If you made a list of challenges and likes about your job in retail you’d probably find that the things that made you crazy, e.g., changing priorities, limited resources, multiple goals, would actually be on the other side of why you liked the job, e.g., never dull, always interesting, a new challenge every day, forced you to be creative, develop key skills.

I was facilitating a senior partner meeting yesterday and the idea of work-life balance came up for the group.  After some discussion I offered a slightly different perspective.  The word “balance” implies equal parts.  My experience has shown that especially in retail, people tend to enjoy their job and even when they move to another company it’s not as a plumber or saxophone player but at another retailer.  I would suggest that since the work of retailers adds value to oneself that the word “mix” might be better used to describe work-life distribution of time.

Making sure you do have time for family, community, to re-charge is an important part of the mix along with work.  Retailers complain about work but often do get as much out of it as they put in.  Do you believe in ‘balance’ or ‘mix’?  What works for you?  Tweet us @mohrretail or post a comment here.

Posted in Editorial
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About MOHR Retail

For more than 30 years, MOHR Retail has developed the critical people-to-people skills needed to create results in the retail industry—and we’re just getting started. Through innovative classroom and online learning methods, as well as our ongoing national retail research projects, we continue to stay on top of the trends so we can fuel the success of specialty stores, chain stores, outlets, catalogue retailers, department stores, and more. Nowhere does learning meet experience as it does in a MOHR Retail training program.