How to get Ahead in Retail
Do you want to know how to get ahead in retail? Well, there are many ways in which you can get ahead in retail, and actually have a decent career. The basic principle is that you have to be very people oriented, because the retail industry is all about serving customers. If you are good at helping people, we will have a decent shot at a good retail career. However that is not all you need, what are some of the other attributes needed to have a successful career retail?
Outside of being people oriented, you have to be flexible. You have to be flexible with your hours because most retail establishments are open 24 seven, were lease extended hours on the weekends. This means you have to sacrifice your Saturday night in order to go to work. However this is always a bad thing as sometimes weekends are actually slower.
You also need to be flexible because you never know who you are going to be working with. Retail is really is a mixed bag of employees. Some have no skills, others are very skilled and then there are those who simply don’t care. Retail is not a very high-paying job for start out so you have to be ready for those who simply are not motivated. This means that you either have to learn how to motivate others, we have to learn how to motivate yourself.
A passion for merchandising is something that you need to have in order to be successful in retail. Retail is simply a game of shoving as much as you can on the shelves and seeing how much sells. This means that you have to be cognizant of traffic patterns, pricing and what items might be most attractive to customers at the current time. For example if people are feeling poor, they might prefer low-cost items such as pasta and eggs.
When you are working in retail you have to be very friendly. When a customer yells at you, you have to be calm and cool with them. Too many customer complaints will cause you to lose your job, or will stop you from being promoted. Also, being a manager in the retail world means that you have to have very good people skills. You never know when a customer might come into the store at midnight claiming that they never got their meat, or that they didn’t get their discount. This is where good customer service can make the difference in satisfying an angry customer.
The world of retail takes a lot of patience and people skills. That only do the deal with customers, but you also that the deal with employees that may or may not know what they’re doing. You have to keep yourself motivated because the pay and the hours are not always the greatest, but if you want to make a career out of it, you need to work hard. That is the only way you will ever get in to a decent paying job in the field of retail.
