She Works Hard For the Money

This week’s {W}rite of Passage assignment is to re-create our first job, to pick a day that was significant or completely insignificant, job and make the feel like they’re living it.

I started working when I was 14. I was totally into music and clothes and my parents told me that I’d have to find a way to make my own money to buy records (yes, I’m dating myself) because I was too old to continue getting money from them. So I worked out a deal with the guy who owned the hair salon my mom and I went to, to clean the place on weekends. It was a pretty easy job—it was a small shop and it didn’t really take that long. I could go in anytime after they closed on Saturday. I’d go in Sunday afternoons, blast the music and be out of there in a few hours. It was the easiest job I ever had. It didn’t feel like work at all.

But my first REAL job, the first time I really had to work hard, was as a courtesy clerk at Safeway, bagging groceries, running for price checks and wrangling grocery carts. I had just turned 16 years old and wanted a car. Or at least to be able to afford gas so I could drive my parents’ cars.

My mom worked in the corporate office and set up an interview for me after school one day. I walked in there in my Catholic school uniform and teased pink hair, and filled out an application. After interviewing me, they told me if I changed my hair color I had the job. Minimum wage in 1985 was about $4.25 an hour. Safeway paid baggers $5.00 an hour and I was guaranteed a minimum of 16 hours a week—and they’d work around my school schedule. I saw dollar signs.

That weekend I went back to blonde.

Little did I know—I was going to earn every cent of that $5.00. This wasn’t going to be like the beauty salon.

I started work the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and it was so insane I almost felt like I was being hazed. The store was teeming with shoppers who were stocking up for the holiday. Carts were piled high, and maneuvering through the store with or without a cart was a challenge.

After getting into my new uniform—navy blue pants, a checked red, white and blue shirt, red vest with a snazzy name tag and my brand-new red Reebok high tops—I was given a tour of the store and a demonstration of proper bagging techniques.

This was before the days of plastic bags, when we understood mass and space, and groceries were packed tightly into as few bags as possible. Like items went with like—we didn’t pack cleaning supplies with food, frozen items stayed with frozen and eggs and bread went on the top—not the bottom.

I was sent to a check stand without a bagger and stood at the end, waiting for the groceries to come down the belt. They came for almost four hours straight. The checkers scanned an endless amount of food. I hustled, moving from check stand to check stand, lifting dozens of frozen turkeys, packing hundreds of bags and pushing heavy carts out to the parking lot and helping customers load them into their cars.

At the end of my shift, after standing for hours, running around the parking lot to corral carts to replenish them in the store, lifting endless turkeys and bending and lifting over and over,  I was absolutely exhausted. My bones ached, my feet were sore and my back hurt. I was so tired I wanted to cry.

I went home and told my mom I was going to quit.

To her credit, instead of yelling at me—which I fully expected her to do—my mom calmly told me that I didn’t have to keep the job, but I needed work the rest of my schedule because it was the right thing to do.

I went back the next day and it was just as brutal as the day before. But I kept going back and after that first week, it got easier. And I started to make friends at work, which always helps.

A couple of months into the job I told my mom I was glad that I didn’t quit. She told me that she didn’t want to insist I stay because it would have made me want to quit more quickly, but she knew if I stuck it out, it would get better. She reminded me that the first day is always the hardest and that work is going to be hard and no one is going to pay me for slacking off.

I kept that job for two years and then promoted into the deli, where I worked for another couple of years. Until I started in the deli I though bagging groceries was the hardest job I’d ever had.

Not quitting that job was a good lesson for me. By the time I graduated from college and was ready to start my career, I had a long work history behind me and had developed a strong work ethic.

Unfortunately, the clerk who smashed my bread and broke my eggs today hasn’t quite developed the same work ethic yet.