I graduated in fall of 2014 (needed to attend school during the summer term to finish my degree) and had no luck finding a job in the months immediately following graduation. By around October, I still had no job, and it's around that time that retail employers start hiring on lots of temporary employees to prepare for the Christmas shopping season, so I suited up, printed out a stack of CVs, drove to the nearby shopping plaza, and left an application with every store there.
I ended up getting calls back from Best Buy and Target by the end of that week, did interviews with both, and got both jobs. At Target, I stocked shelves from midnight to 4 AM , and at Best Buy, I worked the Geek Squad counter during whatever daytime hours I got scheduled (it varied from week to week, anywhere 12-42 hours per week). Target also gave me the option to stay for an extra hour on days when they were busy and needed the help, so between both jobs I was working between 36 and 62 hours per week.
These "seasonal jobs" usually last 3 months, and they also use it as a "screening process" for longer-term employees (people who perform well during the seasonal period often get the option to stay on as a year-round employee). I was fortunate enough to find a job as an IT contractor in December, so I quit both of the retail jobs before they were scheduled to end.
This period of around 2 months was probably one of the toughest episodes of my life, but I'm glad I went through it.
The main negative is that my night shift combined with the inconsistency of my daytime work hours made it impossible to have any kind of consistent sleep schedule. Some days I would finish a night shift at Best Buy at 10 PM and then have to be ready for a midnight shift at Target, and sometimes my night shift would end at 5 AM and I'd have a morning shift starting at 10 AM. I would sometimes get a few hours of sleep at night before my midnight shift, then get home around 5 AM and sleep several more hours before going back to Best Buy at 10 AM or noon. Also, I worked with boxcutters when stocking shelves at Target (pretty much the entire job was cutting open cardboard boxes and moving the stuff from the boxes to the shelves), and it's a sign of how fatigued I was that accidentally cut myself three times during my brief 2-month work period there.
The pay was also what you'd expect from an entry-level retail job (i.e. low). Both jobs were paying $9.50 an hour, which seemed decent until I realized that minimum wage in my state was $9.
Despite the massive negatives of both jobs, I'm glad I did it.
For one thing, if I hadn't been working those retail jobs, the alternative would have been doing nothing, and sometimes working 0 hours a week is even more soul-sucking than working a 60-hour workweek. Also, I was living with my parents at the time, so I didn't have anything with the urgency of "gotta pay these bills" forcing me to look for new work. Having an absolutely draining work schedule actually made me way more motivated to find something better, and I devoted way more time to the job search than I had before even though I had way less time to do it.
I also "lowered my standards" in the job search. Fresh out of university with my engineering degree, I was looking for a full-time job in my field, but when I started retail I realized "literally anything would be better than this" so I started widening my search to include part-time jobs, contract work, and so on. I got my first 1099 the following tax season, and I've been a 1099 worker ever since. (I don't have a "real job" with a salary; since December of 2014 I've just been doing short term contract work, hopping from job to job. That eventually led me to where I am right now, writing the script for several indie video games, which is honestly one of the coolest and most enjoyable jobs I think I could be doing right now. It's honestly kind of unbelievable that I managed to hit this point.) I've discovered that I actually like this lifestyle more than the W-2 life of just working for a single company 40 hours every week, and I might not have discovered this if I hadn't been forced to the edge of "desperation."
Working the retail jobs also significantly improved my relationship with my parents. As noted above, I was living with them at the time, and during the months that immediately followed my graduation, I sensed that I was getting some judgment, particularly from my father. I'm not sure if he'd ever admit to perceiving me as "lazy" for sitting at home all day unable to find a job, but it often felt that way to me. I think he may have doubted the work ethic. Once I started the retail jobs, he very quickly saw that lack of work ethic was not my problem, and he started perceiving my circumstances as being more due to the labor market than any lack of effort on my part.
Apart from all of that, I also got a lot out of the jobs themselves.
For one thing, I've always been an introvert, and though I've always considered myself "socially competent," I have on occasions struggled with social anxiety, especially when it comes to introducing myself to strangers. At Best Buy, I spent several weeks working the retail floor, and basically 100% of the job was approaching strangers to ask "Can I help you find anything?" I was very much of the mindset that I didn't want to bother customers, with the assumption that they'd come to me if they needed anything, but it was literally a requirement of the job that I approach everyone and make them an offer for help, which the vast majority of the time would be rejected. It seems like such a small thing, but having weeks where I would do that for entire 4 hour shifts multiple days in a row very quickly disabused me of most of the fear I associated with approaching people, and it also eliminated a lot of my fear of rejection. This had the unexpected side-effect of almost immediately improving my dating life.
Interacting with customers at Best Buy also gave me a lot of great experiences of "hey, people are people, don't be so quick to judge." For example, one day when I was working behind the Geek Squad counter, an elderly fellow came in because he was having trouble with downloading email attachments. He demonstrated this in front of me, and his problem was that he would download the attachment, and then have no idea where to find it on his computer. (This was back when computers defaulted to putting all downloads on the desktop, and his desktop was a jumbled mess of 100 random icons.) As someone with basic computer savvy, I immediately unconsciously rushed to judge the guy as a simpleton, but then I found out that the email attachment he was trying to download and open was a manuscript that he'd gotten from his publisher for a book he was writing; apparently the guy was an expert in his particular historical field, and was actually quite an accomplished academic, but simply lacked basic computer literacy due to lack of experience (and the reluctance to learn that often comes with age).
Also, the Target job ended up being one of the most fun jobs I've ever had. It was a super high-energy environment, with everybody running on caffeine and adrenaline, and I'd often come into the store a bit groggy only to be quickly jarred awake by boisterous coworkers and loud punk music playing over the store PA system. I really liked the physicality of the job, which involved a lot of picking up heavy things, and the job always left me feeling a bit sweaty but with a real sense of accomplishment. There's something to be said for the ability to step back at the end of a shift and look at something and say, "Look what I achieved today! Man, we really got work done, didn't we?" That daily dose of satisfaction with what I'd achieved really helped me keep my head above water in what was otherwise a pretty difficult period in my life, and it did wonders for my mental health.
I really liked my coworkers, and the staff at Target is actually a great cross-section of humanity that kind of took me out of my "bubble." I compare it to my experience with PE in high school: throughout my entire school career, I was one of the "gifted" kids in elementary and middle school, and took AP classes in high school, so the only time I got to mingle with the "general population" was PE. Target was a similar experience, and I went from having spent years in a university environment to working a job where very few of the people I worked with had a university education. One of my regular "aisle buddies" was a father who was a couple years younger than me working his ass off to provide for his newborn daughter, one of the guys who joined the same time I did was a retired sheriff who realized he liked working more than being retired, and there was a good mix of 20-something entry-level kids and 40-something adults. Also, one of the things I realized is that a lot of the people working the night shift at Target were (like me) working other jobs during the day, so a lot of them had a really strong work ethic and the positive, can-do attitude that so often comes with it. Target also gave me a surrogate social circle that was sympathetic to my struggles at that point in my life; I went from being somewhat ashamed of my lack of job prospects (and not really having anyone to talk about it with) to were sympathetic to my situation. It's hard to overstate just how morale-boosting it can be to have comrades to commiserate with over your hardships, and for reasons like this I think that my mental health improved during this time even though my physical health was worse in a number of ways (lack of sleep being the main one).
On a broader, more philosophical level, I feel like working two retail jobs simultaneously was a version of me hitting a sustainable version of "rock bottom." Throughout my upbringing and through my years at university, I felt like my life was sort of mapped out for me. Pretty much from age 12, the plan was "go to college, get an engineering degree, get a job as an engineer." (Yes, as a kid I aspired to be an engineer in the same way that some kids aspire to be doctors or astronauts. I spent a lot of time playing with LEGO robots so I always figured something with mechanical engineering or software engineering was in my future.) However, the fact that my ideal life was "planned out" was also a constant source of worry, as I was terrified of the prospect of deviating from it. I feel like a lot of kids walk around with that fear, drilled into them by years of recited mantras like "Go to college or you'll have to work a minimum wage job at Wal-mart or McDonalds." As if that's the worst possible thing that could happen to you. Well, the "worst possible thing" did happen to me, and I survived it, and I know I could survive it the future if I had to. This has actually made me incredibly fearless and given me the emotional fortitude to live the lifestyle of a contract worker, which is not the life that I (or my parents) would have envisioned for myself. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing to generate income a year from now, and I'm actually okay with that. Being willing to stomach the risk of being a full-time contractor led to me doing some of the coolest work I think I could be doing right now, because I know that if I ever hit "rock bottom," that retail job will be waiting for me, and while it's certainly not a wonderful place to be, it's a place I can tolerate being for as long as it takes for me to get back up on my feet.
(For those who want an epilogue to this story, I'm now the lead writer for indie game company in Australia, and thanks to funding from several grants and a deal we recently signed with a publisher, this project is now my main source of income.
Here's the trailer for the game we're working on.)
