Unskilled Labor
You Can Do Better. [Oct 22, 2024]
Working in an unskilled labor position after you’ve graduated highschool is probably one of the worst things you can possibly do if you want to have a decent life. And I mean that. It’s pretty much impossible to manage a healthy social life and it’s also extraordinarily difficult to improve yourself (educationally or physically) if you are working one of these jobs.
I say this as someone who has worked the same retail position since the summer between my junior year of highschool and my senior year. Although, to be fair, I was only working on my summer/winter breaks for all of undergrad. But now that I’ve started law school, I’m still working the same position except it’s not just on breaks anymore. Not a good idea!
Now, before I go any further, I should probably give you some background. Like I said, I’ve worked here for a little more than 5 years at this point. It’s a local, family-owned, chain and I’ve worked at all of our stores at least a few dozen times by now. Being that it is a smaller store, the pay isn’t particularly good. I could be making much more doing basically the exact same thing for some chain store like O'Reilly or even just working at Walmart. But I don’t care about the money.
I won’t get in to it, but as I have mentioned before I come from an upper-middle class family and so I have a good economic background. I still live at home (and probably will until at least after I finish law school [you should do this btw]) so I don’t really have any bills aside from my (small) credit card bills every month. I’m also extremely tight with my money and don’t spend it nearly as much as most people my age. I have literally never ordered DoorDash or any similar service because it’s a huge waste of my money. I also don’t blow my money on vidya (I haven’t done a microtransaction in like 3 years) or anything else. I’m not going to drop my bands but I have several times the amount of money in my bank account as most of my friends.
I work this job because 1) I would rather support local business than work for some faceless corporation (which also just sucks to work for anyway), 2) it actually helps me build connections for my real career, 3) I like the owners/management and they have always been good to me, and 4) for a long time it was a good work arrangement that was far more flexible than some place like McDonald’s probably would have been.
So why do I say that you should not work these sorts of unskilled positions like retail or food services (not including high end restaurants of course)? The main issue is stability. Unskilled jobs naturally have a high turnover rate and low worker retention. When your primary workforce is composed of poor people and high schoolers, it’s hard to keep people working. That means someone has to fill in. That would be you (and me). I often get told I need to go to a different store the day before, or have my hours changed, or something like that. We’re closed on Sundays and I don’t work on Mondays or Thursdays, but I still get about 30-40 hours a week. I’m working 10 hour shifts most days, and notice how I did not mention getting Saturdays off (because I rarely do). This is all on top of law school and trying to write Substack articles (which is why I haven’t written anything in the past few weeks). That alone is bad enough, but when you throw in the fact that I can go from working a 3 hour shift (filling in for some high schooler who has a game or something) to working an 11 hour shift at the drop of a dime (fat chick is “sick” AGAIN so now I have to open AND close), this doesn’t really work out in my favor.
Of course, I can refuse to do that and I sometimes do but it’s not nearly as easy to do something like that when you are working at a locally owned business with people you have known for years. And yeah, part of that is on me but still. On the flip side though, if you are working for a corporate chain they will just fire you for not doing what they tell you after you reach 3 infractions or whatever.
Anyway, this sort of thing makes it impossible to have any structure to your daily life. You planned on doing homework Monday before class? Sorry, you have to fill in for Hamplanet McDiabetes who is “sick” for the 5th Monday in a row. Oh, you were going to start working out? How about you work 58 hours this week instead? Maybe you think you can do some homework in your down time since you’re supposed to be at one of the less busy stores. Sorry, last minute schedule change, you’re now going to be working open-close at one of our most busy stores (now every 10 minutes some lonely old person or a housewife is going to come in with more menial tasks for you to do).
Not only does it create scheduling issues for your personal life, but it also has a very obvious negative effect on people. It sucks the soul out of them. You can see it if you have any friends who have no post-high school education and are still working at like Chipotle in their 20s. These kinds of jobs are meant for people in an intermediate stage in their life: high schooler, college students working for a little extra cash/on break, etc. You should not be working this job if you don’t have a plan to find somewhere better. Get a steady 9-5. Work as a clerk/secretary somewhere if you have to. At least shoot for manager of Papa John’s instead of just some “cook.” It will be much better on your mental state and you can actually have a life now that you are working normal, consistent, hours.
I’m going to give my 2 weeks on Friday now that I see how untenable this is as a grad student. I’ve already been telling them that I planned on leaving soon to get a more career-path job like a paralegal or something, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to do 20+ case briefs every week while working this job. At least as a paralegal I can work ahead and get things done ahead of time instead of being interrupted by a customer every 5 minutes while I’m working retail.
No hard feelings to my bosses or anything, there’s nothing they can do. Even if they made me manager at one of our stores (pretty sure the only reason I’m not is due to my lack of availability due to school), I still couldn’t do it since I can’t get any homework done. Anyways, if you are working one of these unskilled jobs or something you better have a light at the end of the tunnel that you are chasing. Don’t get sucked into this trap like most 20 somethings. You will be a soulless husk. And also probably poor (unless you’re me #BOOM). And you REALLY don’t want to be poor. Go be a tradecuck or something.
