$2.75 making pizza in '82 the summer of Jr year in HS.
Also free pizza and beer when cleaning up after closing.
1985? ish, at the ripe old age of 14, I picked raspberries, got something like 50 cents a quart. It suuucked. As I recall, I’d make like 15 bucks a day.
Sounds like you had them steadily depressin’, low down mind messin’ workin’ at the car wash blues.
My brother (or sister, tbh - I don’t know, lol)! (In mobile home park work.)
I think as a young teen I got a buck an hour babysitting around 1975-76.
9¢ an hour…
Dish crew at a scout camp, back in the 60s. $10/week (plus room and board…or rather, a cabin and camp food).
Yeah, those are the jobs that teach you the value of education, either college or life choices.
After moving back to Anchorage, I ran into a guy I grew up with. He’s hard to miss at 6’8" and bright red hair. We talked briefly outside a store entrance and he told me he had retired from a local supermarket chain as a bag boy, and was living in a trailer park. At the time I ran into him, I was the COO of a construction company. The next time I saw him, he delivered a pizza to my door. I think that in my mind I had just assumed that everyone I grew up with did okay in life. A stupid assumption, of course.
Your story of the carpet cleaning then the carwash put me in mind of somebody’s post I read awhile ago about a really shitty summer job he once had. So I searched it up. Good gosh it was from 2007 = 16 years ago! Anyhow, for your reading pleasure:
Working in my dad’s store. Probably 1985-86 ish. Minimum wage whatever that was at the time.
In 1970 when I turned 16, the company where my dad worked hired me as the Saturday morning mail clerk/receptionist/switchboard operator. I’d have to go to the main post office and pick up the canvas sack full of mail, take it to the office where I’d sit at the reception desk with a headset for the switchboard and open and sort the mail while answering the phone and handling any incoming visitors. I think my shift was 5 or 6 hours and I started at $2/hr.
During the summer, I worked in my Dad’s department (he was the export manager) doing stuff like running mimeographs, doing very light typing (I had to learn that stuff on the job), taking documents to different places in town for signatures, and generally doing whatever needed to be done. Worst assignment was sorting files in the basement. This was in downtown Baltimore before all the nifty tourist development, so the office building was across the street from some fish markets. There was no a/c in the basement, so the open windows let in all the street and market smells.
The files we being readied for long-term storage, so I had to verify that they were in order, load them in boxes, and label the boxes with the file number range. The file folders were neon green - yeah, that wasn’t hard on the eyes at all!! But by that time, I was making a whopping $2.25/hr! At least it wasn’t retail or food service! And file sorting aside, I did learn a lot on that job, especially names of major ports in Europe!
My first “real” job (not counting lawn mowing) was probably working evenings and weekends at Target when I was in high school, probably 1978 or so. No idea what the pay was, probably minimum wage. I worked in the Toys and Seasonal department, which was a nightmare at Christmas time. But springtime was cool - I was the only guy in the department so they’d put me to work putting together lawn mowers and patio furniture for display. I even learned how to mix paint - the hardware department was right next to us and sometimes I’d cover the area while somebody went to lunch.
I was a ticket taker around 1971. I think I made 75 cents an hour. However, I ran a scam with the gal in the booth who sold the tickets, she would sell 2 to a couple and I would only tear one of them in half. Then she would resell the other one and we split the extra loot. We stopped after learning the theater owner was a low-level mob guy and I saw a handgun peeking from his vest pocket.
Not exactly a job: When I was eight years old I was walking home from school one day. When I walked past the barber shop, the barber knocked on the window and motioned me in. He gave me an envelope and told me to take it down the street few blocks and give it to Tony at the pool hall. Tony took the envelope and gave me a quarter. In 1961 a quarter was a lot of money, especially for an eight year old. I did this a couple of times a week and then it suddenly stopped. For a while I was the richest kid in the neighborhood.
Later, as a high school kid I realized that I was running the bets taken at the barbershop to the bookie at the pool hall.
1993, $4.75/hour, route manager at my city’s local weekly newspaper. I made sure all of the paper routes were filled, papers were delivered, bills were collected. If i couldn’t fill a route, i could deliver it myself and pay myself whatever i thought was fair. I typically delivered 5 routes a week myself, and paid myself an additional $100-$150 for the effort.
Mid-80s, cook at McDonalds. Started at minimum wage, probably $3.15 an hour. I wasn’t great at it, but they didn’t fire me, and I got a raise to about $3.50 after six months. Also, 50% off on McD’s food. Quit to work at an ice cream parlor, which was a less work for the same pay.
My first job not counting getting paid to do jobs for my parents was as a groundskeeper at age 16, in 1996. It was at a wealthy family’s weekend house. There was a caretaker who lived there full time; he hired a couple of teenagers during the summer to help him out. Part of the work was typical groundskeeper stuff – mowing, weed whacking, leaf blowing, etc. But the owner was very particular about keeping the woods on the property well groomed. Well groomed meant no sticks or pine cones on the ground, just bare pine needles. So a lot of the work was just picking up sticks and pine cones from the woods and hauling them to the dump. I think I got paid maybe $30 per day, and a typical work day was maybe 8am - 2pm. And the caretaker provided lunch. And occasionally we got free gas – every couple of weeks we would go down to the gas station to fill up the gas cans for the mowers, and we were allowed to fill up our own cars while we were there, and put it all on the owner’s credit card. It was pretty much “informal” employment; we got paid in cash, tax free.
My first “formal” job, with taxes and Social Security and all that, was bagging groceries at Herris Teeter, in like 1998 or 99. I got $6 per hour, just barely above the minimum wage at the time.
1980 . Washed and waxed airplanes, mopped the hanger floor, parts runner,
later promoted to line boy, at the local airport.$3.00 to $3.35 per hour
My first full-time job in radio in 1977 (news reporter, newscaster and DJ) paid $550/month. That worked out to about $2.20 an hour.
I did get a raise to $600/month after three months.
Radio pay then was very low, not that it’s improved much. On the other hand, the hours were terrible and you got to work for and with crazy people.
“The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
Yet another who started at that fine Scottish eatery of McDonalds. 1985, age 17, $3.35/hr. Not the worst job I’ve had in my life (that would be my brief foray into the world of political telemarketing as a college student), but an easy #2. The change from a company store to a franchise within a couple months of me starting was a definite step downwards.