[bell-cot]

For a start - what does the tech look like at your retail/warehouse job?

I know a guy who went from retail work at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meijer to being the IT Director at a major regional warehousing firm over the course of ~25 years. It wasn't a direct path, and in a week he may be doing everything from code crunch (there's a lot of custom DB code, tracking all the stuff that clients are storing in the warehouses) to fixing networking equipment atop a scissors lift (in one of the warehouses) to high-pressure meetings with Big 3 (auto manufacturer) clients - who demand accurate "when can you have this working?" answers for some convoluted new way that they want to track & control the movement of (say) their exhaust system parts in the warehouses.