The Benefits of an Unexpected Career
Right out of graduate school, journalism still a gleam in my eye, another recession prompted an early career detour into retailing. After a six month stretch while I finished my thesis, unexpectedly I became what generations had known as a floor walker.
I wore a white flower, if not in my lapel, and then close to where a lapel might have been had I been wearing a suit. I supervised sales people—some students earning tuition, others aspiring to a day job while they waited for their lucky break in acting and full time union employees with very long memories about a strike nearly a decade earlier that left them with bitter memories about management prerogatives, took customer returns and dispatched shoes for repair.
If the job was a proving ground for women in management in those just post Title IX days, with exceedingly rare exceptions, the top management was strictly a boy’s club that seemed almost impenetrable. Fate had others plans and I left my fledging management career and by twists and turns became a journalist writing about management and the workplace.
I thought about this today when I heard Caitlin Kelly speak about her new book Malled: My Unexpected Career in Retail. (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) It chronicles Ms. Kelly’s 27 month stint beginning in September 2007 at a North Face store in an upscale suburban mall. She took the job after being let go from The New York Daily News and seeing her freelance income sink by one third when one of her favored outlets at The New York Times merged with another section.
The book part memoir of Ms. Kelly journey as neophyte sales associates, part explanation of how other retail associates view their role in the customer service hierarchy and also is a business analysis of the sector that drives consumer spending and by extension the health of the economy. It is a story for our age of tightened wallets and for some diminished expectations.
While Ms. Kelly seems game to tackle the challenges that vagaries of the position with a positive attitude, the relatively low wages ($11 an hour and no benefits) and the punishing physicality of the job bring challenges she doesn’t anticipate.
Most telling is her decision to leave after being passed over for promotion. The why is not entirely clear—there is some mention of less experienced male executives being brought in to supervise. Ms. Kelly might have taken her hard won experience, gotten on the escalator and traveled the time honored path of working for competitor.
Instead she emerges with a deeper appreciation of the value of low skilled labor, although she is quick to point out that each of her co-workers is a college graduate. Still, you sense she has had her fill of retailing, at least at this level. There is an old saw that retailing is in your blood. And while the job got Ms. Kelly over a rough patch financially, clearly journalism has the firmer hold.
Tags: consumer spending, low wages, retailing, survivor jobs
