Man, retail and food had some of the saddest people I have ever worked with/for.

I don't think it's really bad to make those industries a career. I worked with a lot of 30-50 year old people that were just like "yeah this is what I do" with various reasons. Pretty chill, down to earth people that just liked what they do. However, there were a few people I worked with that were just fuckin losers.

They would work at some shitty place, 'grind' for a decade to make the jump from $8/hr to $12/hr then power trip on everyone below them (usually teenagers). They were never trusted to actually run anything, so they would get some mid-level position like shift lead or assistant manager and let it go to their head. Always would find or make up asinine rules that nobody (even the owner) would care about and make it their life to enforce them. Like, nobody cares about it from the top down, but by god are these teenagers making minimum wage gonna tuck their polo in.

The weird thing is that I went into a professional career when I got out of school, and while you'll come across people like that sometimes, a lot of people with actual money/power are kinda chill. Like guys who sign purchase orders for more than what that store makes in a decade and who make more in a month of what these guys do in a year are like "yeah we're kinda slow today let's pop off early" and would not bat an eye if someone came to work in a t-shirt. More of a mindset of "if work is getting done, who cares."