Dear Trader Joe's:

thank you for not hiring me!

I believe myself to be an accepting person. Que sera, sera, going with the flow, staying flexible, keeping my expectations of human beings and the world at large to a minimum, etc. etc. Still, there is one thing that still stings, a memory I struggle to accept: the news I received by phone two years ago that I was “not the right fit” for the job at Trader Joe’s I’d just interviewed for.

Was I not approachable enough? Did I not appear capable of lifting and/or setting down boxes? Was my answer to the question “What’s your favorite Trader Joe’s item?” (answer: the frozen naan) unsatisfactory? (Was I supposed to gush over some random sauce or something?) Was I too old? Too young? Too articulate? Not enthusiastic enough about working in a grocery store? Not at ease enough in the windowless broom closet that served as the interview room, a beach-scened shower curtain duct-taped to one wall???? Should I have worn a ‘fun’ color to the interview instead of a white blouse? Should I have worn Birkenstocks?

Once in a blue moon, I daydream about calling the store and asking why I wasn’t hired. They probably figured that as a grad student, I probably wouldn’t want to work at a grocery store long term, and Trader Joe’s is very intense about wanting people to work there FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. (Which seems like a slightly unreasonable expectation of someone applying to work a minimum wage job, no?) Maybe they had another applicant with actual experience working in a grocery store—but if that was the case, why did they spend so much time bragging about how their employees came from all different fields before working there?!

I’ve heard so many similar stories at this point about people earning PhD’s only to end up finding jobs at Target; regardless of higher education, lots of extremely qualified people with loads of work experience are struggling to find work in their fields (or ANY fields.)

I am snobby about lots of things, but not about work. I’ve had a few exceptional jobs, but mostly I’ve bartended, waitressed, bussed tables, wiped baby butts, done coffee runs, sold old clothes, and scraped foul-smelling melted cheese onto piles of meat and potatoes. In short: not very glamorous.

those cheese wheels were HEAVY!

After finishing my MFA, I decided I wanted to move to Mexico to finish the novel I was writing. I immediately started looking for virtual jobs (none of them especially well-paying, but work is work): remote adjunct teaching jobs (~17/hr), virtual assistant jobs (~25/hr), data entry jobs (~15/hr), copyediting jobs (~20/hr). I even applied for a job writing copy for an erotic audio app (and was quite proud of my submission, too.)

Crickets. Nada.

I’d strongly resisted the prospect of teaching English virtually, mostly because of the cliché of it; it’s what most foreigners do for money while traveling or living in foreign countries, and in some ways feels like a shitty workaround, as most of the time these English instructors are not teaching locals and are certainly not earning the currency of the country that they’re residing in. But after five months of relentless job hunting with no prospects, I finally gave in, mostly because I really, really needed a job.

I signed up on the websites tutors.com and preply.com. Each has their own uniquely exploitative model: tutors.com requires you to pay for each ‘lead’ (someone wanting to contact you about your services); this is generally about $20/lead, and I’d say about 10% of these people replied to the messages I’d just paid $20 to send. Preply has a more streamlined and user-friendly website, but takes a 30% cut of your earnings—when I first joined, I charged $20/hr, lower than I wanted to charge, because I needed students, and while I was able to get students, the payout ended up being around $12/hr (BLEAK.)

Thankfully, I found some great students who agreed to leave these cursed platforms to work with me directly via Zoom (and pay me directly, too.) For now, this is earning me enough, and I’ve been able to work on the novel a lot (almost finished, now. Sometime in the near future I’ll be writing about what it’s like to live in Mexico as a foreigner, but the summarized version: 10/10. Highly recommend.

And so, to those suspiciously cheerful Hawaiian shirt-clad managers who rejected me, I owe you my deepest thanks. Thank you for keeping me out of my own way, and for making my decision to leave New Orleans that much easier. I stand by my choice of frozen naan as the best TJ’s product. (The worst: the tzatziki. An abomination.)

As ever, thanks for reading.

-K