The job: Cashier – Marshalls

My age: 16

Hourly Wage: $4.25 an hour

Marshalls, the haven for the bargain shopper. Last year’s styles at low low prices. No frills bargain hunting underneath heavy florescent lights. Also, after you find your golf shirt, you can also buy a candle you didn’t need and maybe a back massager.

Marshalls.

To tell you the story of working at Marshalls, I have to tell you a deeply personal story that has never been shared widely. Why? Because there’s part of me that is still embarrassed to share it. In 1992 I dropped out of high school. I became a high school dropout. There, I said it. It wasn’t that hard. School was something I never loved and at some point I enjoyed skipping school more than going to school. So, at some point, the administration at Lyons Township High School (a great school by all measures) told me I either needed to start showing up, or drop out. My mom told me I had a choice as well, I could go ‘pump gas,’ or stay in school.

Yes, back in 1992, there were still full service gas stations in Illinois where people pumped your gas. I don’t think my mom really thought I would drop out, but I did. So, my parents told me I now had to work full time at the age of 16. Well I knew everything and figured being in the real world would be easy – so I set out to find a job, or two.

One of the jobs I did during that nine month, let’s call it a ‘sabbatical’ from high school, was work at Marshalls. As per usual, I went and applied, got the job and was trained as a cashier.

This was 1991, so if people used credit cards we had to make a carbon copy of their card and punch their card number in to make sure their card was legit. Checking out took forever – nothing like tap and pay you can now do with your phone.

Marshalls was a typical job where you worked 8.5 hours, and got two 15 minute breaks and 30 minutes for lunch. During those breaks and lunches I got to know a lot of my coworkers who were working full-time at Marshalls for very low pay and supporting their families. How did they support their families on making minimum wage, or just above it? It didn’t make sense to me. I had the luxury of still living at home with my parents, but a lot of my coworkers didn’t. Many worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. To hear their stories started to teach me how hard and unforgiving the ‘real world’ was, way harder than being in school.

One of the perks to working at Marshalls was an employee discount which I promptly used to buy many golf shirts. One of the other benefits of working there was you knew what had just come into the store, and could really find great deals on high end clothing that was being sold at a big discount.

Shifts were long, the holidays were crazy, and I don’t remember this job being that much fun. I did a lot of clock watching. Clock watching, and waiting for your shift or day to end is a sure fire way to know that you are maybe not in your talent or passion area.

If you find, at your job, that time is going by really slowly every day – it’s a sign. To me, not a good one. If you, on the other hand, find that your day flies by and you ‘don’t know where the time went?’ you may be in a talent and passion area. When thinking about what you want to do with your life or maybe change to, this is so important.

If the research is right, only 20% of the workforce is highly engaged day to day. Highly engaged is where the majority of your day is doing what you do best. Where most of your day flies by. A lot of people, 60%, are somewhere in the middle – where part of their day is in doing what they do best, and some parts are not. The bottom 20%, they are highly disengaged, and they kind of hate what they do day to day, and bring down the morale of everyone else. These are organizational terrorists who reek havoc on good cultures.

Wherever you are on that spectrum, I am passionate about the top 20% becoming a larger group, and making the bottom 20% smaller. Life is too short to do something you hate forever.

I have to finish where I started and tell you, after spending one year out of school and working full time, I decided to go back to high school for a second junior year. This was one of the hardest things in my life to do, because as a 16 year old, 17 year old, to go back to face all your peers who you hadn’t seen much of was really hard. But, I did it.

My second junior year was hard because I was used to working full time, not sitting in class. Also, all of my friends were now seniors and I knew I had to make friends with the junior class or senior year was going to be a lonely existence. At this point I started working at Turtle Wax car wash as an attendant, but that is a story for another chapter.

If I can give any kid advice today it’s that, don’t drop out of high school. It’s hard in the ‘real’ world. Education is still a path to advancement, even if the path looks different than it did in 1991. I am so glad I went back to school, and finished. Just do it, finish, as much school as makes sense for you with the least amount of debt possible.

Just finish.

Carpe Diem my friends.