Ever seen a meme or a Scott Seiss reel on Instagram (I’m a millennial, obviously) about what it’s like to work in retail?

Is working in retail really like that? Well, if you’ve worked in retail, particularly in a busy store, you’ll know all too well what a Karen is. Nobody knows why they were given that name.  Don’t try to figure it out. Exaggerations of how difficult some customers can be are relatable, but they’re also comic relief, and everyone should be able to laugh at life. Even retail workers. Now, if you’ve never worked in retail, the message these funnies might convey is that retail work is hell and people are just giving you grief all day long.

The main problems with that are that:

1.It simply isn’t true. 2. You might never consider it as a means of employment — without ever having given it fair consideration, which is fine if you’re allergic to money and fulfilment. I’m guessing you aren’t though.

So, why am I spouting about this here? I work for a quirky, data start-up in a cool office with no dress-code, a fish tank, really big TVs, a priest calendar, a suspiciously overplayed dartboard, and a team of weirdos. What could I possibly know about it? Well, I’m a retailer. Even here, I’m a retailer. My job title is Retail Specialist, which means I help this company identify, interpret, and apply the insights from its data tools to help brands and retailers sell more products. I’ve put the years in. I’ve had all sorts of retail roles and experiences both in stores and behind the scenes. I know what I’m talking about from actual lived experience in the retail industry.

Now, this quirky start-up I work at publishes a newsletter and occasionally hosts events called Good Jobs for Bad People. It’s got nothing directly to do with the data we sell. We just know that job-hunting can be shite, so we came up with this as a means to put some positive energy into the world, give job seekers a bit of advice, and play matchmaker between people looking for jobs and companies looking to hire. To date, we’ve mostly engaged our community of cool start-up consumer goods brands for this, but a conversation between myself and the mother of this newsletter, Isobel Thompson, had me espousing the benefits of bringing some retailers into the fold.

(Side note: If you vocalise ideas at work, you’ll be rewarded with more work, sometimes in the form of a contributing article for a newsletter. We reap what we sow.)

So, here we are. Isobel has asked me to tell the Good Jobs for Bad People readership about what it can really be like to work in retail. I’m not really sure how to go about this, and for the sake of honesty and brevity I’m intending to nail it in a single draft, so I’m just going to keep typing and see what comes out.

Flying Tiger Quote Frame

I’ve been fortunate to work for mostly good employers, surrounded by mostly good people, for most of my career. Now, I deliberately say fortunate rather than ‘lucky’. Lucky is finding a £50 note in the street. Getting on well at work is 50% good circumstances and 50% your attitude, and that is true in retail as much as any other type of work. If you’re looking for a new job (which you might well be if you subscribe to this newsletter), have an honest conversation with yourself in the mirror before blaming anyone and everyone but yourself for your malaise.

Sometimes a simple “Cheer up shit-head” is all it takes.  But once you’ve got yourself into a positive, not necessarily perfect, frame of mind then I predict one of two things will happen. You’ll either realise you don’t hate your current situation as much as you thought or else you’ll be motivated to make a change for the right reasons and you’ll present a much truer version of yourself to potential employers.

So, should you consider joining, or continuing to work for a retailer?  Well, start by challenging your perceptions of what it means to work in retail. There are loads of different jobs in retail, so what one are you picturing when you think about it? Are you imagining someone in a Tesco uniform overseeing the self-checkout tills? Someone dressed in an LBD working at Dior? Or someone trying in vain to prevent any clothes from hitting the floor at Primark? It’s probably a person working in a shop you’re picturing though, right? What about someone working in a store room? What about an area manager or a training specialist who’s out and about supporting a different store team every day?  Or a merchandiser who’s merged with a spreadsheet and is cleverly calculating the optimum quantity of each product to distribute to each store? Or a buyer who splits their time between head office, home, and visits to suppliers across the UK and internationally?

One thing is for sure though, regardless of the role, the best retailers are the ones who have shop floor experience.  At the end of the day, that’s where most products are sold, so if you don’t get that experience you’ll be partially sighted no matter what you do in retail.

And working on a shop floor can be great.  The memes I mentioned at the start are very much the exception and not the rule when it comes to interactions with customers in retail.  Think about it.  You go to shops.  When have you ever seen the majority of customers in any store abusing all the staff for the entire time you were there?  When have you ever seen that?  Most people are nice and civilised, and they are nice to retail workers. It’s just that we haven’t figured out how to make funny memes about them. I’m not saying it never happens. I’m not saying there aren’t days when it feels like as one Karen leaves the shop another tags in. But, it’s important to keep our feet planted in a world of reality rather than dystopian fantasy. Bad experiences are not the norm, and lots and lots of retailers are very good at training and equipping their people to recognise, understand, and satisfy unhappy or difficult customers. You can actually reach Boss Level at this, where you have attained a higher state of consciousness and you can cool down even the most satanic of customers without any damage points to your annoyingly serene face.

One of my favourite retail employers was when I worked as a Store Manager for Flying Tiger.  It was in 2011, I had just immigrated to London from Ireland, the company was called just called ‘Tiger’ back then, and they were opening a new shop in Lewisham. Having spent the previous five and a half years working in tourism retail for a top employer, I had both a lot to bring to the role and a lot to learn, but it was brilliant.

When I turned up to start work the shop and adjoining warehouse were both empty.  A blank canvas.  The shop-fitters were just finishing installing the last fixtures and fittings and the stock hadn’t even been delivered yet.  The shop assistants hadn’t been hired yet either.  The then owner of the business, a very decent, straight-talking man from Denmark told me that the company didn’t issue instructions on how to display and merchandise products in its stores.  He said “It’s your store. You are responsible for its success”. That was a very encouraging thing to hear.  So I threw my ideas out there with some input from the operations managers who had experience opening other stores for the business and we made a plan of what was going to go where.

What followed was the mammoth task of putting that into action. Then, standing back and taking a look at it, realising it wasn’t as good as we thought it could be, taking it all down again, and re-doing it.  I cannot remember how many times we did this for each department, but I’d guess at least 3 times on average.  It was hands on learning, and infinitely more empowering than following a decree from head office.

Next, we tackled the warehouse.  This involved assigning a place to all the stock that enabled the team to replenish the shop floor as efficiently as possible.  This is a sort of gamified task; think of it as Warehouse Tetris.  You want all your fastest selling stock to be closest to the shop floor, but you’ve got to keep the heaviest boxes at a safe height for lifting, and the sea of brown boxes have to be arranged in a way that anyone in your team can instantly identify what’s inside.  If you learn how to do this in a warehouse/storeroom you’ll be very good at keeping your shop floor presentable.  Hint: If you interview for a retail job and they show you around, a clean and tidy warehouse is a green light that the entire business is well run.

Warehouse done; time to hire a team.  I needed to hire supervisors and shop assistants.  Again, I was given the freedom to make the decisions here.  I had well developed interview skills from my previous role and was confident I could pick out the right sorts of people to form a good crew.  Tiger were in their infancy in the UK back then and needed to operate within strict financial parameters. This meant that the rate of pay for shop assistants at the time was minimum wage.  But they had no silly specifications like “must have 3+ years retail experience” or “degree preferred”.  It was a much more pragmatic culture of “choose people that you think will be nice to our customers, we’ll train them how to do the job”.  This was music to my ears, and I ended up with a diverse team of people, an even gender split, a mix of nationalities, some wise minds, and some silly young ones. We trained them, treated them with respect, encouraged them, joked with them, gave clear instructions, and showed them mistakes were part of the job.

Everything clicked.  Partly because I felt so empowered by the company to treat the store as if it were my own, and partly because the team I hired all brought a great attitude to work.  We opened that store and I ran it for about a year before moving on to a bigger opportunity elsewhere.  Within 6 months of opening, our store in Lewisham was outperforming the company’s then flagship store in Hammersmith (which had a much more affluent catchment area).  I hadn’t lost any of the team I had hired.  They had all developed really well, so much so that when I left it had the knock-on effect of some of them being promoted.  In fact, a couple of years later I was in their newly opened store in Westfield Stratford and found that one of the supervisors I’d hired in Lewisham was now running this much, much busier store. I felt like a proud dad!

Flying Tiger Mug

One of my team was a girl who finished school and just didn’t’t know what she wanted to do.  She had almost no work experience, but it was clear to me that she would be good with customers.  Within a short space of time it also became clear to me that she was very intelligent, hardworking, and capable.  By the time I moved on she had learned to fix any problem both on the shop floor and in the warehouse.  All she needed was a little more time and experience to build her confidence and she was a sure thing to be promoted, possibly even two levels.

It was a busy store, but it ran like a well-oiled machine, and when the odd disgruntled customer appeared we just never had any major issues because the team had been trained properly to resolve those situations.  All of that doesn’t happen unless the culture within the company promotes it.  I’ve kept a close eye on the business over the years. The man who co-owned the business when I was there eventually grew it to a significant size and sold his share back to the Danish parent company, and it was around that time that the name was changed to Flying Tiger.

You’ve probably been in one of their stores and been amazed at all the quirky, fun, and constantly changing product ranges they stock. They have continued to grow, and I’ve noticed that they have continued to hire an ever more diverse work force.  They don’t have a ‘type’, and I’d venture so far as to say that they might be one of the most open-minded employers in the UK.  The same ethos is visible inter stores in my home country of Ireland. Its hard to imagine it being different in any country where they have stores.

Flying Tiger Tote Bag

Imagine working for a retailer where you can truly be yourself, make friends, be surrounded by so many fun products, interact with customers who are in great mood because the store is just so much fun, learn a lot of valuable hard and soft skills, build a career from the ground up, and maybe even gain international experience.  And they don’t have a stupid-looking uniform either.  Working in retail doesn’t sound like the hell you might have imagined, after all.

If you have any questions about the experience I’ve talked about here, or about working in retail in general, please come to the next Good Jobs for Bad People event and you can speak directly with me about it over a drink in a really unique environment.  And if you think someone else could benefit from it then please encourage them to sign up to the Good Jobs for Bad People newsletter.

Phil, AKA, Pilib MacMathúna!

Oh, and if you wanna see for yourself, here’s the link to Flying Tiger’s careers page — no, they haven’t paid for us to include this.

👉 https://flyingtiger.com/en-gb/pages/work-with-us

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