Are high school jobs a thing of the past? (#25)
A run down of the crappy jobs I had in high school and why they were so important to me
My parents took me to buy my first car on my 17th birthday. Up until then, I had driven my mom’s very rad Buick Skylark. Sometimes when I was wanting a deathlike encounter, or when I wanted to look extremely cool, I’d take out the family Astrovan, the one with the insanely high center of gravity and the slightly schizophrenic cruise control that would randomly toggle on and off (maybe I just didn’t know how to use it?). At long last I would be able ditch the family-mobiles and light some shit up in my own sweet ride!
We went to the Toyota dealership at Gwinnett Place Mall outside of Atlanta and roamed around the parking lot for about 20 minutes. I would pick out a sweet looking truck and say “how about that one” and they would say “keep looking”. Or how about a Toyota MR2, the sporty as hell speck of a car that I likely would not even fit into. They would nod and say “keep going”. Finally my mom and step dad steered me towards the service area where a lonely, boring, extremely base model 1988 Toyota Corolla sat. It was a 5 speed, had about 100k miles on it, didn’t have power windows OR power steering, and well, looked kinda lame.
I paid the car no mind until I walked past it and my mom and step dad stopped. I turned around and they said “this is your car”. And I said “wut” and they said “yes, this is yours!”
I was not ecstatic. My dreams of driving a rad 4runner or speedy MR2 were dashed with this….car.
But hey, my parents had bought me a car! Except….they hadn’t.
They handed me the coupon book for the car and said “payments are $100 a month, insurance is about $85 a month, gas will be whatever, oil changes, …..”. They kept talking but all I could hear was the teacher from Charlie Brown. Womp womp womp woooooomp. I didn’t even pick out the car. I was assigned one.
This was my introduction to real responsibility. I’d had a job since my 16th birthday (like exactly my 16th birthday) and before that, I’d had “jobs”. Mowing lawns. Washing cars. Babysitting the demon children across the street (who called 9-1-1 anytime I watched them). But those weren’t jobs. They were tasks that someone gave me money for.
A job is a place you clock into, get yelled at by an overworked grocery store manager, and one that sends you a 1099 in January. You work with all sorts of people, from the lifers who will happily work in the deli until they drop dead from ingesting too much sodium from the cold cuts to the managers vying for a district job with better pay to the kids from your rival high school. As far as I’m concerned, a high school job is a transformative experience. A task is something you do to buy a few nintendo games.
And here’s the bonkers thing (to me anyway): since I got my first job in 1993, the number of high school age kids with part time jobs has fallen by 35%!
This article points at increased workload at school, competitive college admissions, and competition from older adults as the reason for why HS kids aren’t working as much as they used to. But what are kids missing out on by taking 7 AP classes instead of working at the local hardware store after school? I reached into the wayback machine to think about the multitude of jobs I had as a kid and what I took away from them. Behold, for you are about to take a trip back to the very beginning of my extensive and impressive CV
Kroger - Where I learned the daddest of dad moves
I feel like bagging groceries is a right of passage. I am a 44 year old man who frequently looks at kids bagging my groceries now and thinks “these punks have no idea what they’re doing. WHO PUTS A CARTON OF MILK IN WITH THE BAG OF PASTA GAH!”
I went to the Kroger down the street from my house on my 16th birthday, applied that day, and was hired about 20 minutes later. I was paid $4.25 an hour and showing up, getting yelled at my random shitty managers, cleaning up puke in the aisles, wrangling carts in the parking lot during a rain storm, and everything in between taught me that there are people in this universe that don’t look like my parents or my baseball coaches or my teachers. They were (are) blue collar folks just trying to make a living and watching them rotate through the universe taught me so much about empathy and what a shitty day really means (also taught me how to talk your way out of getting caught stealing snickers bars).
But most of all at this job, I learned a keen dad move in the dairy section one night (does that sound perverted? maybe). I can’t remember who I was working with that night but we accidentally knocked over an entire roller cart full of cartons of milk. I watched about 40 gallons of milk fall over in slow motion like I was watching a car crash on repeat. They came cascading down, exploding on contact with the ground.
The 2% milk tsunami covered the back of the dairy section with about a half inch of milk. We patiently waited for it drain…but it didn’t. The drain was clogged. 16 year old TJ instinctively knew what to do. And so did his coworker. But they feared reaching down into the drain for they knew what awaited them was a fistful of gross. We summoned a manager who came over, looked at us, and said “did you try to unclog the drain?”.
We shook our heads like nervous school boys. No way am I doing that for $4.25 an hour. He chuckled, as he often did at managing stupid 16 year olds, and reached down into the drain with his bare hand. HIS BARE HAND YOU GUYS. And yanked out handful of some truly heinous looking shit. The milk disappeared in seconds and I learned, in that very moment, that one day I would be a dad who had to reach into some truly perilous looking clogged drain and need to yank something out with my bare hand.
I held that job for another year working with a bunch of friends, derelicts, losers, and some amazing people. I also met Jake the Snake Roberts there. It was a great, and terrible, first job.
Sports Town - Where I learned that jail totally blows
When my parents bought me a car but didn’t actually buy me a car, I said to myself “TJ, it’s time you got a raise. $4.25 isn’t gonna cut it”. Also working at a grocery store is fine for about 10 months until you realize there are better things out there.
Like working at a sporting goods store!
I went to work at Sports Town, a sporting goods store with a handful of locations around Atlanta. I started as a cashier, learning the ins and outs of counting cash back to customers, telling customers that I had nothing to do with the price of whatever the hell they were buying, and accidentally ruining someone’s American Express card in one of those old school credit card slider thingies (this was 1994 y’all). I rose through the ranks quickly and was promoted to supervisor. I was making $5.50 an hour now. I was rich as hell.
Until I stole that one thing.
I got an absolute wild ass hair one day and took a merchandise credit “slip” to another store to try and buy 2 dozen golf balls. This is a real story and I am super dumb. 2 dozen golf balls. Who does that? The manager was like some kind of hawk from hell and looked me dead in the eyes and said “where did you get this credit??”. I folded like Chunk from the Goonies when the Fratellis demanded that he tell them everything. I cried. I spilled my guys. I stole a credit and tried to use it to buy golf balls!
I expected to be fired on the spot and sent home.
Instead she called the cops and I spent 36 hours in Dekalb county jail (waiting to see a judge). I was in with actual adults and actual criminals and everyone was…pretty nice to me? I learned how spades (the card game) is *really* played, that sleeping under a bed sucks, and that no matter what, the color of my skin conferred a privilege that I neither deserved nor understood (at the time).
Kmart - Where I learned that the customer isn’t always right
I’m not sure I learned *that* much at Kmart. I met my future ex-wife there (she in lay-a-way, me a stockboy. Romance coming out of every pore). I worked with my future college roommates there. It was fine. Everything was fine.
But the thing that sticks out to me about this job is that it was roughly at the beginning of the “the customer is always right” revolution. Walmart blazed this trail where any dipshit could return whatever the hell they wanted and they’d take it back. Kmart was like the dumb little brother compared to Walmart and their attempts at replicating that philosophy brought out alllllll the dumbasses.
Until some guy tried to return some totally dumb shit to Mr. Lacey. Mr Lacey was one of my managers for about a year. Short, feisty, foul mouthed, and with a pretty great 1980s mustache, Mr. Lacey took no shit from nobody. This extended to customers who tried to return completely dead, unwatered, uncared for Christmas trees. The clerk or supervisor that was taking it back argued with the customer and the customer called for a manager.
Mr. Lacey stepped in to politely inform the customer that, hey, you can’t return this, sorry! They complained and threatened to take their business to Walmart. “Fine” said Mr. Lacey. He backed up his supervisor and maybe he lost a customer (did he really care? unlikely). But even to this day, I think about this when dealing with terrible customers. Often they’re just not worth the trouble. The customer ISN’T always right.
Landscape Maintenance - Where I learned….nothing?
I learned absolutely zero at this job and I’m only including it because it was my last job before leaving for college and I kinda love this story. My two best friends from high school, Josh and Jason, worked at this job and got me the gig. So I was going to spend my last 2 months before heading off to college working with my buddies? Hell yes!
On the very first day of the job, I was “taught” how to use one of the big fancy industrial grade lawn mowers. Not some Husqvarna, Home Depot, pedestrian mower. Nooooo. One of them mowers that is basically a 4 wheeler with a sled behind it, cruising along at 15 MPH. It was powerful.
To make matters worse, the first day was working at the company owner’s house. He had acreage and one of our jobs was to mow his yard. So there I was, standing behind this lawn mower / dune buggy with a blade on the bottom, wondering how to actually use this thing. A smarter man would have started out in the middle of a wide open field, giving himself wide berth to almost kill himself (or someone). But not me. I was bold. I was in the corner of the yard. About 20’ from the fence line. With a beautiful, white picket fence.
I climbed on the back of the mower, followed the “instructions” I got from Josh, pushed the throttle forward, and before I knew it, I had plowed through the white picket fence. I full on ran that damn thing over. I hopped off the mower, looked at the wreckage behind me, and started to panic. I’d had this job for like 45 minutes?!?! And now I just ran over the boss’s fence!
I was left with little choice but to prop the fence back up and move on like nothing had ever happened. It worked because no one said anything to me the rest of the summer.
These jobs taught me so much (except the last one; I didn’t learn shit there). Summer jobs, part time jobs, and odd jobs give you the opportunity to see all kinds of people. And learn things that an AP class can never teach you.
What’s your high school job memory?
This is a great post. I'm glad I took a break from my actual job to read it. LOL.