Store team leader
- Median pay: $41,514
- % who say their job is stressful: 81.4%
The single most stressful part of being an assistant store manager was scheduling, according to Jesse Wojdylo, who worked for a chain pharmacy in North Carolina.
Not everyone would show up for work and that put pressure on the ones that did.
"If you were there at the store, you had to stay and work the extra shift," he said. "That messed up my personal life."
Another source of pressure; the customers. Customers relied on him to solve their sometimes unreasonable problems -- and he was expected to maintain a cheery disposition throughout.
After struggling through a typical stress-filled day, Wojdylo said he would often think on the way home, "That wasn't that bad. Christmas is going to be 10 times worse."
The money was okay but the job never paid well enough to justify all the effort. As soon as he started to earn enough as a social media and Internet search consultant to survive on, he quit.
"I knew I would rather make $75 a day at home than $150 a day at the store," he said.
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Methodology: Starting from a database of more than 9,000 jobs, PayScale used data from over 120,000 respondents who rated their jobs for quality of life factors. The 15 were selected based on the national median pay for workers with at least five or seven years' experience and the percent of workers surveyed who said their jobs were "fairly stressful" or "extremely stressful." Only one job per "job family" was included. PayScale conducted the survey between August 2011 and August 2013.
