Many of my students at George Mason University bring retail experience into the classroom. They have sold apparel, stocked shelves, fulfilled online orders, and worked registers through holiday weekends. For some, those jobs have helped support them through school. That experience gives us somewhere to begin: A top-level discussion about the complexity of inventory means something different when you are the person explaining an empty shelf to a customer.
Why aren’t sales associates trained to be future managers? And the answer is: Most frontline workers aren’t shown the breadth of the retail business, yet many have the potential and passion to make retail a career.
Shortsighted Training
My students aren’t unusual. An Urban Institute analysis of federal survey data found that more than 60 percent of American workers held a frontline retail job early in their careers. This past July, 3.7 million people between 16 and 24 were working in retail. In my class of
40 students, 31 had worked in retail, but only five were planning to pursue a retail career. I’ve seen the same pattern over two years. After three decades in the industry, it doesn’t surprise me. The entry-level jobs they held were designed to show them a task; it was never designed to show them the business.
That should give retail leaders something to sit with. Retail sales associates outnumber retail first-line supervisors and managers by approximately 255.87 percent based on U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. The person you hope to recruit after graduation may already be working for you, and much of what they believe about a retail career has been shaped on the sales floor. What have they been able to see from there? My answer is that what people believe about a retail career often isn’t a failure of the industry’s marketing. It can be a reasonable conclusion drawn from the part of the business they’ve been shown. Employees form their opinion of a retail career from the decisions they watch their employer make. How we handle their questions, whether we back their judgment, and what happens when something goes wrong is the only career story they experience.
Behind the Scenes
When was the last time you took your sales associates through retail complexity hidden in plain sight? Take a product sitting on a shelf. Someone decided to sell it, negotiated its cost, forecast demand, allocated inventory, and set a price. Other people worked out how to promote it, present it, and get it to the customer, whether that meant a truck, stockroom, or pickup locker. What looks like a simple purchase brings together finance, merchandising, operations, technology, and a fair amount of human judgment. (This sequencing is not unlike Miranda Priestly’s cutting commentary about a blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada.)
An associate typically touches the result of all those decisions without meeting any of the people who made them. Their job is to keep the shelf stocked and help the customer. Understanding why the shelf is empty, why the promotion confuses people, or why the app shows product availability that the store doesn’t have falls outside the job they were taught to do. Nobody hid the business from them on purpose; the frontline job wasn’t set up to make those connections.
A Problem of Perception
Many of my students arrive seeing retail largely as stores, products, and transactions. They leave describing retail as an interconnected system. The opportunity for retail leadership is to shift perception to reality among the business’s most important brand ambassadors. The following four perceptions serve as a defacto training guide to transform sales associates into management training potential. A cautionary word, however. Urban Institute analysis found that 72 percent of workers left retail five years after their first frontline job. The focus-group research points to low wages and workers not knowing what retail careers were available. The first is a chronic industry problem.
- Retail Is Easy
The view from an entry-level role: Retail is just people at a counter selling things.
The view across the business: Retail is a connected system, and the counter is where all those decisions land. Much of frontline work isn’t even selling; it is ringing things up, stocking shelves, picking online orders, and processing returns. This is the part of retail closest to where decisions end and farthest from where they’re made.
The view from an entry-level role: Retail is an impersonal transaction.
The view from across the business: The customer relationship is where retail’s value is made or lost, and the associate is core to how it happens. Customers buy confidence, convenience, reassurance, and belonging along with merchandise. They decide in the aisle whether to trust a recommendation and whether the experience is worth repeating. These are frontline moments in the business, not a sales job.
- Retail Is Low Skill
The view from an entry-level role: Retail is a low-tech industry.
The view from across the business: Technology is retail’s operating layer, and its complex problems involve real customers, physical products, and decisions that have to work under pressure.
The view from an entry-level role: A retail career is limited to buying and selling.
The view from across the business: Retail careers run through strategy, technology, finance, supply chain, marketing, and the store itself; the people who hold them often didn’t arrive by a straight line.
- Retail Is Not Strategic
The view from an entry-level role: Retail strategy runs on instinct and experience.
The view from across the business: Good retail decisions combine experience with evidence, and the judgment to know when the two disagree.
The view from an entry-level role: Strategy is what leadership dictates.
The view from across the business: Strategy is what customers and employees experience when the organization tries to deliver it, and it succeeds or fails on the floor.
Business Visibility From the Floor
A career map shows employees how merchandising, supply chain, and marketing are integrated. It cannot make those positions feel attainable. That takes people and practice. Show employees how the decisions that reach the sales counter get made. Bring a planner into the store’s conversation about availability and let associates see the forecast behind an empty shelf. Walk a team through how a promotion was built before they have to explain it to customers. Each of these reveals another part of the business, and each treats the frontline as people worth informing rather than simply managing.
Curiosity needs room to grow during the working day. If every question beyond the immediate task becomes an interruption, the employee learns that a broader understanding isn’t valued, and they’ll be right. When a question leads to a real answer or a chance to learn, a career becomes visible one conversation at a time.
Let people hear more than one story. A leader’s story tells an employee what one path looks like. A range tells them many paths are real. The picture has to include experienced associates and store leaders. A worthwhile retail career does not have to lead to headquarters. Store, district, and regional leadership are essential to the business and offer substantial room for growth and impact. The best corporate leaders build their careers in the field, closer to the people and customers their decisions affect.
Conversations should work both ways. Showing entry-level sales associates the range of skills and opportunities across retail matters, but so does listening to what they know. They see where a promotion confuses customers, where a process breaks down, and what a dashboard cannot explain. Some of the best information in the business comes directly from the people working on the floor.
The Endgame
There is a limit to what a wider view can provide. Some workers understand their jobs perfectly well but want different pay, hours, management, or opportunities. That decision deserves to be taken seriously. Explaining how retail works will not make an unappealing job appealing. There’s an adage that marketers and retailers learn early in their careers: It costs far less to keep a current customer than to attract a new one. The same is true of the people already working for us.
There are two more issues here. The people on the floor are changing: The current labor market is sending graduates who never planned to be in retail. Considering their education and potential, there is an even greater imperative to help pave their way into a retail career. The second is that no success in retail is possible if every step forward takes people farther away from the customer. So, people already working in retail should be able to see a worthwhile future from where they stand. And the pathway to success is not by being secluded in a managerial office.
Look at your frontline associates and potential managers from a new perspective: Most of what they need to understand is already there; it just isn’t being shown to them.
