Retail has gone to shit since Covid. I used to like my job, OK well, I used to tolerate my job. Office Depot is squeezing profits to make itself attractive to potential buyers, at the expense of all of us working in the stores. Payroll is unimaginably skimpy, you could barely even run a store with the amount of people they want scheduled. It seems like they are testing to see how few employees they need to turn a profit. They don’t give a shit that they have basically doubled all of their employees responsibilities by cutting store staff 50%. Turnover rate has skyrocketed, as evidenced by the sudden and rapid acceleration of employee numbers. The amount of employee numbers the company cycles through in one year has quintupled since 2019. That is an incredible amount, especially for a company that has been closing more stores than it has been opening for the last three years. And if you all have been working retail very long then I don’t even need to explain the shift in customer attitudes post-Covid. Bad, very bad.
I am so so so glad to be out of retail. The best advice that I can give anyone is make sure that you are contributing anything that you can afford to your 401(k) or some kind of account that you would be unlikely to touch and gains some kind of interest. I saved up enough to go back to school. Hopefully whatever job opportunities I have in the future will come with a less traditional corporate structure.
I’m free, I’m freeeeeee!!!!