I left my teaching job and went to Costco. I thought I’d only work there temporarily, but now I’ve climbed its corporate ladder and make more money — I feel safe here.

• Maggie Perkins got burnt out as a teacher and quit her job after eight years.
• She started working at her local Costco and says she’s found her lifelong career there.
• Costco feels safe and comfortable, Perkins says, and she loves her job.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maggie Perkins, a 30-year-old former teacher from Atlanta, Georgia 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 burnt 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 just clicked for them and they grasped a new concept.

I was the kind of teacher who didn’t have many rules

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.

It felt like any time I caught my breath, something else was added to my plate

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.

I didn’t plan on working at Costco

When I left teaching in 2022, a new Costco was being opened in my town. I figured I’d work there for the summer and give myself time to figure things out. I thought I might still want to work in education-adjacent work. But by the end of that summer, I stopped looking for other jobs. 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 started as a seasonal worker at Costco and now I’m a corporate trainer

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 50% more than I made as a teacher.

I love working at Costco. It’s such a different environment than I had in teaching.

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, I was believed right away. The job has a ton of variety which is something I really 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 other people don’t.

There is a certain amount of grief in leaving teaching

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.