Why Are Retail Workers Expected To Be Emotionally Available At All Times?

Inspired by the response to a TikTok I made about working in a supermarket, I began wondering why so many people still describe retail as the hardest job they’ve ever had.

Between the ages of 19 and 22, I worked in my local supermarket. The experience was so emotionally tumultuous that I still can’t deposit my bottles at my local grocery shop without feeling slightly sick. I feel as though, at any moment, a customer is going to ask me where something is or say something that ruins my day.

To a certain extent, I’m a very dramatic person but surely I wasn’t imagining it if almost 30,000 people agreed with me. I had just wrapped up my stint in the supermarket after three years and found myself working in hospitality on a J1 in New York. After work one evening, I had a sudden burst of inspiration.

I took a video of myself in the park and captioned it: “It’s after work on a Wednesday and I’m painting in a park in NYC when this time last year I used to cry after working in retail.”

Not thinking about it too much, I went about my day, and it wasn’t until the next day that I realised I had gathered a herd of retail survivors, with over a hundred comments on the video of people bonding over their haunting work experiences.

Occasionally, I had great moments in retail. I loved the girls I worked with, I met lots of lovely people and I was able to make money to support myself through my degree.

But all of this came at a cost. Sitting at the same checkout for nine or ten hours. Doing the same repetitive work over and over. Dealing with rude customers, entitled managers and having to ask permission to use the toilet as a grown woman.

@claradeehanFriday retail workers are built different♬ original sound – nicole

The repetition alone could bring anybody to breaking point, never mind being treated like less than a person for relatively low pay. In fact, I feel like earning my degree was far less emotionally gruelling than my time in retail.

Customers will assume working in retail is easy. You’ll probably spend the day stocking shelves, scanning items at the checkout, and maybe some cleaning. That is the easy part. The other part is how emotionally demanding retail work can be. With almost 400,000 people employed across Ireland’s retail sector, this is an experience shared by a significant part of the workforce.

The emotional labour involved in retail is rarely talked about. Asking people for their clubcard on days when all you want to do is cry. Remaining calm while being shouted at over prices outside your control. Acting cheerful when all you want to do is tell someone they’re in the wrong. Pretending you’re not exhausted after experiencing the same thing day in and day out. All of this is part of the job, yet none of it appears in the job description.

What I experienced in retail wasn’t unusual. It has been studied by sociologists for decades under the concept of “emotional labour.” Sociologist Arlie Hochschild described emotional labour as regulating your own emotions in order to display the feelings your job requires. While physical labour requires workers to use their bodies, retail often requires employees to manage and display emotions according to company policy.

It is easy to end up suffering from burnout when working in retail. Constantly suppressing natural reactions and performing emotions you do not genuinely feel can create emotional dissonance. This is the gap between what a person feels and what they are required to display. Over time, this can contribute to chronic stress and exhaustion.

The hardest part of retail is that there is no room to switch off, even for a moment. Expectations remain high for employees working long days for minimum wage. Every customer deserves the same warm energy and every interaction starts at zero. Even if someone screamed at you moments earlier, you are expected to continue as though it never happened. While customers experience one interaction, staff experience hundreds.

Constantly regulating your emotions at work can completely drain your mental and physical energy. That pressure appears to be reflected in wider research, with one study finding that 75% of retail employees felt their workplace actively contributed to their mental-health difficulties.

The consequences can also be more serious than they appear from the outside. This kind of constant emotional regulation can reduce memory, lower concentration, and slow down decision-making abilities.

 

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Constant emotional performance can also lead to a loss of authenticity. After faking emotions for hours, employees can end up feeling alienated from themselves, almost like a robot. Over time, this can also contribute to physical symptoms such as headaches, muscle pain, stomach issues and disturbed sleep.

What people tend to forget is that beneath the uniform, you are still a regular person who just happens to work in a shop. I have heard customers say “I know it’s not your fault,” before blaming me anyway for the likes of company policy, prices, stock shortages, self-scans breaking down or queues. The emotional weight of remaining calm and polite all day while customers react angrily to situations outside your control gradually takes its toll.

And while I completely understand being the face of a business, doing this every day, five days a week, is not the easiest task. It is difficult to fully understand the emotional pressure unless you have experienced it yourself.

By the end of my time there, the stress had accumulated in ways I did not fully recognise until I left. One customer may experience a five-minute interaction, whereas the retail worker may already have served hundreds of people, handled several complaints, dealt with rude customers, endured a nit-picking manager and spent the entire day in pain from standing. Yet the next person is still expected to receive exactly the same enthusiasm.

I’ve had many jobs since working in the supermarket and can still say it is the hardest job I’ve ever had. The mental exhaustion caused by the expectation to be constantly performing friendliness for other people was especially frustrating because I was never allowed to let that exhaustion show. After a while, I felt like a sponge absorbing everybody else’s emotions.

The response to my TikTok made me realise I was far from alone. Hundreds of people used the comments section to share frustrations about a job that often appears “easy” from the outside. The emotional labour of retail may be invisible, but it is widely felt.

Most customers are lovely. Most interactions are routine. Retail workers are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for recognition of everything that goes into an ordinary working day, everything customers never see. Behind every “Have a nice day” is a person who may already have repeated those words hundreds of times, swallowed their frustration just as often, and is still expected to smile for the next customer.

Words by Katie Walsh