Retailing isn't a thing you "do"...it becomes who you are 🛍️

I had a stack of books and a daily newspaper during the holiday break, but it was a recent article in The New Yorker that really got me thinking. So you can thank Cal Newport's “The Year in Quiet Quitting: A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well lived life" from the December 29th issue for today's naval-gazing newsletter.

Newport argues that like the Boomers and Millennials before them, Gen Z is just taking its generational at-bat of reimagining the balance and intertwining of being a person and needing a job. As an elder millennial approaching my 42nd birthday, I could recognize the generational differences between my parents, my peers, and kids these days.

But as a retailer born to a retailing family, I was struck by how this retail work-life experience really sits outside of the framework Newport illustrates. We don’t do retailing — we are retailers. Or at least that’s what I always thought.

During my years of restaurant ownership, I missed a lot. We opened just before my 28th birthday, and we closed less than a month before my 32nd. It seemed that everyone I knew either got engaged, got married or got pregnant during those years, and I missed a lot of it. Now since I was still pretty connected to my college friends, I was invited to all the celebrations — the bachelorette weekends and weddings and baby showers — but because I was a restaurant owner at the time, I operated between the burden of a business owner’s obligation and the privilege of its designation. I had to decline events that I wanted to attend because we just didn’t have the management coverage to allow my escape, and I also declined events that I preferred to miss because I had the ultimate cover.

Being a retailer was a second skin that never came off, and I’m really not sure that’s such a good thing. While those years were exciting and fueled by passion, adrenaline, lots of cortisol, mac and cheese, and craft beer, the cumulative damage to my relationships — of missed birthday parties and housewarmings — slowly eroded friendships. After a few years, I stopped being invited to events, not because my friends knew I wouldn’t come, but probably because they had moved on without me. For a while I felt resentful — how can they expect me to be at this event when it’s on a Saturday and I have a restaurant to run — but then I also realized that I had been choosing the separation all along, and I was the only one to blame.

Newport argues that quiet quitting is a direct byproduct of an online childhood emerging into adulthood during a pandemic — where the boundaries between life and work and private and public are missing. The idea of coming of age on Instagram, TikTok and Zoom resonated with me as a retailer in a small business frequented by regulars who became friends. Like struggling to maintain privacy while sharing everything online, it’s incredibly difficult to hold space for your private world in a customer-facing retail space. On my 45-minute commute from Alexandria to Annapolis (also a bad choice), I would prepare to shove the pain of a really terrible romantic relationship way, way down for the eight to twelve hours where I’d be required to be a confident, gracious, and collected professional to my team and my customers. There was no time and no room for tears or self-pity. I stayed in that awful relationship far longer than I should have, because I just didn’t know how in the hell I’d make the time to leave.

That can’t be right. There has to be a way to be both a retailer and a real person while still delivering the put-togetherness a staff and a discerning customer base seems to require. Newport concludes his analysis by saying: “Figuring out how work fits into a life well lived is hard, but it’s an evolution that has to happen. Quiet quitting is the messy starting gun of a new generation embarking on this challenge.”

While we talk about this idea a lot at Pedal — the idea that you have to plan your business to work with your life as you want it — I think it’s worth doubling down on this message in 2023. If Gen Z is showing us that it’s time to reimagine and rebuild how work and life live together, maybe we should think harder about how we can reframe and rebalance retail life toward a more humane, evolved future.