I did. I was 12 years old. The papers were delivered by the newspaper to my street corner. I’d go out at like 6am, put them in my stolen shopping cart. And would throw them on the porch for about 4 blocks.
I would have to also go “collecting” once a week in the afternoon. The subscribers would pay me, and I’d pay the newspaper guy for the papers he delivered to me.
It was not a lucrative job.
This was the early 80’s. I think adults in cars took over soon after. And of course papers hardly exist anymore.
Yes. Mine sounds the same as yours, except that we took the collected money to the newspaper’s office and paid it there, and our newpapers (and any inserts/comics we had to stuff into them prior to folding and rubber banding) were dropped off at our driveway.
Mine was similar to @Somethingwitty1, except it was the afternoon newspaper. I was 12 in 1982. I hated the job but you were signed on for a minimum 3 month commitments and my parents made me stick to it.
I delivered papers (and flyers and occasionally catalogues and maybe phone books) for several years in elementary and high school, in the early 1990s. The newspaper company had truck drivers that would drop off the bundled newspapers to our driveway in the afternoon. When I got home from school, I’d stuff them in a padded canvas bag and deliver them into subscribers’ mailboxes. (AFAIK it’s only the US that has that bizarre law about mailboxes being usable for federal mail only.) It took me three trips to complete my route. On cold days (say, below –30 °C) I’d usually take a break inside to warm up before delivering each third.
If I recall correctly, subscribers had a choice of paying the newspaper company directly (via cheque or maybe direct debit) or paying me in cash every few weeks. In the latter case, I needed to buy the papers from the newspaper company and effectively resell them to the subscribers. But I don’t think I ever had to hand over any money to the newspaper company, since enough subscribers paid the company that the company was the one writing cheques to me.
Overall the pay was quite good; I remember always having a lot more money than most of my schoolmates. The newspaper company also used to invite all the delivery boys and girls (as well as the odd man or woman) to an annual Christmas party where they’d hand out service awards. Everyone got an engraved watch after the first few years of service, and you also accumulated some sort of points per subscriber that you could redeem for items from a catalogue. (These included genuinely useful stuff like name-brand boom boxes and headphones.)
The only bad thing about the paper route, besides the cold weather, was finding people to fill in for me when I was sick or on holiday. Despite the good earnings, very few of my friends and school-aged neighbours had any interest in the work.
I learned that upstanding, erstwhile respectable homeowners will pull the curtains and feign not being at home, stiffing a kid who’d have to pay himself.
I also learned that there wasn’t a damn thing they could do but pay when I returned at 11:00 PM and kept knocking and calling “Monroe Evening Times. Collecting,” so the neighbors woke up too.
I never had a paper route as a kid but my boyfriend was a district manager for a small regional paper when I met him. He was the guy who managed the routes and the drivers, made sure everyone had their papers and got paid. And also the guy who had to cover the routes when the drivers couldn’t do it and couldn’t get a substitute.
It seemed like an absolutely horrible job (the delivery part). His paper is in Ohio’s “snow belt” so 4 months out of the year it was even more horrible.
But, he loved it. Except for the crappy hours and crappy pay, he said there’s something about delivering papers that if you get into it, you really love it. And tips could be good.
He recently went back for a stint as a fill-in, as he’s between jobs. The way it worked out, since he didn’t have a good delivery car (using a 2008 Ford Explorer), he was making just a few bucks an hour after gas and stuff. Yech.
Wow, that’s really terrible. In all my years of delivering papers I never once had a customer who tried to avoid paying. Some of them would be hard to catch at home, and I might not see them for months. But they were always friendly and apologetic when I finally did reach them, and a lot of them even tried to make up for it by paying not only their outstanding balance but also for several months in advance. Customers generally left good tips too.
Delivered the “Redwood County Livewire”, which was a free advertising thing (multiple pages, but just half the size of a regular paper (or thereabouts, long time ago)). It showed up on Wednesdays.
Started out as a Scouting fund-raiser. When the troop collapsed, we split the town in half with another family and continued delivering for a few years.
Nobody really wanted the damn thing, so we didn’t always deliver them all if the weather was bad (but had to find ways to discard them that our folks wouldn’t notice). I remember one cold Minnesota evening where I was absolutely convinced that my foot had frozen and my big toe had broken off (I could feel it in my boot). Turns out I had a small snow/ice ball in my boot, but until I got home and found that out I was having a marvelous pity party about how awful my life was.
I did in the mid 1970s. I had a route of about 40 papers, afternoon Monday-Sat, morning on Sunday. Carried them on foot in a newspaper provided canvas sack with a shoulder strap.
There were only a few people that were hard to catch for collecting; Sometimes they’d be out, sometimes they’d promise to pay me the next day or so. A lot of them would leave the money in an envelope under the door mat, between the storm door and front door, or in the mailbox if it was mounted on their house. Some people always left a small tip, some people never tipped. One of my customers was a local bar, and when delivered, the owner always had me sit down and have a cold soda from the tap.
It was OK, depending on the weather. A thin week might net me 9 dollars, a fatter week 12 or 13. Not bad for a 13 year old or 14 year old without a “real” job.
I didn’t, but a close friend did. I think he made something like $10/day, which certainly sounded like a lot of money at the time (early 90s, high school). But he had a big route, and had to get up at something like 4 am, and spend more time in the evening folding and bagging the papers. All added up, it wasn’t really a great rate, not to mention wear and tear on his car (and gas).
Washington Evening (and Sunday morning) Star, may god rest its soul. Got up at 4 a.m. on Sundays and proceeded to wake up the whole neighborhood with my rusty, squeaky, red wagon. Plus the fact that I played my my transistor radio loudly whilst making my rounds.
Yes, back when I was 7, my older brother and a neighbor teamed up to split the local paper route. The manager was concerned because Big Bro wasn’t quite 9, but Mom’s brothers had routes at the same age so that became a family tradition. The evening route(s) were never in my name but I got to be the substitute and a Sunday morning partner in crime. My main job, also commencing at age 8, was to start babysitting because I was the only girl in the neighborhood who had already had measles when it swept through town.
I still remember chanting “Hi, I’m collecting. It’s a dollar-eighty,” at the neighbors whenever big bro was sick, but I also did it at the customers who would give the boys a hard time but were suckers for girls. I was paid for my efforts, but naturally not much.
When next bro came of age, we got a second route and when the youngest made it, the oldest was ready for a “real” part time job so who did what route shifted but we all kept it up until the evening newspaper folded.
What this did for us was give us strong legs and a small savings to be put towards tuition at the local community or technical college. It taught us to save, be responsible and report for work on time.
Naturally, our work would cut into time to do other things (but middle bro managed to get into trouble anyway) but it also cut into our parent’s time and hurt their schedules and plans just as much as ours. Holidays didn’t stop delivery and neither did extreme cold. We complained and when we were pressed for time to go to church and a hockey game on Sunday morning, the parents would get up and drive us on the routes to make sure got to everything on time.
Nowadays, kids don’t have routes and many don’t work during the school year because their time is regulated by team sports and such. But when I look back, we learned our lessons very well and my earnings between that, babysitting and other jobs paid for much of my schooling. I worked through college too. Good lessons. Thanks Mom and Dad.
Not exactly a paper route but I did distribute flyers for a local painting company when I was about 13-14. In retrospect, it was a weird deal. I’d get a call from what sounded like an elderly lady to check my availability a day or two before the job. Then, a guy in his 20s would pick me and the other three tweenaged boys up and drive us to some suburb we’d never heard of. Dude would drop us off at various points and we’d criss cross the streets to deliver flyers to each mailbox and collect my … $15? when it as done. There weren’t many ways to get money at that age and I was happy to be ‘on the list.’
I also distributed Spanish Yellow Pages for a summer in college. I was the driver and I had two, for lack of a better term, what I’ll call lightly special needs guys, significantly older than me but were independent enough to take the bus from wherever they lived (I remember the boss saying they were very secretive about their residency) to the book place. I drove a full size van with the back packed with phone books around to various specific addresses to deliver a book. We had a great time, it was very easy work. I have no idea why the van had two runners, almost all of the addresses were not where both dudes could be useful.
I delivered a once a week (Thursdays) paper with my older sister for a couple of years. This probably started when I was 9. It was distributed for free so there was no collecting thankfully.
Later my younger brother delivered a daily (except Sunday) paper, the Cleveland Press. It was just after I turned 16 so once a month or so, I’d drive him to collect from those who constantly “didn’t have any small bills”. I’d take larger bills to make change. Somehow they were more cooperative with a driving 16 year old than a walking 13 year old.
I did. I was 10 years old, living in a small town in Pennsylvania, and it was actually a decent paper. Well, it was decent until they decided to issue a major anniversary (100 or 200 years, I don’t recall now) with a humongous issue without any increase in pay to us deliverers. No surprise that almost all of us quit.
The delivery schedule I had was afternoons, Monday through Saturday. Technically, we deliverers bought the papers and then re-sold the papers to our customers. A bit of hassle was we were forbidden to throw the papers onto the customer’s porch, meaning we had to park the bike, hike up to the porch, and leave the paper. The only benefit for that was delivering to apartment building residents.
The biggest hassle was a tie between those who lied about not getting the paper so I had to deliver them an extra paper, cutting into my own time, and those who coudln’t be bothered to pay their bill.
