Eric Church Says Shop at Home Network Fired Him Over Knife Sales
eric church says he was fired from the Shop at Home Network after telling callers not to buy knives. He says the job came early in his Nashville run, before his music career took off, and it sat inside a schedule built around night work and daytime song meetings.
“I’ve had a lot of awful jobs…my worst one was when I first came to Nashville. I got a job at the Shop at Home Network. I worked midnight, graveyard, midnight to eight.” Church said.
He said the shift ran from midnight to 8 a.m., while he still had writing appointments and meetings to get signed during the day. “That was bad enough but then I would work all night, go home, shower and then I had writing appointments all day because I was trying to get a career started.”
Midnight Shifts in Nashville
Church said the routine pushed him from the Shop at Home Network to song pitches, then back to work again. “I’d go write songs and get meetings just trying to get signed. And end up getting done at 3 of 4 with all of that, I’d go home, take a shower or sleep for a little bit and then I had to be at work again at midnight.”
He described the actual sales job as knife-selling from midnight to 7 or 8 a.m. and said callers at 3 or 4 a.m. could be hard to take seriously. “I sold knives from midnight to 7 or 8am. And, anytime somebody calls you at 3 or 4am and needs 200 knives for $19.95, it’s automatically an alarming situation.”
Why He Warned Callers
Church said he told people not to buy because he assumed they were drunk. “I knew they were drunk. I knew what they had done. They’d just come home from the bar, flipped on Shop at Home and said, ‘You know what? I need that.’”
That comment is the whole reason the story sticks: it turns a forgettable side job into a clean example of how awkward the pre-fame grind could be in Nashville. After graduating from Appalachian State and moving to the city, Church was working overnight retail television shifts while trying to build a music career, and now he is making music for fans and selling out arenas and amphitheaters around the country.
From Shop at Home to Arenas
The contrast is sharp without needing any gloss. A singer who now fills large rooms once spent nights talking callers out of buying knife sets for $19.95, then tried to make it to writing sessions on little sleep.
For readers, the useful takeaway is simple: Church’s pre-breakthrough years were not just lean, they were scheduled around survival. The job ended badly, but it also explains why his Nashville origin story still lands—he was already writing songs on the way out of a midnight shift.
