These Women Built Careers In Retail. The Pandemic Tore Through Their Stores

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Diana Newcomb is one of millions of women who built careers in retail. The pandemic tore through their stores, with some 400,000 jobs yet to recover. Newcomb’s is one of them.

Georgia Stanley /Diana Newcomb

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Georgia Stanley /Diana Newcomb

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«This is one of those times in life that you just don’t see coming, Newcomb says. Now 67, she’s faced several personal crises on top of the pandemic, including a diagnosis of breast cancer.

Over the years, she’s worked what she calls odd jobs: in a restaurant kitchen, at a salvage shop she ran with her husband in Oregon. She got an interior design degree, but time and again came back to sales work: a furniture store, then J.C. Penney. Newcomb was in her 60s, when she and her husband separated.

Feeling lost, she did what she knew she could do well: retail. Newcomb got an apartment with her daughter, tied a nice old scarf around her neck and walked to Macy’s at a nearby outdoor mall. She got hired for the holidays and stayed — and soon got promoted to handbag specialist.

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Store closing signs are posted at a Sur La Table kitchenware store on Sept. 22, in Los Angeles. Thousands of retail stores across the country have closed during the pandemic.

Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

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Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

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Heather Wilcox-Nicholls lost her job with Mattress Firm during the pandemic. She had been with the company for about five years and was about to take on a new store as a manager.

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Krista Rossow for NPR

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It had been an accidental career for her, even though it became a solid one. In her early 20s, with a new baby, but without a high-school diploma, she had wandered down the main street of her town, résumé in hand. A mattress store hired her, and that job allowed her to afford her first car and a house where «everybody got their own bedroom.

But over time, Wilcox-Nicholls wondered whether a retail life was sustainable. She filled time between customers studying for her GED. In her 30s, she got into community college. Now 46, she’s chipping away at a bachelor’s degree in physics, hoping one day to work in a lab.

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Wilcox-Nicholls has been taking care of her mother, Susan Coon, in recent weeks. Wilcox-Nicholls flew out to help after her mother had an accident and missed too many workdays to get through the probationary period of her new job at a furniture store.

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Wilcox-Nicholls has been taking care of her mother, Susan Coon, in recent weeks. Wilcox-Nicholls flew out to help after her mother had an accident and missed too many workdays to get through the probationary period of her new job at a furniture store.

Krista Rossow for NPR

«I see retail as … you can get lucky for a time and find a decent job, but you can’t make a career in it anymore, Wilcox-Nicholls says. «My son is 25 and I want him to have hard-skill knowledge that can never be taken away and will always demand a fair wage.

After losing her mattress sales job, she actually found a new one, at a furniture store. But her elderly mother had an accident — a side effect of not getting in-person assistance visits during the pandemic. Wilcox-Nicholls flew out to help, missing too many workdays to get through the probationary period at the new gig.

She left the furniture store on good terms, planning to try for another job when she can. For now, she needs to figure out how to pay the rent.