The Fashion Job Is an Arithmetic Test in Disguise

In partnership with

 Is Social Media Hurting Your Child? Your Family May Qualify

Many parents blamed themselves, or their kids, for the hours lost to the feed. But legal claims allege social media companies built in psychological triggers on purpose: intermittent rewards, endless scrolling, toxic social comparison, and recommendation engines that pull kids into content rabbit holes.

Now families are filing legal claims against platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

You may be eligible if:

• Excessive social media use started under age 18

• There was a diagnosis of an eating disorder, severe anxiety, depression, or self-harm

ClaimsHero checks whether you qualify for a claim and gets your family justice. Nothing upfront. We only get paid if your claim is successful.

Check Your Eligibility

Welcome to today's SCALIS EarlyCareers newsletter! 🚀

Somebody told you that retail is where you go if you like clothes and you are not a numbers person. That person has never read a buying requisition.

Open Macy's 2027 Summer Internship for Merchandising and Buying. The qualifications say, in plain text, that all majors will be considered. Encouraging. Keep reading two lines and you hit the real gate: strong retail math skills, with the ability to analyze sales, gross margin, inventory productivity, and sell-through, and translate that into business recommendations.

Belk's Summer 2027 Assistant Buyer req says the same thing in a different order. Strong understanding of retail math and terminology. Proficient in Excel with a working grasp of formulas and reporting. Burlington's Buying Intern posting asks for an affinity for retail math outright, then tells you the program itself includes classroom training in retail math and Excel, which is a quiet admission that most people show up without it.

So the major requirement really is open. The screen just moved somewhere else, into a vocabulary of roughly eight calculations that no general business course covers and that merchandising majors spend an entire semester on. That gap is the whole competition. It is also the single most closable gap in any vertical we have covered, because the formulas are finite, public, and learnable in a weekend.

The AI newsletter curated by engineers who build it

TLDR AI is a free daily email curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers: the new tools worth trying and the research worth understanding, summarized for 1.1M+ readers.

Subscribe for free

4,052 BRAND NEW internship positions freshly posted today. View the full list below and start applying!

Learn the eight numbers, because they are the interview

Every other vertical screens you with a test you have to sit for. Coding assessments, case interviews, timed online exams. Merchandising screens you on whether you can speak the language in a normal conversation, which means you can prepare for it completely in advance.

Here is the working set. Sell-through is units sold divided by units received. Markup is calculated on cost, margin is calculated on retail price, and confusing the two is the most common tell that somebody is bluffing. Markdown percent is markdown dollars over net sales. Inventory turn is how many times your average stock sells through in a year. Weeks of supply is how long current inventory lasts at the current rate of sale. Initial markup, or IMU, is the margin you planned at the moment you bought, before any markdowns ate it. And open to buy is the forward budget for how much more inventory you can purchase this period without blowing past your planned stock level.

Learn those cold. Not the definitions, the arithmetic. Be able to do each one on paper in under thirty seconds.

Sell-through is the number that runs the job

If you only internalize one, make it sell-through, because it is the metric that triggers every decision a buyer makes.

A rough industry heuristic: when full-price sell-through on a seasonal item is still under 40 percent by week six of its run, that is the signal to open a markdown review while there is still margin left to protect. Wait longer and you are clearing at a loss. Buy deeper into something selling through at 85 percent and you capture demand you would otherwise leave on the table.

That is the entire rhythm of the job. Read the number, decide whether to chase it or cut it, defend the call. If you can describe that loop in an interview without being prompted, you sound like somebody who has already done the work.

Four requisitions, four different careers

Macy's posted roughly 26 Summer 2027 roles across two waves in September, and inside merchandising alone there are separate postings for Buying, Assortment Planning, Product Development, and Merchandise Planning and Inventory Management. These are not variations on one job. They are four distinct ladders, and you choose yours at the application form.

Buying selects product and owns the assortment. Assortment Planning decides which products land in which locations and quantities. Merchandise Planning owns the financial plan and the inventory dollars. Product Development builds private label from concept to delivery alongside design and sourcing.

Buying is the most applied-to and the most competitive of the four, and most candidates pick it reflexively because it sounds like the glamorous one. Planning and allocation have thinner applicant pools, sit closer to the money, and move laterally into buying later all the time. If the numbers are the part you actually like, applying to planning is both the better odds and the better fit.

Hands Down Some Of The Best 0% Interest Credit Cards

Pay no interest until nearly 2028 with some of the best hand-picked credit cards this year. They are perfect for anyone looking to pay down their debt, and not add to it!

Click here to see what all of the hype is about.

Learn How To Apply Now

Build the one artifact that proves it

You do not need retail experience to demonstrate merchant instinct. You need one page.

Pick a brand you can observe. Walk the store or the site weekly for three weeks. Track one category: what is on the floor, what sold out, what went on markdown and when, what got replenished. Then write a single-page recap with a recommendation. Something like: this retailer took the seasonal outerwear category to 30 percent off in week four, which suggests the initial buy ran deep against actual demand, and the replenished colorways point to where the sell-through actually was.

That page does three things no bullet point can. It shows you can read a business from the outside, it proves you use the vocabulary correctly, and it gives you an answer to every behavioral question they will ask. Attach it, or bring it, or just narrate it.

The window is volume-based, not date-based

This calendar does not work like banking. Belk's own posting says the internship listings stay open based on applicant volume. TJX put its merchandising internship up on September 1 and reviews on a rolling basis. Macy's opened September 9.

Rolling and volume-capped means the deadline is invisible and moves. There is no benefit whatsoever to polishing for another two weeks, and there is real cost. Apply to the planning and allocation reqs this week, even if buying is your eventual target, because the ladder connects and the pool is smaller.

What to actually say when they ask why retail

Most candidates answer this with enthusiasm about the brand. Answer it with a number instead.

Nobody else in your interview slate is going to say that. You did not need an internship to be able to say it. You needed three weeks and a notebook.