So, I was hired to work as a cashier at a supermarket at the beginning of June and everything is fine and dandy. Its not a hard job and I told the manager that I plan to work weekends when school starts. But I am also a VERY dedicated student who needs lots of study time and I am NOT willing to sacrifice my grades for $7.25 an hour. Most people who work at the grocery store have worked there for almost a year. I plan on going to the manager in two weeks and tell him I would like to quit working and work for another two weeks if he needs me to. The store only hires 17+ and I am 16. They made an exception to hire me because one of my friends who had worked there for two years recommended me. Now, I am going to quit after only a month and a half! What would they think?
*I would quit no matter what they think, but can you guys make me feel a bit better about doing this?
Food for thought: What if you are responsible for your own feelings? What if no other person can actually “make you feel” anything?
If you want to feel better about it, feel better about it.
Why do you want to quit? Why do you think working would get in the way of your grades?
So why do you need to quit in two weeks and how do you know already that this job will interfere with getting good grades? Why not keep working until a real and not imagined problem actually arises? Did you forget to include in your post above the reason why you are quitting?
I am the type of student who does homework and studies for hours on weekdays and who studies to get ahead on the weekends. My family also owns and operates a restaurant that I have to work at after school unless I ask to go home to study for something, so it is already hard on me to keep my grades up where I want them and working at the restaurant. I don’t want to have to sacrifice 15 more hours from my week to work at a grocery store when I also have to work at the restaurant. I don’t care about the money I get from the job. I care about reaching my goal of being admitted into a prestigious university. I still feel bad about quitting though.
I need to quit in two weeks in order to give the store two weeks to hire a new cashier since school starts for me in August.
Did the store now it would be just a summer job when they hired you? If so they should expect for you to leave at the end of the summer. If not why didn’t you make it clear when you were hired?
When they hired me, I had the intention of working only on weekends when school starts and I had told the manager this. He had come to talk to me about it and said I had to at least also work a day Mon-Fri and that the other workers who had school worked late nights. Ever since I started the job this summer, I haven’t been studying for the ACT/SAT and doing summer reading as much as I would like to. Also, when I finish my shift at the grocery store and want to go home to rest, my parents think I’m lazy for not working as much as they do since I used to work 12 hours a day at the restaurant (At least, I could study in between customers). Now, I only work at the restaurant on my off days. My brother is also going to college next school year, so he won’t be able to work as much at home and I’ll have to help out more. Doing well academically is really important to me and unlike other teenager’s situations, my entire family spends most of the day working at our restaurant to pay the bills, so I am obligated to work as well. I’m already juggling work and school, so I don’t want to add ANOTHER job in there as well.
Whether you are actually doing it or not, it appears that you are looking for sympathy for a plight you’re in. The reality is that you aren’t in a difficult situation - this is an everyday situation that requires time management skills. You are probably dealing with this issue for the first time, which makes it much more difficult. I’ve been there! It sucks! But after sitting down and thinking it through, everything isn’t so unmanageable.
If you had an expectation of working only weekends and have now been told that you need to work weeknights, that is not right. You could tell your manager that you are inflexible on working weeknights during the school year if you are open to working just on the weekends; if he says that is not acceptable, then he should be fully prepared for you quitting.
If you are going to be plenty occupied at the family restaurant and want to quit the supermarket regardless, then there’s no reason to feel guilt about quitting the other job. While you should give some notice, realistically a couple of days should be plenty. A job like that isn’t going to follow you anywhere - you likely wouldn’t bother putting it on a resume if you had it for a a month and a half… your total hours will probably add up to less than 100, so you probably will not have had enough time to develop much in the way of transferable skills… Don’t worry about it reflecting poorly on your friend. It doesn’t. Your friend is not you… if your manager thinks low of you, it shouldn’t have any impact on the other person.
It is the right thing for a person to quit a job when, all things considered, it longer works for them to have it. I gather that you realized later that you shouldn’t work weekends at this job while school was underway. It’s OK to act on realizations you have later. In fact it’s wrong not to.
I actually talked to my manager today about quitting and he did try to get me to stay on the payroll by working one day a week, but I told him I can work for him anytime up until school starts. I was simply overthinking everything like I do all the time, but in reality, he probably doesn’t even care much about whether I leave or not since many people have applied for a job there recently.