Kat (former Lululemon employee)

And so they wanted to hire someone who could product test the running clothes and like sell them in the store, which I did, which was pretty sweet because then they would pay me to go on runs and stuff.

So it was actually pretty great.

There were other perks, too, like employees were given a debit card with some money to spend on yoga and fitness classes each month.

But there were some Lululemon practices that were just sort of strange.

I'm not even talking about the intense Lululemon fans like the woman who quit her corporate job to work there.

I'm talking about the weirdly personal things the company made their employees do.

Like, Lululemon was really big on helping employees set goals and achieve them.

So we would have these workshops, and in staff meetings, there would be dedicated time to goal setting, where you would set your goals for, like, six months, a year.

I wanted to be a writer, and they helped me set all these goals around writing, and most of the people in my store were all aspiring to be on Broadway, or musical theater actors and performers, and so often their goals revolved around that.

And even though it's

kind of cheesy, I still like use a lot of those skills and the sort of rules around goal setting.

For a basic retail job with a high turnover of employees, this was pretty deep personal stuff.

Too personal, I'm sure, for a lot of people.

But for Kat, who was so young and so new to the city, it was actually pretty helpful.

I'm a novelist now, so I am a writer now.

And I guess I should probably thank the goal-setting skills I learned at Lululemon for that.

There are a lot of novelistic things at Lululemon when you really think about it.

Tightly wound women in tightly wound clothes.

Aspirational quotes on walls and merchandise bearing down on them.

Merchandise that would one day be splattered in blood.