For me, and of course YMMV, dispatch was a significant pay upgrade from the warehouse I was working in in addition to the benefits. The dispatch center I work at is actually one of the lowest paid in my immediate area, but they’ve done a pretty good job of giving us raises, I’m definitely in a better financial place than I was when I started here even with everything crazy that has happened with the economy over the last few years.

And at the end of the day, it’s hard to put a dollar value on just not hating your life because of your job. I could barely call what I made there a living wage, and in truth it really wasn’t, I needed 2 roommates to afford a shitty apartment. But if the roles were reversed, and the warehouse was the higher paying job I might still have made the move to dispatch and taken a pay cut and considered it worth the necessary lifestyle adjustments.

For me, even just the hours I work are worth a lot, I avoid a lot of traffic because our shifts don’t line up with rush hour traffic, my commute takes me about a third of the time it used to despite working twice as far from home. I love working night shift (though I get thats not something that’s for everyone) and with the schedule I work (we do 12 hour shifts, which means longer work days but more days off, which I can certainly manage sitting in a chair in the air conditioning as opposed to breaking my back unloading a shipping container that has been baking in the sun,) never having to work more than 3 days in a row unless I want to take overtime, having a 3-day weekend every other weekend, and having days off during the week to run errands is amazing. I actually struggle a bit to figure out how to use all of my PTO because I can just plan everything I need/want to do around my schedule.