Courtesy of Maggie Perkins
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maggie Perkins, a 30-year-old former teacher from Atlanta who works at the Costco corporate office in Washington state. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. What I didn't know was that I'd get burned out after eight years of my dream job and instead find my lifelong career at Costco.
I loved being a teacher. It was so rewarding to spend time with children and provide them with the pieces they needed to put a puzzle together. I loved that moment when everything clicked for them, and they grasped a new concept.
As long as they were learning, I didn't mind what form it took. Once, I had a student make an Instagram account from the perspective of a soldier in the Vietnam War using historical photos. Another time, a student did an interpretive trapeze routine about color theory.
My ethos as a teacher was rooted in allowing students to be creative. I was there to facilitate that creativity versus strictly embodying the role of an authoritative teacher.
If I could've kept going to work, teaching my kids, planning for the next day, and going home, I think I would've been a teacher forever. But that's not how it was.
I'd be added to a committee, or I'd be sent a student with behavioral problems, or I'd have to plan a field trip. I've talked to so many teachers in the last few years, and it's the same story everywhere: We do so much unpaid work outside of working hours.
By the time I left teaching, it felt like the extra stuff was taking up more time than the classroom. And I was making $47,000 a year with eight years of experience and a master's degree.
When I left teaching in 2022, a new Costco was opening in my town. I thought I might still want to work in education-adjacent work. But by the end of that summer, I stopped looking for other teaching jobs and took an offer at my local Costco for $18 an hour. I saw that there was a career ladder to climb at Costco, and I know that ladders don't even exist in many other workplaces.
I create content and materials for the marketing department and make sure the warehouses have the trainings they need. I even get to travel to new and existing warehouses to conduct training events — which combines my love of teaching with my penchant for content creation. I also do some educational consulting and writing. Now, I make about 50% more than I made as a teacher.
My first job was membership, and that was labor-intensive because the store was new to my town, and some people had never been to a Costco. Then I transitioned into the front-end cashier position.
When I'd tell my supervisor about interactions with customers, they believed me right away. The job has a ton of variety, which is something I enjoyed in teaching. It's interesting because no matter what school I worked at, I never thought it'd be the one I would stay at forever, but with Costco, I can really see myself working there for my entire professional life. This is the first time in my professional life that I've stopped looking for other jobs. I just feel safe and comfortable here.
I also share my journey of leaving teaching on TikTok to over 120,000 followers. It's been so fascinating and validating to find a community of other former and current teachers who are approaching the edge of burnout. We understand each other in a way that others don't.
I always dreamt of being a teacher, and especially in American society, our identities are so tied up with what we do for work. It's been difficult to untangle that. In this culture, our worth is about our productivity and our careers, and for so long, my worth was about being a teacher. But I'm finding new ways to value myself — including taking a job that values me.
Correction: July 31, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misstated when Maggie Perkins started working at Costco and her initial employment status. She started working at Costco after the summer ended as a full-time employee, not during the summer as a seasonal worker.
