I Miss Retail

It’s a strange yearning to walk past a shop and want to go work in it, perhaps one a little too rose-tinted, but I like to pay attention to these intuitive pulls, so let’s see.

Between 1999, starting with Netto, an arse-end Scandinavian supermarket, on £2.63 per hour, and 2007, ending with Waterstones booksellers for roughly twice that pay, I worked in many retail jobs.

During a period of heightened stress last year, I’d walk past the Everyman Cinema and fantasise about shutting down my email, pulling down the website, burning my personal projects, and going to serve popcorn in a low-lit cinema.

Firstly, that wouldn’t happen because I simply couldn’t get by and give my family the life we’ve built on a retail wage, but also, as my wife rightly points out, I’d lose my head inside a week. If I step out of the stress for a moment and allow myself to return to calm, quite quickly, I’m making plans for new creative ventures, connecting with other restless souls over creativity. So why the yearning?

You have to interpret these things not as a call to literal action, but as themes, intuitive sirens alerting us to needs.

Seeing people laughing behind a counter or restocking the drinks fridge revives muscle memories of the sense of connection and purpose those jobs brought me. Thrown together with stangers and given forced instructions, we had to adapt. Get along with or tolerate those with whom we might not have clicked. Make new friends we otherwise wouldn’t have. Co-operate so we could work and go to college, or out on the piss after work instead of working the late shift. It formed a micro-society and put us on the public front line. That brought stresses of its own, but it also gave me a tangible identity in the places I lived. In Keighley, I’d get pointed at or even hugged in takeaways at 1 am by people who knew me as the bloke who gave them their VHS films and bags of popcorn in Blockbuster Video. That felt good. In Max Spielmann, I’d develop photographs and laugh with people as they shrieked upon seeing their holiday photos, or realising I’d fucked up the order when they revealed 30 shots of a South Asian wedding instead of the stag do they’d come in for, dreading. We’d have to work it out, diffuse the situation, and find a solution. All of this meant that finishing a shift was exhilarating because we’d made it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Creativity is my life cause, a job I care deeply about. I don’t want to return to retail, because all of those shop jobs were, in part, characterised by this background fantasy of one day getting to draw, write, or paint, and not having to come to the shop to earn my keep. But now, 18 years into said fantasy, there are critical parts of it I’ve failed to maintain, and most of them can be found in retail jobs.

I sit in my garden studio most days – a luxury indeed – but alone. This leads to overthinking and demotivation sometimes. A lot of my work is self-initiated or longer-term, so the grind and triumph I would get by completing a shift and locking up are absent. Instead, days and weeks bleed into each other, as do all the projects, to-do lists and ideas.

There was a time when I’d have nightmares about being back in retail, and rejoice when I woke to remember I was an illustrator. These days, I see the value of that work. We can always learn from what we might, in black and white terms, deem undesirable. Creativity pulls from all places, and the fantasy is rarely true.