I worked retail for about 3 years, first just weekends and bits of overtime during school holidays all through 6th form, and then for nearly a year basically full time afterwards, and then a couple of the holidays during uni. I've also worked as a waiter, a factory hand/labourer in a bottling plant, and a telephone fundraiser. None of these were great jobs but they were there when I needed the money and I'm grateful for the experience they gave me.

Still, for me these were all temporary bridges to something better, because I was fortunate enough to have other options open to me after university. That isn't true for everyone: plenty of people go through their whole working lives in low paid, low skill jobs, and there are all kinds of reasons why that happens.

So why do privileged people like me see retail as a temporary bridge to something better?

Most fundamentally, the pay is shit[0]. I mean, really shit. My first job paid £2.16/hr in 1992. It's maybe a bit better now but minimum wage is still minimum wage. And they're not very interesting jobs. I mean you can get bored of any of them really quickly. And there isn't much you can do to make more money or make them more interesting, so there's also that.

Let's talk about the pay issue in more detail though, because it's pretty easy (and totally justifiable) to moan about, but I think it's also worth thinking about why pay is so low. Think about it though: ignoring the economics of supply and demand (there are plenty of people who can do low-skill work), even if (bricks and mortar[1]) retail companies wanted to pay more, could they afford to do it?

I can't speak knowledgeably about the state of (bricks and mortar) retail in other parts of the world but, here in the UK, large swathes of it are beyond hosed. In the best of times retail firms make 10% margins: compared with product firms that might make 40% or more. These are not the best of times. Retail operates on razor thin margins and nowadays you're doing well just to stay afloat.

In the last couple of years alone we've seen sub-sectors like fashion and department stores get an absolute pasting. Here are some of the chains that have gone under, just off the top of my head: Debenhams, Beales, Arcadia Group (including Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and various other brands), Karen Millen, along with countless independent stores taken down as collateral damage of the pandemic.

And why are the margins so thin, especially given the huge markups that are typical on clothing? Several factors: high rents, outrageous business rates... and then there's the small fact that the buying public don't want to spend, or don't have the money to spend, more on clothing. Hence the prevalence of low-cost fast fashion brands, including online brands such as Boohoo and ASOS (who are amongst the few brands doing particularly well at the moment).

I.e., pay is low basically because we don't want to pay more for goods, and retail has long since turned into something of a volume game in terms of both customers and goods shipped.

So for everyone who has the option of a different career, it's always going to be a temporary bridge to something better.

I haven't really talked about online retail, which may be something of a different can of worms. Could, e.g., Amazon be a more fulfilling place to work than it is at the moment? Could it be better than bricks and mortar retail? I'm talking here specifically about roles at similar skill levels to normal retail, not highly paid software engineers, etc. Amazon makes huge margins by the standards of retail so, arguably, they could make it a better for warehouse workers. I haven't done the sums to figure out what real terms difference it would make to an average warehouse worker if they, say, reinvested 50% of what is currently profit into pay and conditions improvements, or whether that would be enough to make Amazon warehouse worker a desirable career option (I suspect possibly not), but it would certainly make a positive impact on those who have few other options available to them.

[0] I know in the US you allegedly can make decent money from tips as a waiter but this is the UK and, most places, that's never really been true here, especially not if you're a gawky and slightly awkward post-teen.

[1] This bricks and mortar versus online distinction is important. Most of what I'm talking about here is bricks and mortar retail, since this is the main topic of the article, but I do touch on online at the end.