(This post is already pretty long so I am splitting it into two parts. Part One covers a wide range of jobs I had from age 16 through 25. I did not realize how busy I had been until I put all of this down. There is a bigger point to this story, which I will make in Part Two.)
I had a lot of jobs during my younger years, though not quite this list!
When I asked my son to get a job the summer between high school and college he asked me why. I don’t remember my answer but he did get a job at a local sub shop. This episode brought back the kung-fu flashback when my mom told me to go get a job. (In the Kung-Fu TV show David Carridine would be reminded of a lesson he learned as a young monastic student in a flashback).
Like my son, I was young and afraid. I had no idea how to get a job. I got my first job as a 16 year old at Clark’s Hardware. A friend had the job but was leaving for his next, better step up the income ladder. He put a good word in for me so when I timidly went to see Mr. Clark, the process was only a little painful.
This was the early 1970’s, before Home Depot and Lowe’s controlled the market, when there were still mom and pop hardware stores. I learned how to cut glass, mix paint, check in inventory, wait on customers, and use the cash register. I also had to clean the bathroom and the paint mixer. The worst part of the job.
Mr. Clark only paid $1.35 an hour, thirty cents less than the minimum wage at the time. Small businesses were allowed to pay less than minimum wage back then. Today (at least where we live now) for a child to work, forms must be filled out and signed by the school. There are limitations on how many hours and which hours children may work and what kind of jobs they can hold. In Texas in the ’70s they did not seem to care.
This was important because I came to love work, and the paycheck, much more than I loved high school, which I considered to be a baby-sitting exercise (I still do). Note with pride though that both of my kids excelled in high school and received great scholarships so this is a do what I say, not what I did article, especially in this day of ridiculously high college costs. In Texas in the ’70s college was almost free. I also started college while in high school, cementing my low opinion even more.
About four months into the job, in the fall of my junior year, I learned that the grocery store a few doors down might be hiring. I checked it out. They paid minimum wage. While I had enjoyed working at the hardware store and learned a lot from Mr. Clark, it was my turn to climb the income ladder. I joined the grocery store. I think I worked at the hardware store on Saturdays until he found a replacement.
I worked at the hardware store on weekdays from 4-6ish PM after school, helping to close. Yes, mom and pop stores closed at 6 PM. I rode my bike home by 6:30. Still time to do important things like watch TV (or do homework which I did not do much of).
At the grocery store I worked until closing at 9 PM. Got home by 9:30. Even less time to do homework. Did not like homework. Liked my paycheck. Win-win. I sacked groceries, escorted customers to their car, and loaded them in the trunk. Sometimes I got tips.
In today’s grocery store world, I bring my own bags, use a store-supplied scanner to scan the prices, pack my bags, and check myself out (in truth I often use a human register because coupons have a high failure rate). Bob Dylan, cleanup on aisle 3.
The grocery store I worked at was called Tom Thumb. When not sacking groceries, I was putting soda bottles in their respective cages (Dr. Pepper, Coke, Pepsi) for pickup. These bottles had deposits and the customers returned them. We had to organize them by vendor for pickup. I also mopped floors after the customers left and cleaned bathrooms.
After some months doing this I wanted to earn more money. The stock crew was the next step up. I asked to join. I had to wait for an opening but one came after a bit and I joined. I did not get a raise immediately. I had to prove myself, but one came after a few months in the new position. Until I got the raise, it was sort of a decrease in pay, as I no longer got tips for loading groceries in shopper’s cars. But I did not have to clean the bathrooms anymore, so it was worth it. I think I got more hours as the stockers stayed until the job was done, which was often quite late. As mentioned above, there were no student job police back then, but there was mom. She laid down the law with the store manager – I had to be released at 11 PM, done or not. This probably did not do well for my standing among my fellow workers! I was pretty tired in the mornings at school as it was, so thanks mom.
This is the tool (it is called a Garvey) I used to mark cans:
I worked that job through high school and college. I got assigned my own aisle in the store – it featured soups, canned tuna and similar items, macaroni and cheese and similar boxed items, beans, and pig’s feet. I ordered products for the aisle and came to learn about supply chain issues. Sometimes there was not enough shelf space allocated for some products given the demand. Some suppliers were not reliable. The goal of ordering was to have enough stock on hand without running out, while minimizing the amount of stock in the back room (we called this back stock, but that term has another meaning as well). I became expert at minimizing back stock while keeping stock on the shelf. I took a lot of pride in this. When our store manager had visitors to the store, including his bosses, my aisle was the one he made sure they came down, knowing it would be in great shape.
Today the scanning systems in the supermarket do this job, determining when to order more based on how fast product is moving through the register.
At some point while in college I got promoted to another job, working the cut and mark crew. By this time I was in another store (my boss had been promoted and I followed him). It was a larger store that was stocked at night. I was part of a two man team that unloaded the truck, validated the inventory, separated the inventory by aisle, cut the boxes opened and marked the prices. The night crew then loaded their boxes on the dolly, trucked them to their aisle and stocked the already marked items.
I did this job full time during the summer. It was a five day a week job, one of the days being a weekend and one a short day in the evening. I had one full day off during the week and most of the other day off as well. Occasionally I got bored with this much time off. I filled that time with one day assignments at Manpower, helping some business with some odd job or another. One time I attached TV sets securely in motel rooms to they could not be stolen. Interesting experiences.
My mom had been working in a Market Research firm and she invited me to work there on some of these other days off. So I worked a telephone, calling people to see if they had seen a certain TV show the night before and if so, did they see the Jello commercial, and if so, what did they like about it.
Unlike high school, I cared about my college grades. As I was continuing to work around 25 hours a week the first two years of college, I only took 12 hours a semester. I attended a local community college so I was able to live at home. This allowed me to save money. I managed to get the rest of my credits through some summer school and clep tests. Those first two years I got all As and one C (see my post ‘Success has Two Cs.’
I spent 5th semester in Israel, living on a Kibbutz and attending the University of Haifa. I worked four days a week and attended University two very long days, earning 16 hours of credit. For work, they had me washing dishes, gardening, using a fire hose to clean a pool (that was fun), spraying something toxic on avocado trees, picking avocados, moving chickens from an open coop to an industrial coop (they loved this – not).
I got back from Israel barely in time to turn around and go to Austin to finish my degree. During that time I worked at another grocery store owned by the same company that employed me back home. There I worked mostly as a checker. No scanners back then. We had to work a register, ringing up each item.
After graduation I flew to Maryland to interview with a government agency. Although I had a liberal arts degree, I scored well on math and computer capabilities on a test they gave me. They had a program to transform liberal arts majors into computer folks, as they needed more of them, and they had determined that us liberal arts folks made better managers because we had better communication skills. As I type this I am an IT Senior Manager at private company, so perhaps they had this figured out.
I worked that last summer after college in the grocery store, saving more money. I had enough to pay the security deposit, first month’s rent, buy a bed and other items, ship a bunch of stuff, and still moved out with about $3000 in the bank. That was real money in 1979.
A GS-7 did not make a lot of money back then. I had decided to not buy a TV. So a few months into being there I got tired of looking at walls. I got an evening job doing taxes (see the Success post again).
I did get raises but I also got married. My wife was a full time graduate student – she did bring money in as a Teaching Assistant, which also waived most of her tuition and fees. Still, I felt we needed more money, and tax season was, well, seasonal. So, I got a third job teaching programming at a local evening school for adults who signed up for student loans to retrain. Six months after getting married we bought our first house, a townhouse condominium. My wife also had some savings so we were able to put 20% down, avoiding PMI.
I kept myself out of trouble in those early years by working. Not busy enough, I also got my Master’s degree, taking evening classes and $10,000 of student loan debt. I really only needed about $7,000, so I banked $3000 of it (probably not the wisest financial move, but also not the dumbest one I ever made). My payments were about $116 per month and I paid it off on time in 10 years. As my income grew it became less of a big deal. I would not recommend student loans for undergraduates and today I would only recommend them for certain programs like medical school. The cost of education is just too high now.