Working Retail Quotes & Sayings

Like us, many students had spent their years in college thinking they'd get that well-paying, planet-saving job, even if they'd heard horror stories from recent underemployed grads. Those jobs, of course, no longer exist (if they ever did). By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn't even require a degree. There are 365,000 cashiers and 318,000 waiters and waitresses in America who have bachelor's degrees, as do one-fifth of those working in the retail industry. More than 100,000 college graduates are janitors and 18,000 push carts. (There are 5,057 janitors in the United States who have doctorates and professional degrees!) — Ken Ilgunas

A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune? — Barbara Ehrenreich

Unfortunately I'm not on the same wavelength as Maria yet in the literary sphere. She writes me such good, natural letters, but she reads ... Rilke, Bergengruen, Binding, Wiechert; I regard the last three as being below our level and the first as being decidedly unhealthy. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hate the term 'black' because it doesn't bring to life who we are as a people. The term 'black' has more negative synonyms than the term white. — Isaiah Washington

I look at tennis as a bit of a platform to hopefully touch lives and encourage people. — Michael Chang

Experts say that children are not born criminals, nor pampered parasites. They are made that way by the environment in which they live. — J. Edgar Hoover

For example, suppose you are seeking a job as a retail manager. You might bring added value by being fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Being trilingual may not be part of the job description but can be a valuable asset when working with diverse employees and customers who speak Spanish and French. This Value-Added message may tip the scale in your favor. Possibly you are seeking a job as a fifth grade teacher. If you are an expert in computers and computer programming, these skills may not be part of the job description but might be perceived as having high value to an academic institution. If you are an expert electrician, but you are also highly skilled in sales, this added value of contributing to new business development efforts might be the differentiator, the added skill that will help you land a job quickly in tough markets. — Jay A. Block

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery. — Anthony Marra

Let still woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart,
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner to be lost and warn,
Than women's are. — William Shakespeare

I have fantasy jobs like working in retail at a department store just selling rich housewives outfits and saying 'this looks fabulous on you! Let me find a matching handbag!' Then, the other is being like some sort of Vice or taskforce, law enforcement, undercover [person]. Or possibly someday becoming a guerilla activist - I'm kind of in-training for that now anyways. So, maybe my retirement will be jumping on ships, kidnapping, and [participating in] espionage. I still fantasize. — Mike Ness

Black Friday, in reality, is a symptom of the plight that 30 years of Reaganomics has brought to working people in America. Right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other at retail outlets across America, we've been steadily, for the last 30 years, watching the destruction of organized labor ... of decent pay and wages and conditions for working people ... We have Black Friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for 32 years, ever since Ronald Reagan's election. — Thom Hartmann

The worst thing about working retail is that your friends get chosen for you by management. It's the scariest thing about working in the service industry: your coworkers reflect your own failure. — Isaac Jourden

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head. — Chuck Palahniuk

You are seeing me now, when I am old and ugly; you should have seen me then, when I was young and ugly. — Zohra Sehgal

She was tired hugging pillows, counting on blankets for warmth, and reliving romantic moments only in her dreams. She was tired of hoping that everyday would hurry so she could get on to the next. Hoping that it would be a better day, an easier day. But it never was. — Cecilia Ahern

We are called to be God's answer to each other's needs — Sunday Adelaja

A lot of times, I can put a product together with a distributor when I go into my Rolodex for distributors. I can then put it together with a face, such as an artist. And then I can go into my databank of retailers and people that I've been working with through the years of retail, and then also manufacturing. — Daymond John

In life, there are no true beginnings or endings. — Gavin Extence

I remember my first job, when I was working in a retail store down there, growing up in Laurel, Mississippi. I was making, like, $2.15 an hour. And I was taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions. — Marsha Blackburn

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language. — Alain De Botton

Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way. — Peter Singer

His face held a certain impassivity; you see it in all waiters and valets. They might want to jam a knife through your left eye socket, but you'd never know it from their expression. Working retail, I've acquired a similar look myself. — Ann Aguirre

Retail therapy - usually one of my first resorts - wasn't working; I felt like a cat that smelled pit bull. — M.L.N. Hanover

He who aims to forecast fog, will have mist. — Logan

We must never settle for harmony at the expense of holiness, nor for peace at the expense of principle. — John Bradford