---
title: "The Post-00s Who Just Entered the FMCG Workplace Have Already Resigned"
description: "In his sixth month at the company, Xiao Yang (pseudonym), the only employee under 30 in his department, resigned. He cited low pay, heavy and miscellaneous tasks, long working hours, and a lack of belonging as the main reasons. His experience highlights the challenges young people face in the FMCG industry, where high turnover and difficulty in retaining fresh talent persist."
author: "汪海"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2024-06-05"
language: "en"
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# The Post-00s Who Just Entered the FMCG Workplace Have Already Resigned

> In his sixth month at the company, Xiao Yang (pseudonym), the only employee under 30 in his department, resigned. He cited low pay, heavy and miscellaneous tasks, long working hours, and a lack of belonging as the main reasons. His experience highlights the challenges young people face in the FMCG industry, where high turnover and difficulty in retaining fresh talent persist.

**The Post-00s Who Just Entered FMCG**
In his sixth month at the company, Xiao Yang (pseudonym), the only employee under 30 in his department, submitted his resignation.
"My colleagues told me that I have strong resilience; the previous colleagues of similar age almost none lasted three months."
During the conversation, Xiao Yang revealed that for their company, a bachelor's degree is the threshold, and exams are the corresponding assessment method. But sometimes, **exam scores do not necessarily indicate the ability to quickly adapt to the environment and pace in the market sales department.**
As a newcomer, he was supposed to start in the GT market, but when he joined, the KA market department was short-staffed. Coupled with his outgoing personality and excellent performance, he was exceptionally allowed to work in KA market.
For a company, the shortage of staff often reflects a high turnover rate.
After more than a month of hands-on training from the department manager, Xiao Yang began to independently handle a local area. Summer is the peak season for the beverage industry, the busiest time, followed by CNY. Xiao Yang happened to catch the company's CNY campaign.
"**In the whole of February, including the Spring Festival holidays, I only rested for 6 days.** The rest of the time, I was busy contacting managers of major supermarkets to organize activities, build floor displays, and check product placement in various stores. From morning to night, phone calls came one after another. After hanging up, I had to respond immediately, rush to the scene to solve problems. My state was like an arrow on a bow, fully drawn, ready to be released at any moment," Xiao Yang complained.
Locally, Xiao Yang has many relatives and friends in the FMCG industry, so he has been exposed to it since childhood. What he learned in this job was far less than what his family taught him. Coupled with his outgoing personality, he performed quite well in this role.
Xiao Yang admitted that if this job were given to a "complete novice," they would be completely at a loss.
**"You think you're a salesperson, just talk, and people will take the goods. The reality is not like that at all. You need to know how to calculate accounts, understand sales, promote products, communicate well, and think on your feet."**
**Communication is the biggest challenge**
Xiao Yang said that **the biggest difficulty in marketing is communicating with "people."**
In the industry, age often equates to seniority, so in interactions, there are many who judge people by appearances.
Communicating with the promotional aunties was also one of Xiao Yang's headaches. "I dare not say I'm there to manage them, for fear they'll reject me, but the result is still difficult."
Facing the promotional aunties, Xiao Yang said, **on one hand, because he is young and inexperienced, no one cares what a kid says; on the other hand, they are mostly women in their 40s and 50s, with a laid-back attitude, low cooperation, and low initiative.**
After communication, the work still struggled to progress.
"For them, making changes is difficult. Excuses like 'I'm too old,' 'My salary is so low,' 'This isn't my responsibility' are endless."
Although the promotional aunties are hard to motivate, incentives can still have some effect, but communicating with the managers in charge is the real dilemma.
Xiao Yang said that the most painful part of communicating with supermarket managers was the initial stage. Initially, contacting them was quite troublesome, as he was unfamiliar with the responsible persons; once he finally got in touch, they were indifferent or made excuses.
**On one hand, he had to face the company's assigned targets; on the other hand, he had to face the managers' "cold shoulders."** Xiao Yang sighed, "In this matter, I can only change myself. Every time I communicate with these managers, I have to psych myself up before entering, because after all, in sales, who doesn't have to beg and plead?"
Facing such situations, Xiao Yang often felt powerless and his enthusiasm was dampened. For a veteran salesperson in their 30s or 40s, they can rely on past experience and mentality to cope. But for a novice, even if they understand the nature of the job, their confidence will inevitably be hit over time.
In work, enthusiasm is sometimes more important than ability. Enthusiasm determines people's attitude towards things, and ability can be cultivated. If enthusiasm is extinguished, it is hard to recover.
**Reasons for resignation**
After six months of employment, Xiao Yang resigned. When asked about the main reasons, he mentioned three:
**1. Low salary**
Although February had little rest, the full workload still brought relatively good performance. Xiao Yang said it was his highest performance since joining the company. I then asked, "So you must have earned a lot in February, right?" He said, "After insurance, I got just over 5,000 yuan in hand."
Now, the biggest problem for salespeople in the FMCG industry is that companies don't talk about salary but about dedication. They tell you that as long as you're willing to work, you'll do well, but they don't even dare to promise "if you do well, you'll have a future," let alone paint that rosy picture.
**The current market environment is tough, but the company's high growth and high targets increase every year.** When divided into monthly performance, with a good promotional period, it might barely be achieved, but most of the time it's almost impossible, and not achieving means no bonus.
**2. Too many and miscellaneous tasks**
Apart from February, Xiao Yang had one day off per week.
Every day, he had to visit stores to communicate about restocking, and during that time, calls from other stores would come in at any moment. Whether big or small, he had to rush to the scene to handle it. **Mechanical photo check-ins, moving goods, and arranging displays; at night, he had to input orders, review, and summarize. After work each day, he just wanted to empty his mind and stop thinking.**
**3. Long working hours and lack of belonging**
Xiao Yang said his latest off-duty time was 3 a.m., and leaving at 11 p.m. was common; other times, he was rarely on time. Despite working six days a week and being on standby for long hours, the work was still overwhelming, and he had to keep going non-stop.
Every day, he was either riding an electric bike or driving alone outside. **There was almost no sense of belonging at work, which is also a huge gap for fresh graduates.**
"During these months of work, I had almost no personal life. On rest days, I just wanted to sleep well at home, and the next day I went back to work. The most infuriating thing was seeing the number on the pay slip..."
When talking about future plans, Xiao Yang also revealed that he would almost never enter this industry again.
**Finally**
The resignation of post-00s is both reasonable and unexpected. The above content covers the "reasonable" part. What is the "unexpected" part? It is that in the current downturn, with more people waiting for employment each year and jobs becoming harder to find, young people still choose to resign.
**On one hand, post-00s are entering society and need more job opportunities; on the other hand, companies need to rejuvenate, so they need the new energy that post-00s bring.**
In recent years, those who apply to major companies are almost all salespeople over 30 who left other FMCG companies. **Those who previously did daily chemicals now do beverages and snacks.** In the same region, it's almost the same people moving around, and "fresh blood" is hard to inject.
To recruit and retain more excellent young people, companies have set up management trainee positions, hoping to cultivate more talent. But in reality, less than 1% stay.
One side lacks people, the other lacks jobs; it should be a win-win situation.
But from Xiao Yang's case, **young people need job opportunities, but they also value work-life balance and their true feelings.**
In recent years, topics like "post-00s rectifying the workplace" have circulated online. These topics make it hard to tell whether it's the post-00s' attitude towards work that is problematic, "unable to take off the long gown," or whether the industry itself has problems, or management has problems. Is it that post-00s need to face reality, or that companies need to adjust to post-00s?
Regarding the topic of young people and FMCG, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
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**Recommended Reading**


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