The three times I’ve worked in it as an adult, I liked it enough. But then I don’t invest my identity in “jobs”—-I’ve always had a side hustle, a small business, school (High and Collège) going on. I was a sales associate at Belk’s, Abraham & Strauss and Lord & Taylor. Then about a decade ago, while visiting Charlotte to help with my terminal mother, I took a job at Walmart just to get out of the house and not spend my savings/royalties to cover my general expenses.
I’m an extreme introvert, I’m learned-professional at being present, professional and extroverted enough for sales and dealing with customers. I like solving problems. And about 90%+ of the time I’ve been dealing with reasonable people, a few extremes but I generally hand them off to others (managers.)
I think what has been influential are two things:
- I seek to learn not earn at every job. A&S convinced me, Jim Johnson after an hour—-convinced me to take the job during the interview at 17. I’d been applying for a bike messenger job on 34th street and wandered over to the Manhattan Mall, in hopes of finding something more amenable. I was resistant because I wanted the base pay $7 an hour but was terrified of their commission structure, 8% on top of sales total mandatory of $2000 a week, He promised Sales training for 2 weeks. He convinced me that by having a resume, since I was 14, being in a suit and tie for a bike messenger job—-in comparison to the Black man who’d left before me, twice my age in jeans and a Bart Simpson t-shirt——my parents had developed me, so he could professionally develop me. Finally I broke down, figuring that a few months of such high hourly pay would equal months of part-time work. The training was spectacular and eventually, within about 6 weeks I was making commission cash and then eventually up to $1000 a week through the 6 Stages of Sales training was:
What are the 6 steps of the sales process?
Cultivating relationships are a vital part of the sales process steps
- Define and refine your book of business. You might think prospecting is the first sales process step.
- Prospecting and outreach.
- Discovery conversations and meetings.
- The sales presentation/demonstration.
- Close the deal.
- Post-sale follow-up.
Of course this is broken into individual/personal contact but we were also responsible for developing a Personal Shopping Book of 100+ private clients that we would invite to store special events for them.
It is to this day, skills that I still use from then, I was 17–18 years old.
I carried it over to Lord & Taylor and further into corporate world/professionalism. I think that many people who work in retail don’t consider how to develop their skills—-whether offered by the company or to GO BUY A BOOK on sales, sales training, and YouTube videos. Most people go to work and expect it to pay them, support them, be perfect and full of great supportive people. A job is a dildo—-you get out of it, the expertise you put into it, to developing the relationship. I found mainly the lack of interaction with people some times, waiting for customers, tedious—-but I find the same thing in all of my positions, careers, etc..
2. At Walmart they specifically had a Computer Based Learning-Training system—-computers in a back training room where all of the stores’ positions were learning modules that took a few hours to weeks, to go through. You completed the training and then interned in the department and boom, promoted. I had to complete a whole series of CBLs to start in Customer Service and then in the 6 months I was there, I did a handful more of Professional Development CBLs as different modules came along that I needed to expand my skills to encompass my work duties. I was there 40 hours a week, a mile from the family home, bus stopped in front of the house, ended at the mall—-or some days and nights I would walk home. During lunch breaks I would wander around the store, studying it, the systems, the computer systems, learning the store, or take a book or magazine into the handicapped bathroom and read. When I finally left, U-Haul and family in the parking lot, I went in and thanked coworkers and then hugged the manager for giving me something to do, to learn, to focus on, during a time of personal turmoil.
I work to learn, not to exclusively earn.
- I seek out how many skills—-the register, the sales system, the stocking system, the sales system, the management systems, as many ideas I could find and absorb—-I can get. I’m not a bump on the log, I don’t resent work, I don’t resent customers.
- I also like solving problems—-whether it’s an outfit, discussing colors and styles, things to try out—-the one thing I didn’t like about A&S was eventually the pressure to maintain high sales—-I felt that I might have to be less honest than I prefer being. I didn’t like being attached to the commission structure in a greedy/competitive way. One of the things I learned to do was take customers all around the department store and sell them things outside of my department.
- I like working, even as I own my own things on the side. I often go to jobs to escape my life——keep my life separate from work—-no friends visit me, no deep relationships at the job, I never date from my jobs—-so that it’s like a bubble I go into and leave at the end of the shift. I leave it, the work, the people there, and go into a whole different bubble-world. What I’ve learned over the years working in retail and corporate world is that people infuse their work into identities and expect it to fulfill their identity/lives.
- A job, like retail, is to gain skills, learn the external workplace, engage people, make a little money and move on. Another error is that people take jobs, which are not forward, ascending, skill based jobs, and expect it to have comparative fulfillment to a developed career at any and every age. A job is to a short term goal and long term internal gain to use at another, higher position. Because of teaching, computer, university, vocational, corporate training, I’ve had to evaluate work, skills, education—-which meant going back and looking at myself, my history, my decisions. Most people don’t know how to evaluate and develop themselves—-they use time, age, and pay rates to go from job to job, unless education allows them to focus on a career/outcome.
Perhaps what we need in America as a whole is more geared education and mentorship towards Life Paths. What to do, how we’re building, what building looks like. One of the things I’ve done for about 20 years is I maintain a Word file that has several repeated questions/answers per job, career, projects, etc..
- What did I do?
- What did I learn?
- What did I learn how to do?
- What did I not like?
- What would I change?
That breakdown allows me to go back and look at the objective reality of where I was at compared to my subjective perception.
I also as part of various current classes and trainings I’m in and doing, go back and use older work/projects as reports-presentations for my classes/training. What I mean by that is in project management examples—-I go back and dissect work/projects into presentations. So I’m consistently evaluating myself, my past work, which helps to frame it, my work. I think that’s important to consider and do about one’s work history and education.
I honestly LOVED running a cash register—-at D’Agostinos supermarket, Wendy's, Pathmark and the above places. I LOVE books, and if I could make the same comparable salary as I do from my career and a small business—-I would be up in Barnes & Noble. I often fantasize about working there for shits and giggles. Yes, those are my kinky fantasies. lol
#KylePhoenix
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