The story about retail is that it is something you do while you work out what to do. For plenty of people it is exactly the opposite: it is the industry where they got promoted fastest and learned the most.
The store ladder
Team member, team leader, department manager, store manager. Four rungs, and people move up them in years rather than decades because stores are always opening, and someone always has to run them.
The roles nobody tells you about
- Buying and planning: deciding what the stores sell and how much of it.
- Supply chain: getting the stock from a port to a shelf.
- Visual merchandising: how a store looks and how that changes what sells.
- eCommerce and digital: the online side of every retailer is growing.
- People and training: retail employs a lot of people, and someone has to develop them.
Almost all of these hire people who have worked in a store, because you cannot plan for a shop floor you have never stood on.
Ownership is a real endpoint
In the co-operative brands — Mitre 10, Four Square and the wider Foodstuffs group — the ladder does not stop at store manager. Owner-operators run their own businesses, and many of them started on a till.
Content supplied by Retail NZ