Before I became a marketing consultant, I had a long and varied career in field sales and business development, but I actually started out in retail.
Every day after school, I would walk home via the florist or the video rental store, where I’d work until 10pm, then cash up, lock up and head home. Weekends and school holidays were stacked: 9–5 at the post office, 5–8 at the florist and 8–10 at the video shop, with weekends also reserved for replenishment and checkouts at Sainsbury’s.
I earned a meagre £1.75 per hour at the florist and £2.50 per hour at the post office and video store. Sainsbury’s was the goldmine. A Sunday shift, especially overtime, yielded more than £8 an hour. At the time, I thought I was living the dream. If only I’d saved the money I earned.
My favourite role was working on the fruit and flowers department at Fortnum & Mason, where I learned very quickly that customers expect nothing less than perfection, and that delivering it gracefully is an art form in itself. Retail was my first real education in human behaviour. No marketing textbook has ever taught me as much.
In my early twenties, I joined Shoe Express, part of the Sears Group, on a management training programme. Within six months, I had my own store in Surrey and was taking home what felt like a huge salary at the time: £13,000 a year. (Imagine someone managing a store for that today.)
Then the company was acquired by JJB Sports. Stores were closed, restructures began, and I suddenly found myself in the deeply challenging role of closure manager. I was responsible for keeping multiple stores trading, maintaining morale and serving customers right up until the final day. The stress was relentless, the uncertainty constant, and for £13k a year, it often felt unbearable. I cried more times than I care to admit.
But it also taught me more about resilience, leadership under pressure and the importance of honest communication than almost anything else in my career.
Later, I moved into a frontline management role at TK Maxx, overseeing customer service and checkouts. Anyone who has worked a busy Saturday in retail will know it is not for the faint-hearted.
It was here that I learned one of the most important lessons of my career: the customer is not always right. But understanding why they think they are is everything.
Most complaints are rarely just about the product or the price. They are about feeling unheard, undervalued or misled. The moment you understand that, you stop reacting to what someone is saying and start responding to what they actually need. That’s empathy in action. And empathy is the foundation of every piece of marketing that genuinely works.
My most recent chapter in retail was with Waitrose as a night replenishment team member, and by this point the retail landscape had changed dramatically. Night replenishment staff can earn around £14 an hour now, but it is physically brutal work, and I ended up with a back injury.
Customers have changed too. They are more informed, more demanding and more time-poor than ever before. Online shopping has replaced much of the traditional weekly grocery run. Click-and-collect has become the norm. Retailers are restructuring workforces, introducing night pickers, rolling out self-checkouts and reducing the human interaction customers relied on for decades.
And yet, nobody really asked customers whether they wanted any of this.
The response has been telling. Self-checkouts remain one of the most universally disliked developments in modern retail. The lesson? Never assume customers want what’s convenient for you. Understand what’s convenient for them, and build your business around that instead.
But there’s another shift happening too. Increasingly, young people simply aren’t taking these kinds of part-time jobs anymore. The traditional Saturday job, once considered a rite of passage, has steadily declined.
I understand why. Young people today face enormous academic pressure, different career expectations and a digital world full of alternative ways to earn money or spend their time. But I do think something valuable is being lost in the process.
Because retail teaches lessons that classrooms rarely can. It teaches resilience, patience and accountability. It teaches you how to speak to people properly, how to deal with pressure, how to solve problems quickly and how to stay calm when there’s a queue of frustrated customers standing in front of you. It teaches you to turn up on time even when you’re tired, to support colleagues when things get difficult and to understand that the world does not revolve around you.
Those experiences shape you. They build confidence, emotional intelligence and commercial awareness in a way that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Long before I understood marketing strategy, customer psychology or brand positioning, I understood people, because retail had already taught me how people behave when they feel stressed, rushed, disappointed, delighted or ignored.
Working in retail is physically demanding, often thankless and chronically undervalued in terms of pay. The people who do it well deserve far more credit than they receive. But what retail gives you in return is invaluable.
That understanding is what I bring to every marketing strategy I build today. Because marketing isn’t really about platforms, algorithms or content calendars. It’s about people. It’s about understanding what they need, speaking to them in a way that resonates and building enough trust that when they are ready to buy, they think of you first.
And ironically, some of the most valuable lessons about people are still learned in the jobs many overlook: stacking shelves, serving customers, handling complaints and turning up every Saturday whether you feel like it or not.
Jane Sargeant is a freelance marketing consultant based near Plymouth, working with small businesses and SMEs across the UK. Book a free discovery call via janesargeant.co.uk
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