First Job

[Kshartle]

Anyone want to share their first work experience and how it helped/hurt them?

My first job was at Little Ceasars at 15. I got the job to save money to buy a car. My dad said whatever I saved he would match. They would drive me to work 15 minutes away....sometimes just to do the 3-4 hour dinner shift for min wage, $4.25/hr.

By the time I was 17 they made me the manager even though the owner had 12 adult children with 11 of them working for him (he owned 5 stores if I remember).

I had the keys, did the schedule, the ordering, firing (but no hiring) etc. Ran the entire show. Looking back it seems crazy but I was really good at it and confident about it.

By the time I was 18 I was making $7.50 but also working 50-70 hrs per week every week, $11,25 OT. I got $500 checks so I thought I was rich. I bought CDs paying 5.5% so imagine that! I graduated when I was 17 so it didn't conflict with school. I had been a C-D student in high school so this was the first time I learned I could really excel at something and how to do a great job, work hard etc.

I still have the occasional dream about that job because I loved it so much and learned so much from it.

[Pointedstick]

My first work experience was at age 15. The lead-up was that I was volunteering at the time tutoring the children of African immigrants in English on weekends. It was a pretty miserable experience. The kids were mean and rude and hated being there, so there was a lot of churn among the unpaid volunteers. I was the most reliable volunteer mostly because my parents were guilting me into continuing there (this was during my liberal indoctrination upbringing). They noticed that I was reliable so they offered to pay me $10 an hour. I was floored. That was, like, a ridiculous amount of money to me!

It was a perfect education into how an overpaid, make-work job functioned. We got grants from the state government, and the local Unitarian church let us use their basement for free, so we had almost no overhead except for the administrators' high salaries (and then my pay, of course). The kids we tutored basically learned nothing, and their parents mostly used us as a free daycare and after-school program. The value creation was infinitesimally small, and I was getting paid a bunch of money for basically just showing up.

The sense that something was wrong began to penetrate the thick layers of liberal indoctrination and I eventually burned out and refused to show up anymore, despite the high pay and my parents' disappointment. I gained a resentment of anything that resembled "make-work" type stuff, which actually helped me when I went to college. The terms of my financial aid package required that I work for the school, and of course the only work they had was ridiculous make-work stuff as well. I got a bullshit job in the computer department and proceeded to treat it as though it was a real job, in the process vastly outperforming my peers and earning rapid promotions and eventually becoming a student sysadmin, because there really was work to be done and I wanted to do it. By my Junior year, I was ready for a real real job and started writing software for a small firm while I was still in school. Oh boy, that place gave me a lot of crazy stories… but this is a thread about our first job.

[edsanville]

The kids we tutored basically learned nothing, and their parents mostly used us as a free daycare and after-school program. The value creation was infinitesimally small, and I was getting paid a bunch of money for basically just showing up.

So it was like public school, then? 

[flyingpylon]

My first job was picking and selling strawberries at age 11-12.  A friend's brother owned some land and grew the strawberries.  We'd pick in the morning (got 25 cents a quart IIRC) and then sell them at a roadside stand in the afternoon.  Can't say that I enjoyed the picking too much, but the selling part was okay.  My friend and I got to hang out all afternoon, and we got to meet a lot of people.  Our table of strawberries was positioned low, and it was hot in the summer, so sometimes when the ladies would bend over to look at the strawberries we'd get an eyeful... definitely a major bonus at that age!

After that, I worked for the same family as a beekeeper until I was 16.  They owned about 1200 hives and all summer long we'd be maintaining them and removing the honey.  It was pretty hard work for that age, carrying 40 lb "supers" full of honey to a truck on a hot summer day, with long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, hoping to avoid getting stung too much.  I think I got a whopping $35-50 a week for that, plus beer.

Then when I was 16 I went "corporate" and got a part-time, year-round job at the local grocery store until I left for college.  I really enjoyed that job... worked with good folks and enjoyed the interaction with customers.  I think everyone should get some experience working with the public in some capacity.

I had a lot of other somewhat interesting jobs throughout college.  I think the main thing for me is that from a very early age I had to take responsibility for myself and the things I wanted to have or do.  I didn't come from money at all, so it was always up to me to make things happen and that's been a valuable trait... I've done pretty well so far. 

[WildAboutHarry]

Busboy.  $1.65 per hour.

This job helped me to learn that I did not want to be a busboy for very long.

[ns3]

Busboy.  $1.65 per hour.

This job helped me to learn that I did not want to be a busboy for very long.

Same here but only $.85 /hour + 10% of waitress tips if they were honest about it.

[Kshartle]

Busboy.  $1.65 per hour.

This job helped me to learn that I did not want to be a busboy for very long.

Same here but only $.85 /hour + 10% of waitress tips if they were honest about it.

What was the average age of the waitresses then? Has it changed at all in your estimation?

Hopefully this doesn't derail us.

[l82start]

age 10/11 delivering flyers door to door, rain or shine deep snow or summer heat, i don't even remember what it payed, it was an entry level job for the local paper/advertisers, a sort of pre-paperboy job..  learned about hard work dragging a wagon or toboggan full of flyers through the neighborhood and started developing a good work ethic..  not a bad first job..

[ns3]

Busboy.  $1.65 per hour.

This job helped me to learn that I did not want to be a busboy for very long.

Same here but only $.85 /hour + 10% of waitress tips if they were honest about it.

What was the average age of the waitresses then? Has it changed at all in your estimation?

Hopefully this doesn't derail us.

I don't know what the average age was but the waitresses were mostly older women.

I don't know how the industry has changed as I'm not in it any more but I can make an observation about how the economy has changed. I was able to save enough money to pay my tuition at the Ohio State University working as a busboy part-time during the school months and full-time in the summer. I seriously doubt that this could be done on busboy wages today.

[Pointedstick]

I don't know what the average age was but the waitresses were mostly older women.

I don't know how the industry has changed as I'm not in it any more but I can make an observation about how the economy has changed. I was able to save enough money to pay my tuition at the Ohio State University working as a busboy part-time during the school months and full-time in the summer. I seriously doubt that this could be done on busboy wages today.

College tuition inflation has usually been double or more the general rate of inflation for the last 50 years:



Thanks, government!

If, in the unlikely event that there remains anyone here who is unaware of how this actually really is the government's fault, I would be happy to point it out.

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=Kshartle]What was the average age of the waitresses then? Has it changed at all in your estimation?[/quote]

They were all way older than me.  Then.

[quote=ns3]Same here but only $.85 /hour + 10% of waitress tips if they were honest about it.[/quote]

Goodness, was that minimum wage or some special restaurant classification?  My $1.65 was the summer of the first moon landing.  California minimum wage at that.

[Bob]

I worked as a box boy at a local Alpha Beta Grocery Store in uptown Whittier, California, summer 1969.  Pay  $1.70 an hour.  I previously had worked at my dad's office / warehouse in downtown LA area about once a week during the summers to sweep, clean the bathrooms, put labels on mailings, and other odd jobs.  He gave me .50 cents an hour or $4.00 a day.  In 1966, four dollars went a long way, at least for a 13 year old like I was at the time.  Every few weeks I would work two days a week.  That $8 dollars seemed like a lot of money then.

[ns3]

Same here but only $.85 /hour + 10% of waitress tips if they were honest about it.

Goodness, was that minimum wage or some special restaurant classification?  My $1.65 was the summer of the first moon landing.  California minimum wage at that.

I don't think we were covered under any minimum wage law. This was 1965 in Ohio. I was in Vietnam at the time of the moon landing making only slightly more - probably less if you figure it by the hour.

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=ns3]I was in Vietnam at the time of the moon landing making only slightly more - probably less if you figure it by the hour.[/quote]

Yes, but you got free uniforms, room and board, etc.

By 1971 I was making less than my minimum wage job.  I was in the Navy making, if I recall correctly, about $75 per month.  But I got free uniforms, room and board, ...

[Tyler]

Excluding a few minor gigs as a kid (mowing the neighbor's lawn, walking dogs, distributing flyers for a friend of my parents), my first real-ish job was at a screen-printing shop when I was about 16.  It was owned by the parents of a friend of mine, and paid around $4-5 per hour although I remember my actual pay varying a bit and it was more "whatever they can afford that week".  I was the kid in the back room all day cleaning the used silkscreens with nasty chemicals.  But honestly I liked the job quite a bit.  Working with your hands while listening to the radio all day isn't so bad at all.

My second job was as a temp at a home security company, doing data entry and warehouse work for an exorbitant $7/hr.  My favorite responsibility was manning the shredder.  For some reason I never understood, they printed huge monthly reports on continuous streams of paper (hundreds of feet long if you laid them end to end) with an old dot matrix printer.  I would take the stacks of paper to the back dock, feed one end into an industrial shredder, and sit in a chair nearby waiting to fix the occasional jam.  And when I got bored I would experiment with feeding random stuff into the shredder just to see what would happen. 

[HB Reader]

Setting pins at an old eight lane bowling alley built in 1945 on the second floor of the military Special Services Building at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.  It was 1965 and I think I was paid a $1.10 an hour (my memory may be faulty, but that is pretty close), plus $.15 a game and any tips from bowlers.

The job involved picking up the ball, putting it in the return slot, picking up the downed pins, placing them in the proper slot of the overhead setting device (God Help You if you put one in the wrong slot), and pulling a rope to drop the setting device.  If you were really good at it and could keep track of everything going on in each lane you could cover four lanes at a time.  As a young teenager (13-14), I was only physically capable of covering two lanes at a time.  It was very dangerous as you had to keep track of what was going on in each lane (and I was complete idiot about the dangers).  Most of the pin setters were off duty black Navy sailors working part time. In 1966, they prohibited anyone but active off duty military personnel from doing it, probably because of the potential liability issues.

After that job, I delivered the morning Philadelphia Enquirer everyday from 1967-1968.  It didn't pay a whole lot more but was much safer.