when their children were fooling around. I’d hand parents tissues so they could clean up the messes they let their little ones leave behind.  You wouldn’t believe the amount of parents who’d act like it was my job to clean up after their kids. Seriously. It was eye-opening.

I even went so far once as to tell a particularly clueless parent that I would have to call mall security if she continued to let her toddler run out of the store and into the mall walkway.  I was appalled that I had to keep retrieving the kid for her. 

I quit retail a few years back when I started having to call in sick a lot because of family illnesses that seemed to always coincide with my weekend shifts. Plus, my girls were both out of college then and I didn’t need the money so much anyhow. 

There are so many things I truly miss about working in retail. I miss the pleasant chit chat. You don’t get much of that in the schools these days. Most teachers I know are beyond stressed. Any talking we do tends to focus on testing, student data, classroom behaviors, and heartbreaking out of school issues that we have no control over, like homelessness, violence, and so many skewed parental priorities that don’t involve putting kids first.    

I miss the social outlet that the retail world gave me. I miss the clothing discounts too. But I don’t miss the obnoxious customers. I don’t miss the parents who expected me to clean up their kids’ messes.  In the store where I worked, parents were held responsible for their kids’ behaviors. I appreciate that. It dovetails with my own personal beliefs.  

I miss that saner, rational way of thinking. That’s another reason I miss retail.