Sometimes I’m doing something boring at my part time job and I think about my friends who work part time at the mall or at a shop in town. They have to deal with customers or do physical labor or even man a reception desk while watching TV… and for quite a bit less money. That must really suck. If one job paying $X/hr sometimes requires a good cup of coffee, I can’t imagine how bad it’d be at .4*$X. Student jobs. Yuck.
Very MPSIMS.
I don’t know how part-time retail jobs are now - I haven’t worked retail in over 20 years - but the last time I did the part time jobs for students were pretty good. They made just a bit over minimum wage but got a substantial discount on clothing purchases, so lots of students liked them.
If by “student” you mean high school student, say 15 - 17 years old, I’d have to agree. In college, though, some on-campus jobs aren’t so bad. There’s also work-study (which my job wasn’t eligible for, so I’m not sure about this) that I believe gives students a tax break on some of their earnings, too.
I had a pretty nice job during school as an office assistant. It was on campus so I could pop in for two hours before or between classes, and although I started out at minimum wage, we got regular raises. I also really liked my co-workers, but that’s the luck of the draw. They had about 5 or 6 students on staff, and we could each work between 10 and 20 hours per week, depending on our schedules. It didn’t pay a lot, but it was enough to keep me fed and entertained, while my scholarship/loan refund went for books and rent. It also lead into my first “real” job related to my career, so that was another plus. There were times, though, when it sucked: when I’d had to file hundreds of folders, or shred two big boxes of paper, or had answered the phone with “LongWindedDepartmentName, this is beanpod, how may I help you?” so many times I was hearing it in my sleep.
Yeah, there are some real sweet ones. I currently have a part-time job doing tech support in an on-campus library. As far as I can tell, my primary duties involve sitting behind a desk browsing the web, or occasionally doing homework. Every now and then, somebody will come up with a technical question that needs answering, or they will need directions to the restroom. They started me at minimum wage, but with a couple of annual raises, I’m now at almost $10/hour to discharge these duties. My scholarships already pay for all my expenses, so this job is just a nice source of cash on the side. 
I was just reading on another board about a girl who realized she worked 10x harder at her mall job folding clothes, getting yelled at, serving idiots, etc. than she ever has in the corporate world. She was onto something. Then again, if you have that sort of job and are just doing it for extra spending money, you have the freedom to quit. If you need it to get through school, the lack of any sort of prestige, respect or benefits can be painful.
I worked near full-time (and sometimes much, much more) in the local supermarket starting when I was 15. I loved it in a perverse way even though I only made $3.35 on hour plus the rare tip. My family life was godawful at that point with my parents getting a divorce with re-marriages in the works. I became financially independent on that amount of money and even bought my own cheap small pickup. I usually worked 7 days a week on top of high school. The work was often physically demanding like unloading 18 wheelers with just a manual pallet jack and my bare hands.
The people there became like my family and I mostly avoided my real family often working until 2 am on a school night for floor polishing duty. I was well respected by people much older than me and they gave me management privileges even through I wasn’t really a manager. I learned a lot about the lower tiers of the working world as well. That directly served me after I moved to Boston and was looking for my first professional job. A major supermarket chain was thrilled in the interview that I knew what a pallet was and how trucking functions. Fast forward, 7 years later and that same knowledge landed me a consulting contract at a company almost everyone has heard of.
I have a nice professional job now but I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world and would be intellectually impovished without it.
When I did my first degree I used to stack shelves at the local supermarket several nights a week to earn some money. It wasn’t intellectually stimulating, but I didn’t mind because I was getting plenty of that during the day in my actuarial courses. But it did pay well and, just as **Shagnasty ** said, it gave me a whole lot of valuable exposure to parts of the working world that were very different from the professional one for which I was training.
In college, I got to see a car blow up at least once a month, and some type of explosion once every week or two. I also got paid about twice what I had before. My student job was awesome, and I never had to work more than 20 hours a week.
My student job in the campus library remains one of the best jobs I ever had. They had to drag me out of there kicking and screaming after I graduated. I think I learned just as much working there and skimming through the materials as I learned in class.
For graduate school, I had a part-time job with the Housing Department of the East West Center in Hawaii, and that, too, was a very good one. Of course, that entailed a free place to stay, and in Hawaii that is nothing to sneeze at.