Not long after I filled out the online application, I attended a group interview process for a job as a "front-end associate." By the end of the interview, which took a full afternoon, I'd accepted the position. I was officially a Costco employee — even though I didn't really understand what that meant. I'd never set foot in the East Harlem store before the interview, and I had no idea what a warehouse club was really like.

During my first shift, I was overwhelmed on many levels. As the only Costco location in Manhattan, the store saw a ton of traffic — people took cabs from all over the island to shop there. My primary responsibility was to unload and re-load members' carts at the cash registers — and you had to be fast. But if you were too fast or if a customer just didn't like the way you loaded things into their cart, you'd hear about it. And I did, plenty of times. Here are some of the things I learned while working — and making mistakes — at the Manhattan Costco.

1. People assume retail employees are just "looking for something better."

On my very first day on the job, a customer asked me what my long-term plans were, other than working at Costco. I was shocked — and I was almost positive he'd only asked me that question because I was white. I wondered if other employees were asked questions like these, and how they responded to them. Many of them were happy working there — I was, too — and no one deserves to have their profession consistently questioned or to have people act like their job isn't good enough.

Yes, some people take jobs at big-box stores as seasonal employees or to earn money on top of their "real" job. (In essence, that's what I did — Costco was my "side" job, even though I spent more hours there than I did freelance writing.) But plenty of other people stay with places like Costco for years, or even decades, and their jobs aren't any less real or important. A manager I know started at Costco as a summer job and ended up working there for years and moving up the ranks. The type of job that makes you happy is different for everyone. None are less "good" than others.

Sometimes, I felt like I was part of the problem. I became friends with many of my coworkers, but many of them were significantly younger than I was, since they had started working there as teens and didn't go to college. I was determined to make them think I wasn't "looking for something better." When I left the job just months after starting, I felt guilty, like I was proving that notion true. I tried not to mention my background to anyone at the store outside of the interview, because it really wasn't relevant. Once in a while, however, I'd try to make small talk with a customer by complimenting them on their Goyard bag or noting that I had the same Athleta leggings they were wearing. I'd worry that conversations like these would alienate me from my coworkers. In the end, though, any distance I felt from my coworkers stemmed more from my shyness (and age), not from our long-term career ambitions.