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Lynnsey Stacy, an intern at The Buckle in the East Hills Shopping Center, folds clothes Friday afternoon at the clothing store. Ms. Stacy said her closet has always been organized, even before she started working at the retail store.

Abby Schulenberg’s closet is full of question marks, and she places the blame on her line of work.

Ms. Schulenberg, who works at Dress Barn at the Shoppes at North Village, is referring to the position of her clothes hangers, which all face exactly the same way. It’s a habit she picked up from her three-year tenure at the clothing store, along with folding her clothes as neatly as if they were going home with a customer.

“I think it’s a habit from working here all the time, and I end up doing it the same way at home,” she said with a laugh, holding up a special folding board with illustrated directions for the proper technique.

An acute attention to folding is something that many clothing-store workers take home at the end of the day. In Ms. Schulenberg’s case, it’s a conscious habit resulting from her appreciation of the way merchandise is folded at Dress Barn.

“Whenever we’re putting the clothes in the sacks for customers and I fold them all nice and perfect ... that’s what I do whenever I do my laundry,” she said.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that some psychologists are finding folding habits among retail workers that verge on obsessive behavior. Michael Jenike, chairman of the scientific advisory board for the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation in Boston, told the Journal he has treated people who have folding compulsions.

In St. Joseph, Megan Miller’s clothes-folding habit falls far short of obsessive.

“This is just what I’m used to doing; so when I’m watching TV, I’m just folding my laundry and not even thinking about it,” said Ms. Miller, a sales associate at Kohls at the Shoppes at North Village.

Sitting amid a pile of jeans transformed into crisp-cornered squares, Ms. Miller said she has also noticed the trait in her co-workers and that many of them even report organizing their closets by color.

“I don’t, I’m not that obsessive,” she said.

Scott Marconnet, manager of The Buckle in the East Hills Shopping Center, is familiar with treating his own clothing like store merchandise.

“It does kind of carry over into our homes,” he said. “My wife folds jeans different than I do. So whenever she folds my jeans, I refold them as they go in my closet.”

Mr. Marconnet also classifies his habit as minor, saying that 22 years of working at the retail store has simply caused him to organize his closet in a different way.

Dr. Nora Clark, who has a private psychology practice in St. Joseph, said she has never had a patient who reported an obsessive folding habit. She said it is unlikely that a job folding clothing in a store would produce extreme habits at home, and that even if a patient did complain of excessive folding, a more in-depth interview might reveal additional routines.

“The source of it is not that they work at the store,” Dr. Clark said.

Repeated actions such as clothes folding might be a sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which causes a person to perform a certain action over and over again. Other habits might include excessive hand washing or rearranging things.

“The person thinks that it will reduce anxiety,” Dr. Clark said. “It doesn’t. It’s an error in thinking.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, many healthy people may experience habits, such as clothes folding, that fall short of obsessive.

“The difference is that people with OCD perform their rituals, even though doing so interferes with daily life and they find the repetition distressing,” according to the Institute’s Web site.