If anyone here wants some real life training on social interaction, take a once or twice per week part-time cashier job at CVS or Walgreens. Don't go for Walmar

If anyone here wants some real life training on social interaction, take a once or twice per week part-time cashier job at CVS or Walgreens. Don't go for Walmart / Target, or a smaller convenience store. The middle ground of CVS and Walgreens is ideal, it has just enough traffic, but not too much. Do that for six months or so, and engage the customers sincerely. You'll have a couple hundred opportunities per week to talk to strangers and you'll get paid for it; they'll overwhelmingly be nice, older women customers, and many will appreciate the small talk. You'll deal with shoplifters (confrontation). You'll deal with people that are upset and or having a bad day. You'll deal with mean customers occasionally. You'll deal with obnoxious coupon types that will drive you crazy. 97% of the customers will be pleasant, and in a slight hurry. You'll help solve their problems. You'll deal with communication challenges from time to time (slurred speech, health issues, different accents, etc). You'll interact with customers from a very wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds (from poor EBT card users to rich people, from teens to grandparents). So you'll see a broad spectrum of social interaction, in a quite safe environment overall. One could take a paid phone-help job (support line of one type or another) to chat with lots of people, however the additional nice thing about the cashier job is that it's in-person. You also have a counter separating you from the customers (a bit of a shield for some introverts), and other employees in the store to back you up if anything unusual happens. The part-time cashier job is also not overly important to the store, so if you're working only one or two days per week you won't have very many other tasks put on your shoulders (which full-time employees will have).