I've been back in the retail sector for a little while now — part time, temporary, but still in there — and it occurs to me that, despite the pay being low, I actually don't hate it. I even quite like it, I hesitate to say.
This is not entirely what I had in mind when pondering my career choices towards the end of secondary school. This is not what I had in mind when it looked like I was starting to build a career in the games press. This is not what I had in mind when I obtained a teaching qualification. But, well, it's where I am now — and it seems to be "working" for me pretty much as well as anything I've done before, perhaps even better.
You may consider this to not be particularly ambitious, and I'd probably agree with you there; I've been conscious over the last few years of the fact that I'm simply not very ambitious when it comes to career prospects. All I really want is to be comfortable rather than rich, and I value the situation where I can completely "switch off" from work at the end of a day and just enjoy my evenings and weekends.
The other thing which occurs to me is that retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with whatever it is that makes my brain work the way it does. I didn't cope well with the traditional office environment, for example, because I couldn't deal with all the gossiping, backstabbing, politics and outright lying that went on every day. It didn't help, of course, that I was forced out of the job in question as a result of my immediate superiors not understanding what depression is or how to help someone with it. But then I hated that stupid, shitty, pointless job with all its stupid, shitty, pointless policies and procedures anyway, so despite getting the boot from it costing me a reasonably healthy salary, I'm not sorry I don't work there any more; I'm just sorry that the circumstances under which I left it occasionally leave me with horribly unpleasant "flashbacks" when I'm trying to get to sleep.
But I shouldn't dwell on the past too much; as I say, retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with me. And I've been thinking about why that is: it's to do with always knowing what I should be doing. because the things that there are to do are always obvious. Gap in a shelf? Fill it. Customer at a till? Serve them. Customer with a question? Answer it. Back counter messy? Tidy it. There's always something to do, which takes care of what was my biggest frustration with the aforementioned office job: the fact that there sometimes simply wasn't anything to get on with. (And boy, they didn't like that being pointed out to them.)
I make mistakes, sure, because I'm still learning how things are done at my current job, but I pick things up quickly and I seem to have been making a good impression so far. It's tiring, too, but coming off a shift feeling knackered makes me feel like I've done something worthwhile rather than sitting on my arse all day — plus it's a kind of "exercise" that I can do without thinking about it.
So while it may not be particularly ambitious to say so, so long as I can keep bringing in some pennies each month with a combination of retail and the freelance writing work I'm doing on a regular basis (not for any websites or magazines, I'm afraid, so you can't "see" it anywhere) I think I can probably muddle through like this for the immediate future. I hope so, anyway; I just want to be able to relax and just get on with life rather than wondering what amorphous, unclear, foggy target I should be aiming in the general direction of next. I just want to live, y'know?
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I know where you're coming from on this one. I stock a grocery store freezer on Saturdays and Sundays for afew hours, and I find the work tiring, but incredibly satisfying. I've often said that if I could get the same pay & benefits at the grocery store that I do from my office job, I'd work there full time in a heartbeat. I feel that way about retail to a certain degree as well. Although I don't miss my time in games retail (I hated dealing with trade-ins), I thoroughly enjoyed the few years I spent selling toys. I like fun to be a component of my career – and hooking kids up with the toy that they were after certainly fulfilled that need.
I often complain about the soulless grind of retail work – but it's never the nature of the work that I'm actually bitching about, but more the amount of work that is expected of you for the meager pay. Retail workers work HARD, make no mistake, and they should be compensated in such a way as to make a career out of their efforts. Then they'll perform at a level that reflects that. It's just good sense.
You sound like a typical European when it comes to work/career prospects, or at least what I understand Europeans to be like in this regard. I think someone made the distinction by saying "Europeans work to live, Americans live to work." Now there's a whole other discussion of differences in work culture, worker rights, and economic policy to be had there, so I'll just stop with that comparison.
I myself recently managed to land a medical scribe work that doesn't pay a whole lot but I'm at least not totally broke. I'd still like to make a living doing something I actually like doing and live more comfortably than I am now.