Thursday, February 5, 2009

Just One Step Away From A WalMart Greeter

Before I retired my colleagues at work asked me what I would do when I retired. Would I get a consulting job in my old industry? My stock reply was that 35 years of working in the same industry was all I cared to do. If I wanted to do anything like work again, a WalMart greeter was about as stressful as I wanted to get.

I have been retired for a little over one year now. During that time I have seen a lot of new places and done a lot of new things. I have not had the time nor felt the need to consider working. I do however scan the part time job listings on Craigslist just for fun.

A month or so ago I saw an ad that peaked my curiosity. It was for a "demonstrator" at local big box stores. You know what that is... You've seen lots of them in Target, Walmart and your grocery store. Those are the folks behind the card table giving away samples of food.

It turns out that this interested me in several ways. First of all, the weather is not good enough to allow me to go on frequent RV trips locally so my weekends are free. Secondly, the job description indicates that you are a "contractor" for the demonstration company. You get to pick the demonstrations you want to do. There is no pressure to have a regular schedule. The demonstrations are 5 hours long and the pay is $10/hr.

So, for $50 a day I would get to give away someone else's stuff and I only have to do it when I want. That sounded like something I would like to give a whirl so I submitted an "application". Now I wasn't about to do work to get a job so my application said that I was retired and intelligent enough to have had a career in industry for 35 years and I was looking for "pin money" and that was it. No fancy resume.

I'm not sure if I'm exactly the kind of person they were looking for or they were really hard up but they signed me up and I will do my first two demos this weekend. I had been offered several more demos in coming weeks but I told them I wanted to do just the two to begin with to see if it was a "fit" for me. The $100 I get for working this weekend will buy several tanks of gas for the RV on my trip in two weeks so I'm into this thing for now.

This is the type of work that can be fun....I don't need to do it and if I don't like doing it, I'm gone. Too bad my career wasn't that easy!

Thanks for visiting.

2 comments:

janet copenhaver said...

I've often wondered how they select these demonstrators. What products are you going to demonstrate?

janet copenhaver said...

Checking in to see how your day went?

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