Welll… it may not be gone, gone. I just know that every single Hardee’s that I knew existed in my state has been converted to a BK. They may exist outside the state though.
I was an admissions counselor at my alma mater. What a great first job. The pay was lousy, but I didn’t need much, and I got to travel all over. I made a lot of great friends who worked in similar jobs at other colleges.
And it made me realize that while I didn’t want to be a recruiter all my life, I did want to stay involved in Higher Ed. So I went to grad school in a Higher Ed program, and now I work for a University.
In high school, I got a job writing educational programs for the Apple II that could be used by elementary schools. (The Apple hadn’t been out long, there wasn’t a lot of software available, and the schools really weren’t sure what to do with these new computers at first.)
I followed that up with summer jobs doing database setup, data entry and database maintenance for the school district.
They were really great high school jobs - good pay, low stress, experience that looked good on your resume. I didn’t fully appreciate until years later what cushy jobs these were for a high school student (compared with, say, fast food or other retail).
There’s a Hardee’s or two here in New York.
My first job that I was paid for was when I was 17. I worked the counter at a posh celebrity bakery. I got the job because one of the owners had been forced to move away from his family due to excessive pot usage, and my mom took him in. So he owed her.
The good thing about it was that this guy was a chef and a caterer primarily and he hated having to run a bakery, hated his partner and HATED dealing with the customers. So we, the workers, were allowed to influct the punishment we saw fit on anyone that made our job harder.
For example, there was a whiny office girl that always ordered a bunch of items for delivery and then, without fail, called back and complained about what we sent her. One day, my boss happened to get her on the phone, and got so pissed that he cut off not only her, not only her entire office, but the whole entire BUILDING from getting deliveries. And if someone called for a delivery, we were to inform them that the whole building was cut off due to Sally in Smith Company on the fifth floor being a bitch.
I worked for Hardee’s too - started when I was 14. The one I was working at was bought by Marriot, who also owned Roy Rogers. They closed it and shipped all the emplyees to the Roy Rogers down the road, then converted the Roys to a Hardee’s, then converted it back… last time I was back there, it was a Boston Market.
My first full-time (40+ hours/week) job was for a landscaping company just outside Annapolis, Maryland. We did plantings, lawn care, and landscaping maintenance, but my favorite part of the job (and I believe the most profitable part of the business) was laying concrete pavers. We did driveways, patios, walkways, etc. We had a big job in the Naval Academy Stadium about 10 years ago - we put in a walkway around the clubhouses at the end of the field that said “GO NAVY” in the middle in contrasting colored bricks. I worked there (summers) for four years, and my brother worked there for 4 or 5 years also (two years overlapping). I think a couple of his friends still work there.
My first job was as a lab assistant in a plasma collection center. I had to get a lab coat, so I went to a uniform shop at the local mall. This being high summer in San Diego, it was a very bright, sunny day, and when I walked into the shop my eyes took took a while to adjust to the indoor light. So while I was blundering around with my eyes still dazzled, I evidently wandered a little too close to an open dressing room where two large ladies were trying on nurses’ uniforms. One of them gasped, but the other told her, “Honey, he’s in the medical profession–he’s seen it all already.”
First job (real or otherwise) was stacking boxes on a local fruit farm the summer I turned 13. I made $3.15/hour (this was the summer of 1984). They actually had a specific name for the job - “palletizing.” The boxes weighed between 20 and 35 lbs. depending on the size of the fruit and how it was packed. Boxes were stacked onto pallets, six to a level, 10 levels high. I could only stack 9 high so one of the other guys had to do the top level for me. I did farm work every summer until I moved to Germany when I was 19. I eventually worked up to forklift driver, truck driver, and then foreman.
By the time I left I was positive that I never wanted to work in agriculture again.
And I haven’t.
My first real job was at age 16, I did phone surveying, but only for five weeks. After that it was a couple years as a cashier at K-Mart. For most of my college years I was a grader or lab assistant for various professors.