In one form or another I can’t name a job I’ve had that no longer exists. The first ones I had were:
After some college:
Does your first “real” job even exist anymore?
Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. It was working the counter at a ‘neighborhood market’, a sort of hybid between a convenience store and a tiny burger joint. This was before franchized convenience stores and mini-marts. Convenience stores and burger joints seem to be doing well.
I think the thing that kept it in the black was the location, which was across the street from the junior high. During the rush before and after school, kids had to go to the outside window. Candy was kept behind the counter.
I don’t know if this was before diet soda, or if we just didn’t sell any. I think the fountain taps were coke, root beer, cherry, and green. I think the green was lime, but it wasn’t carbonated. The cherry would have been called red if it wasn’t a standard thing to order a cherry coke. You can’t make a cherry coke with red.
My boss called me over to act as a witness, once. He had been changing out the cash register and when he threw a handful of pennies on the counter to count, one of them had landed edge-up. I can testify. I saw him throw them and then step back, raising his hands. Then I leaned over and saw it sitting there. It happened.
Hey, my dad was a pin-setter for awhile. He said he had to watch for jerks who would throw the ball while he was still setting the pins. He was authorized to close the alley down for that.
I’d like to see statistics for that.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there are still 30,530 radio and TV announcers (most of those should be in radio), and the job market is expected to remain basically static (maybe a 2% increase) over the next ten years or so.
Even if that’s so, there remain a goodly number of small market stations (like the one where I got my start), able to remain economically viable by paying crappy wages to their announcers. The BLS says the median announcer salary is $29,000. Take into account how that’s skewed by the high salaries made by relatively few top-tier DJs, and you’ll realize that there are people working in Ambient Springs, Arkansas for maybe $15,000 a year.*
*my starting salary back in the late '70s was $550 a month. Of course, I got a big $50/month raise after 3 months. 
I’d be surprised if it did. The company filed for Chapter 11 a couple of years ago, then was bought out by a much larger firm. There was a massive layoff somewhere in there and several divisions, including the mine, were either dissolved or reorganized.
To give you a perspective: At the time I worked for them they were pretty much the only tenant in a rather large downtown office building. After the buyout/layoff, they moved to a much smaller office building across town and take up maybe half of a floor in said building.
I guess I need to know what you mean by ‘real job’
My first job was on a horse farm. That farm is long gone. At the time there were several places around that rented horses by the hour. Not anymore, the liability insurance is too high and any nice large pieces of land got bought up by developers.
McDonalds is still around.
The Chinese carry-out where I worked 40 years ago is still there. I doubt they still get American girls to work the counter anymore as all their kids are grown and speak English. When I worked there the owners barely spoke English.
I don’t know that any of those qualify as real.
My next job was as a bank teller, the job still exists but the S&L I worked for is long gone, bought up but another bank, that was bought by another bank, who knows how many times.
The US Navy facility and the organizational structure still exist. The project itself does not. Something about minesweeping with boats being obsolete…
Bank tellers still exist, but they probably have a lot more free time than I did. On the other hand, the percentage of difficult, scamming, or just plain confused customers is probably higher.
I have a fairly good voice and for a time I was in the midst of three major radio station’s staff and a broadcasting school. I was frequently told I should get into radio. My (entirely pleasant) answer was that if I wanted to roam the country making less than minimum wage working overnight shifts and being fired every time a marketing director had a big idea, I’d be a hobo or a mugger first. The laughs it got were always pained.
My first job was here. While I’m sure kids mow lawns and work in kitchens, nobody’s doing it at the Holland Sporting Club anymore.
While I’m not surprised, I am a bit saddened to know that every single member of the club that I met that summer is no longer with us.
That is genuinely sad. At least the place is still standing. Every building (except one) that was occupied by members of my family in the little town where I went to grammar school has been plowed under or turned into a parking lot. I even had an old thread about “You can’t go home again.”
Back when women wore nylons with creases held up by garter belts, some poor schmuck stood in a 120 degree room putting nylons on upright aluminum legs and sending through a steam machine. I lasted less than a month. And good heavens, I hope no one has to do that anymore.
First job - yes, Burger King still needs cashiers/burger makers/floor sweepers. The particular BK I worked at is gone now, though.
Second job - part-time clerk in the transcription/records department of a large hospital. Electronic records eliminates the need for what I did back then (1979-80) - take physical paper records to each floor of the hospital and file them in the appropriate patient’s charts (for current inpatients) or in the records room (for discharged patients).
Both the place, an elementary school, and the position, assistant janitor, still exist.
My last full-time job was working for a computer company which wrote programs to interface between insurance companies and state DMVs so that the insurers could find out applicants’ driving records. Every state has its own rules as far as what they require in order to issue that information, and every state has its own output information and format, so the company I worked for created a standardized program so that the insurers didn’t have to worry about what they needed to provide to the DMVs and then worry about how to read it.
Oh, my. I had no idea that was a job. My world is wider, now.
I was a PBX operator and office clerk. I’m pretty sure no one anywhere has an honest-to-goodness switchboard with wires that plug into holes, altho some companies do have someone to route incoming phone calls, so that job sorta exists. And, of course, clerks still exist, but I don’t think they run mimeograph machines any longer. In fact, does anyone use mimeographs any longer?
Oh yeah, and I typed on an IBM Selectric - does anyone use typewriters in the age of computers??
First summer job I had was working for the Public Works department in the city I grew up in. Cutting the city’s public grass, trimming trees, making and replacing street signs, changing streetlight bulbs, painting the streets, landscaping the parkways outside residences for new curb projects, etc.
Not only is the city (and probably the summer jobs for the local High Schoolers) still there, but I just looked up their website and am completely shocked to see that my boss is still the Public Works Superintendent.
Circa 1974 I started hand setting lead type from a California job case and printing things on a hand-fed Chandler & Price printing press.
Somewhere there are some throw-back “boutique” print shops that still do this, but when I was doing it, the move from letterpress to offset was still going on and “computer set type” was created by light flashing through spinning negatives onto photo paper that ran through a chemical bath to be developed.
First job for money not paid by my Father was moving an old barrel floated boat dock 8 miles on Ft Gibson Lake in Oklahoma. 1956, age 12.
First part time job not paid by my Father* was as a daily janitor during school & full time summer maintenance man at my high school. 1957 to 1959.
ARMY in 1961.
In my Girl Friday job, I used to be allowed to fill in for the receptionist while she was at lunch. I got to use the PMBX - I loved doing that! All those cords and switches.
My second job was as a stenographer in the typing pool. We all had manual machines (Remington Rand, mine). I used to dream about being able to use the IBM golfball machine.