Woman Leaves Teaching Job After Revealing Her Shocking Salary. Inside Her Unexpected New Career (Exclusive)

• Maggie Perkins left her teaching job to work at Costco in 2022,
• Perkins shares her journey and life on TikTok, where she’s grown a following.
• She doesn’t regret her decision and empowers others to do what’s right for them in their careers.

After teaching for eight years, Maggie Perkins made the difficult decision to completely change careers.

Perkins, 32, always wanted to be a teacher growing up, but as her working conditions worsened over time, she was motivated to leave the industry for good in 2022.

“The conditions were worsening rapidly, and I realized they weren’t getting better, and nobody seemed alarmed enough to do anything. I was 29 when I decided to leave,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively, noting she was making $47,000 at the time.

Perkins and her friends, who were also teachers, frequently joked about quitting and going to work at Starbucks or Costco. She never took it seriously until a new Costco opened in Athens, Ga., where she was attending the University of Georgia as a PhD student. 

“I applied because it was opening in the summer,” Perkins shares. “It was serendipity, right place, right time, and the rest is history for me.”

Perkins initially saw the Costco job as “good enough while I figure things out” and considered becoming a professor. But the more she learned about academia, “the less interested” she was in it, she says.

“The more I learned about Costco and the different roles at the company, the happier I was at the idea of working there, whether at the warehouse or at corporate, for the rest of my career,” she notes. “I feel like there was a great potential reward for pursuing it.”

Perkins eventually got promoted as a corporate trainer and a content developer in the marketing department at the headquarters in Issaquah, Wash. There, she currently trains warehouse employees who work in the membership department and on the front end, including cashiers, assistants and supervisors.

In her role, she makes training materials and helps employees through her guidance, which is not too far from what she was doing when she was teaching. 

“I love working with employees because I was where they were,” Perkins shares. “I was a membership employee, I was a cashier, and now I train membership employees and cashiers.”

“I love the people,” she adds. “I love the interactions we have with members. I really believe in the value of not just our products, but our mission. I’ve never worked for an employer as committed to doing the right thing as Costco is. I’ve been a member my whole life, like my family who’s always been a member. I’ve always had a connection to Costco.”

While the variable schedule is a big difference for Perkins, the pacing and the variability of the days are reminiscent of when she was a teacher and “felt like a natural transition from teaching,” she says. Another difference for Perkins is that she doesn’t bring her work home with her anymore and never takes on unpaid labor. 

“I was taking home 10 to 20 hours of work a week. I was there early, staying late, working on weekends, working on vacation,” Perkins shares. “I was spending my own money on my classroom, and the amount of emotional labor that goes into being a teacher is extremely hard to describe.”

While Perkins doesn’t believe she would rejoin the teaching profession, with her PhD she would “teach a class a semester,” and that “would be a nice place for me.”

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Perkins has shared her journey on TikTok, where she’s gained a following for documenting her life and career. She first started with a behind-the-scenes look at what she was doing on a daily basis at Costco and her following took off when she mentioned she used to be a teacher. 

“I figured out that when I said the words, ‘I used to be a teacher, and now I work at Costco,’ that feels complex for people because it challenges their notions of what it means to be a teacher, the retail industry, and the quality of life retail can offer. They can’t figure out why I would walk away from what they call a higher calling or morality career. I’m happier now, and that’s what matters.”

Perkins has talked to hundreds of people who are educators or in care professions, like nursing and social work, and she says many people in those fields are “deeply burned out, overworked, under-appreciated.” She mentioned that she had several friends who now work at Costco because they had left these jobs.

“If I was speaking directly to a teacher right now, I would tell that person, ‘It’s not your fault that the system is the way it is. You are not a bad teacher when you make choices to protect yourself and improve your well-being and that work does not love you back.'”

She adds, “You’re never too old to change your own life.”