This has come up here before; I stayed out of it then.
I worked retail for about five years [1], selling outdoor equipment. Tents and boots and rucksacks and sleeping bags and so on.
I liked the job, I was good at it, and I enjoyed 99% of the customers. There’s the occasional dickhead, sure, but most of them were pleasant people who were excited to discuss their planned adventures and vocally grateful for the advice and assistance I offered.
Apart from sore feet, the only hard part of that job was dealing with the clueless dickheads at corporate HQ [2].
[1] About 30hrs/week; my sole income during my undergraduate degree.
[2] I’ve still got a couple of lovely ink sketches of a fig tree cascading over rocks, that were given to me by a customer.
She was an ~80 year old hippy/bohemian artist, married to a physicist who was dying of cancer. They’d been together for around fifty years, travelled all over, did all sorts of stuff.
He was cold all the time, but didn’t want anyone to buy him clothes because he thought it was wasteful since he’d be dead in a few weeks. But she was determined to do something, so hauled herself into town to find the warmest thing possible.
After about half an hour of listening to her story, I eventually sold her an Antarctic-grade fleece jacket. As she was leaving, she pulled two of her artworks from her bag (ink sketches of the trees at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair) and declared that the psychic voices in her head insisted that she gave them to me.
