Teaching our children is an incredibly important job. However, it’s not a very lucrative one and often an extremely thankless one. Maggie Perkins felt like she was simply “surviving every moment” while teaching in both public and private schools for two years. However, she eventually decided to quit her job and start working at Costco. She’s never looked back.
The 30-year-old, who posts on Tiktok as @millennialmsfrizz, admitted that her job as a teacher was taking a serious toll on her mental and emotional health. As a result, Maggie Perkins desperately needed a change of scene.
“We grew up going to Costcos, and so I’ve always known that Costco employees are treated well and have a high quality of life,” she told Fox Business. “So when there was a new Costco being built in my town, I immediately applied.”
She shared in a TikTok video that she actually had to work on Christmas Eve this year but she didn’t mind. In fact, she wasn’t bothered by not having the winter breaks she did as a teacher.
Maggie Perkins is much happier at Costco than she ever was as a teacher
@millennialmsfrizz I used to be a teacher and now I work at Costco. This is my first year not having a winter break. I do not miss it at all. My pace of my work life now is so much better, I am not sick or exhausted like I used to be when I was a teacher. When I was a teacher I used my winter break basically to recover and go into the next semester of just surviving. fformerteachertteacherquittokccostcotiktokrretailworkereexteachertiktokccareertransitiont#teachersonbreak
“I just worked seven days straight including Christmas Eve and I feel fine,” she said in the clip. “As a teacher, it was like I was just surviving every moment and by the time I got to Christmas break I was so exhausted I got genuinely sick.”
While Maggie always had a “goal in life” of becoming a “researcher, professor, and be part of academia,” she realized that it was ultimately not for her. There’s too much struggle and not enough payoff.
“[I] saw people who were well respected, amazingly articulate, published, everything you could hope for in a researcher and a professor and they were in their fifties and their forties, hustling their tails off still trying to make it,” she explained.
“I realized that there was no end it was, there was no place where you arrive, where you are like, ‘That’s the person, she’s a full professor, she’s tenured.’ Even if you’re tenured, even if you’re a full professor, you’re still hustling for someone else’s approval.”
Despite working in retail now, Maggie Perkins says her life is “so much better” than it used to be.
@millennialmsfrizz
Featured image credit: TikTok/@millennialmsfrizz
