Hardest management job I ever had - working night shift manager at a food store while going to college during the day. Like surviving a hurricane while running a marathon while the building's on fire, every single night. I lived roughly a decade of "real" management in my senior year.
Cashiering required a surprising amount of memorization of obscure procedures and policies and item codes, not to mention carefully tracked flawless arithmetic skills when giving change.
The general manager was an artist of endcap design. At non-megacorp retail you're on your own when designing displays. Its truly an art. At the megacorps you have teams of CAD drafters, graphics artists, and sales consultants designing displays, at a non-megacorp story you have yourself, and the boss expects you to do as good of a job as the team. Teams are usually much less productive than individuals, so its not as hard as it sounds.
Stock clerk at higher levels was insane. Its really a two level job and the new hire teen kids merely threw product on marked shelves, but if you were there more than a year and were not an idiot you watched the more experienced guys and took over for them, after which you spent all your time on rotations and resets and price changes and sales stickering and being a reception clerk for the 50 or so direct store delivery trucks we had. I don't care if you have 20 pounds of soup cans for a 10 pound shelf, make all of them fit somehow and you need to accept deliveries from dairy and bread and beer and you have two hours until break time to get this all done plus or minus helping out everyone else.
I've noticed over many decades that despite enormous quantities of (self serving) propaganda, the hourly pay rate people get generally has little relationship with how difficult or important the job is, on a large enough scale.
Another interesting observation is the dumb people didn't survive on the job nearly as long as the smart people, and the dumb people absolutely suffered horribly compared to the smart people.
Hardest management job I ever had - working night shift manager at a food store while going to college during the day. Like surviving a hurricane while running a marathon while the building's on fire, every single night. I lived roughly a decade of "real" management in my senior year.
Cashiering required a surprising amount of memorization of obscure procedures and policies and item codes, not to mention carefully tracked flawless arithmetic skills when giving change.
The general manager was an artist of endcap design. At non-megacorp retail you're on your own when designing displays. Its truly an art. At the megacorps you have teams of CAD drafters, graphics artists, and sales consultants designing displays, at a non-megacorp story you have yourself, and the boss expects you to do as good of a job as the team. Teams are usually much less productive than individuals, so its not as hard as it sounds.
Stock clerk at higher levels was insane. Its really a two level job and the new hire teen kids merely threw product on marked shelves, but if you were there more than a year and were not an idiot you watched the more experienced guys and took over for them, after which you spent all your time on rotations and resets and price changes and sales stickering and being a reception clerk for the 50 or so direct store delivery trucks we had. I don't care if you have 20 pounds of soup cans for a 10 pound shelf, make all of them fit somehow and you need to accept deliveries from dairy and bread and beer and you have two hours until break time to get this all done plus or minus helping out everyone else.
I've noticed over many decades that despite enormous quantities of (self serving) propaganda, the hourly pay rate people get generally has little relationship with how difficult or important the job is, on a large enough scale.
Another interesting observation is the dumb people didn't survive on the job nearly as long as the smart people, and the dumb people absolutely suffered horribly compared to the smart people.