Not Just the Perfect Fold: How Retail Prepared Me For My Career

In hindsight, folding t-shirts for a large corporate retail company at the age of 18, all to save up for college, was actually the first step in preparing me for my future career and I didn’t even know it.

Valuable lesson number one: Retail isn't a job for everyone.

It takes patience, attention to detail, a friendly personality, and most importantly, the ability to smile when someone is screaming at you with a problem you can't fix.

But, in my two years of retail experience, these learned traits set me up with a toolbox of knowledge for my full-time job.

Learning Efficiency and Time Management From the Sales Floor

Retail work is full of time-consuming and sometimes, what feel like, mundane projects but they all have the same goal, to get them done and to get them done quickly.

I used to spend hours doing shipments, putting sensors on jeans, and every day, I found a faster and easier way to do it. This is when my process development skills were created without me even knowing it.

Now when I see a process in my office that seems to be inefficient, I find a way to make it quicker, more economical and a better use of time.

This also showed me that improving inefficient processes truly does impress your boss. This fostered a mutual respect that my boss and I had for each other because I was saving her staff time and money doing these projects effectively.

Back in retail, we would complete large floor sets that seemed to happen every other week and the ability to see big picture and figure out what to do first could save hours. The problem with some of these projects is that you can only do so much when customers are not in the store so it is important to use your time effectively so doing a floor set doesn’t take away from you spending time with customers and helping them. Those few hours before the store opened were crucial and this is when my time management skills began to grow.

Treat Every Person Like a Client

At a busy retail job you can come into contact with hundreds of people every day. This trains you to read body language and become a problem solver while dealing with emotions.

On any given day in the retail environment you will talk with people that have a great experience at your store, hate your store or don’t know about your store and it is your job to be able to interact with all these different people and give them what they need.

These interactions, whether they seem big or small, will educate the way you work with clients or co-workers in your future career.

I now know that when someone starts to get extremely defensive it usually means they feel attacked or underappreciated, so you can listen, value their opinion and then try and have a more educated conversation. I can translate this directly to working with a peer on a project or working with a client that is unhappy. I learned all this just from helping a customer return a pair of shorts.

Sometimes in life you don’t realize how much you are learning, especially at a young age, but my time in retail taught me some valuable lessons and helped me foster skills that I still use to this day in my career.

Interested in working in retail? See what retail jobs are available in your area.