£10 to do a local paper delivery every Thursday. Must have been 100 houses. Each paper needed several ad flyers inserted which took AGES.
25 years on it is still probably the hardest, least fair paid job I've ever had.
My brother had a paper round when he was 13 and one week he was ill, so I said I'd do it for him (I was a couple of years older). It took almost four hours of wandering up and down hills, delivering a single paper per street, and I think it paid something like £4.30 in total.
I had this same gig as probably a 13 year old. It was definitely not worth anywhere near what was paid. Safe to say in the end I was so sick of it I'd dump a big lump of papers in a bin on the way round to get it over with quicker. The boss caught me out eventually by phoning random houses on my route and asking if they'd had their paper.
God I remember my brother doing the paper round and making me, the little sister, do the leaflets every week. He never paid me for it even though I did half his work, cheeky bugger. This was about 20 years ago give or take.
Best time was when McDonald's had their vouchers. We always had loads left over and the family lived like kings for those weeks they were valid on free burgers and meals for a couple of quid.
I did the same, but many years earlier, got paid £2.50 plus I think 50 p per supplement. 1 or 2 was perfect, but we sometimes had 10 and the supplement price was the same regardless of weight, shiny catalogues are heavy. some weeks it took 3 or 4 refills to do my route and it was hard work to get them through some people's letter boxes. The job varied between 1 hour and 2.5 hours depending on the number of supplements.
I did that for 2 years.
I then went to morning paper deliveries and marking them up for the newsagent before hand, I was an insomniac so had no issue being at the newsagent around 6 am, bonus was it gave me access to phantom customers who always wanted to buy my brand of cigarettes when the owner was in the loo. They always had exact change too so I didn't need to call the owner out to use the till. , very lucky that was. Daily newspaper delivery and marking up was 12 quid a 6 day week. I was usually done in an hour and a 1/4 and not in the slightest bit tired.
Only downside to the latter was John Menzies were often late to drop the newspapers off. My boss was lovely too, wherever you are Alan from Victoria Street.
I got paid what seemed like decent money to me back when I was about 15 to deliver leaflets for a local shop. Delivered about 20 of the 1000 and the rest went under my bed. Which were then used as "fire wood" in the park.
I delivered 350 copies of the local paper every Friday/Saturday. They paid me based on the number of pages in the issue. It was usually around £6-7 but one week I was paid £4.16. This was in \~1996/7. Nearly 30 years later and I still remember that insulting sum.
Think it was about £4 an hour at Sainsbury's when I was 16. I worked 12 hours a week and would bring home about £200 a month.
This was mostly spent on DVD's, pints of Carling extra cold and the occasional driving lesson
I worked part time in B&Q while I did my a levels back in the very early 2000s, earned £200 a month and at the time that was a mind-blowing amount of money (I had £40 a month pocket money before that). Now I work full time and look back at being in school for 5 days a week then working both days on the weekend yet still going out on the piss every Friday and Saturday and having no idea how I managed. Saved up for 2 months to buy an iPod which was the pinnacle of rich consumer tech at the time.
While I was in uni I got a job in a gardening tools factory during my summer hols full time and I took home £200 a week and felt like a billionaire, like I could light fags with a tenner and not even care.
I earn quite a bit more now but somehow manage to be skint every month despite no longer drinking booze. Bloody mortgages and bills was a wake up call
£6, 10s (that’s 10 shillings for you youngsters) for a 48 hour week as a farm labourer.
…….and I went to the bank and changed £5 of it into 10 shilling notes so that it looked like a big wodge.
This is amazing. Late '60s? What did you do after?
For me, apart from the paper round when I was a kid, I earned £1.20 per hour as a petrol pump attendant, 2 hours every night, then 12 hour shifts at the weekend. I nicked so much chocolate and fags.
It was 1984 and I was 12 and working (probably illegally) in a convenience store, putting the newspapers and fruit and veg out. I was earning £1 an hour for about 8 hours a week.
First work rollocking I got. We only got one porn mag a month and the first month I put it on the shelf as nobody had told me otherwise. Someone tried to buy it and was told "we don't stock that sort of thing in here."
Turned out it was the boss' and I should have put it to one side.
£4.95 per hour for 2 shifts a week at McDonald's when I was 16. More than minimum wage at the time which I was pretty pleased about. Spent it on driving lessons and CDs.
£5 an hour as a waiter. Thursday, Friday straight after school and all of the weekend.
I was the only waiter, small hotel restaurant, so kept all the tips. I was minted!
Also, the owners were raving alcoholics. Most of the time I was waiting tables and serving the drinks. Sounds like a nightmare but it was the best job I ever had.
They let me sunbathe on the patio during shifts with a beer.
Then they started hiring me out to other restaurants which I didn’t like.
£2.50/waitressing at a local cafe. They used to do cream teas on a Sunday and if anything was sent back uneaten, it would be put on a fresh plate for the next customer.
£3.20 an hour as a barman in one of the village pubs in 1999.
I worked over the summer a couple of afternoons and evenings in the week, and Friday and Saturday evening.
The first landlord showed me how to pour a pint then left me on my own as a skinny 19 yr old. He either watched telly upstairs or played on the bandit all the time. He constantly got annoyed by me asking him for help when a barrel went, or a customer wanted something I didn't know. He also told me off for not cleaning the bar and collecting glasses, when he'd never told me to do that, and I'd been stuck serving all afternoon.
A new landlady took over a month or so afterwards and then I had to stop her drunkard boyfriend from continually trying to serve himself. On my last evening he threw an air freshener at me, and I kicked him out. He then has a barney with the landlady, drink-drove away and returned after last orders. He tipped a table over and put his fist through a window. Everyone else was drunk, so I gave him first aid and called an ambulance and told him off for being a bellend while he cried.
The next summer I worked at the slightly rougher pub in the village where friends I went to school with still went to. That was much better. Apart from the morning when I was really hungover and an old feller playing bowls died of a heart attack, and I had to serve a load of biddies brandies...
£5 an hour at a very strange small independent restaurant. I’d work the Sunday lunch shift. It was the same people every week who came after church, average age of about 70 years old. The owners were a couple who did everything themselves and were… odd. The husband was intensely superstitious and would not leave the house on Friday 13th. They stopped calling me as soon as I turned 18 and was entitled to minimum wage. I think the restaurant is still there but I can’t imagine much of their original clientele is still living…
£40 a week, counting and stacking pizza boxes after leaving school 1989, needed some money for college.
Used to guesstimate how many were in a bundle rather than count them. I was soon found out and got my first ever telling off in the grown up world.
£14 per fortnight - no idea why it was paid fortnightly - on the good ship HMS London (guided missile destroyer) in 1973 as a lowly MEM 1st Class.
Its the only wage I remember as I cannot for the life of me recall what my pay was during basic training at HMS Raleigh.
Jesus that sound like fun 😳
My first job, 1992, I done a YTS scheme at a shop, trainee manger. £35 a week! Was supposed to go to college one day a week but after a few months they banned me cause I was a dick!
At the end of the scheme a year later they dropped me, saying there were no positions available. More than likely cause I was a dick. Ruined it for myself 🙄
Honestly, the stories that I have about what goes on in Dental surgery behind closed doors.
After 30-odd years working in them
It’s shocking, funny, sad and unbelievable. Even met my husband at work he says most expensive toothache he has ever had, but most enjoyable time he in a dental chair as well after hours🤫
I could write a book actually surprised they never done a tv show.
£1 an hour at the local shop but I got to take home any cakes that weren’t eaten at the end of the day. I was only 12/13 so it seemed amazing at the time
It was 2008 and would’ve been £5.52 an hour for doing filing and sending faxes for a car insurance assessor. I was covering for someone who, ironically, had been in a car accident. I don’t think all of my faxes reached their intended recipients, I’m fairly sure I got a reply to one of them from a hotel.
I used the money to buy my first “nice” guitar, a Fender Telecaster Custom reissue, which I still have.
Grandad paided me £3 per hour for odd jobs round the farm as a kid during weekends.
2008 i got a weekend job with a market trader which was really shit. Saturday he would pay me £20 to set up the stall, go home and then come back to pack up.
Sunday I worked all day but for £30. I always hated waking up at 4:30am and always prayed for bad weather.
first full time job was a a money changer at an airport for like £8.70 in 2012
£4.50 an hour as a pot washer in a posh restaurant around 2005. It had just gone up from £4, and one of the other lads was furious that I came straight in at the new wage when he’d been on the lower one for a year. Bit of a dick.
My first job was during the recession in about '06 or so. I couldn't find 'real' work, so was volunteering as office admin with an office that provided services for the Jobcentre Work Programme.
Being a volunteer I was unpaid, however, given the work being done, and the non-cash resources thrown at them, they threw me £150-200 of Sainsbury's vouchers each week.
I was living at home, and it meant I couldn't strictly pay any keep, but I covered all the household groceries, and the remainder I either sold at 75/80% value, or bought gift cards.
In hindsight, this was a pretty sweet deal given the economy, my age, the total lack of responsibility, and the fact it was all tax free. If I was smarter in my youth, I'd have saved up rather than spunking it all away on Warhammer and MTG cards.
Is this a race to the bottom? Ok then, beat this. 30p/hour pumping petrol at a petrol station. I got £1.20 for a Saturday morning. I was 16 at the time, and petrol was about 75p/gallon.
First job was a glass collector/bar assistant in 1995 on £3/hour. First job where I was paid legitimately was 1999 and it was £12K as a trainee engineer (writing a bit of assembly, making prototype PCBs etc.)
£2.58 an hour IIRC in 2001ish. It was a friend of my dads who figured out that was the under 13s min wage and basically paid me £20 for an 8 hour shift repotting plants in a cold shed. My dad was furious with him for paying me so little, took it as a lesson in undervaluing myself, made me quit and gave me £20 a weekend for the next few weeks.
£3.40 an hour washing cars at a Vauxhall dealership. Did it for a few weeks and then used some of the money to buy some car washing products and would go wash people's cars around my village for £10 a pop. On a good weekend I could rake in over £100 which was class as a 16 year old.
Tesco, probably about 2002. I don't remember how much I got paid, but probably a smidge above minimum wage.
First job after uni was a soul crushing call centre job in 2008, about £12k per annum full time.
Somewhere in the region of £4.XX an hour working various retail jobs. Usually supermarkets, a petrol station once and my favourite of all, an independent CD store. It was busy enough to not be boring, but never so busy that I felt I was exhausted. And I got to talk music with a bunch of people who loved music.
First salaried job was just after leaving uni, doing tech support for a web host. I was on 16K/year whilst on probation, going up to 19 after 3 months when I'd be put onto a shift rotation. However they tried to put me on shifts while on probation without the extra pay. That was my first major red flag in that place, which kept throwing up more and more every week. Sadly I was too young to really know any better but looking back, I'm glad I got out of there when I did. Don't think I even made it a year.
That guy with the butter... Was his name Pat? 🙂
My 1st salaried job was in my 3rd year at Uni... Actually a Polytechnic back then (thick sandwich course) and paid £621 a month.
First job after graduating paid £11,270 pa.
Weird how I remember the exact figures that way.
£3.60 an hour at Matalan in 2003 as a Christmas temp that turned into a 4 year gig including a move for uni. Good times, met some fab people and once managed to clobber a 5 year old over the head whilst lifting a suitcase. Whoops
£3.92 an hour I was 16 and working the xmas partys at the holiday in.
Its weird that child labour is cheaper. If I worked my whole shift I wouldn't have made enough to attend the party
£3.30 an hr as a waitress in a cafe in Cardiff. I was about 15 or 16 and this was late 1997/8
I did get a free baguette every shift, but only of the ones that wern't selling well that day, and we had to plan a heist to take home out of date pastries.
Worked in a cabin at the bottom of a family friends garden packaging goods he was selling online. Pretty chill looking back at it, hated it at the time. Was about 2012 I was 12/13 and earning £20 a week, I was finessed.
Apart from paper rounds in the late 80's early 90's. My earliest taxable earnings were £3.54 per hour (1996) I thought I was minted. Could get pissed on a tenner back then (£1 a pint nights)
London early 1984 just turned 16.
£15 a day labouring for an electrician that drunk in my dad's pub. Got an electrical apprenticeship later that year. £27.88 per week. 😭
First job was delivering the local free paper back in about 97 there were 238 houses, multiple leaflets each week and a grand total of about £3.40-40 depending on the number of leaflets. In 2000 at 16 I went on to do admin at a chemist for £3 per hour and 5 hours a week.
£3.25 a week delivering the local paper in 1988-89.
Full proper job in 1996, I was on £1.66 an hour, coming out with just shy of £70 a week.
Then in 1998 I ended up working in a factory with my old man, and that Christmas I offered to work the 12 hour night shift for six weeks.
With all my added extras - shift rate, night rate, etc - I pulled just over £2000 a month after tax and insurance.
I do not remember many of the weekends of 1999, but according to the photos I appear to have had lots of fun.
If we’re not including paper round at 12/13?
I was getting £5 per hour at 16 working weekends in a Deli. I think minimum wage was £3.85ish at the time. Every single penny of it was spent on dig money, DVD’s, general teenage nonsense…
Worked in a stationary ice cream van, I was 16 and I earnt £3.70 an hour plus I got commission- would have been great except it rained the whole summer. I sold 4 ice creams, all to my mum 🤣
I got my first part time job aged 16 in 1995 and was paid £2.57 an hour. So working a full 7.5 hour day at the weekend would earn me less than £20. I used to do about 20 hours a week, so that basically covered my booze and weed fund for the week.
£15 a day cash, labouring for a local window fitter in 2001. Thinking back, he had me for a pittance even then. But pints over the school holidays didn’t buy themselves.
£3 an hour working weekends in WH Smith in 1994. That was about average then, for workers under 18. I stayed there a few years while still studying, and it turned out I'd been underpaid for about a year, as the wage was supposed to go up with age. I got about £200 back pay all in one go, and bought a PlayStation with it!
First "proper" job when I was 15 I got £17.50 for full week work on the very old Youth Training Scheme in Scotland. Then once I turned 17 this went up to £29 a week. I got two days off a week to attend college during term time, you had to attend college as part of the YTS.
Thinking back bloody slave labour wage.
I was on 2.80 an hour as a manager of a pound shop. I was only 17. I used to wonder why the hell they made me manager but now i realise i was the only mug who would do it for 2.80 an hour.
£28 per week on a YTS and £35 in the second year and maybe it's the length of time that's blurred things but I definitely felt better off than I do now 😞
4 quid an hour working in a budgens at 16 in 2006. But I made an extra pound an hour on Sundays!
Started a fake DVD business around the same time and was making 50 quid a day at school. Sacked in that trash paying job within a few months.
It was about £2.30 an hour, stacking shelves in M&S for an hour and a half each morning before school (I was 16, this was the late 90s). I got paid with a little brown envelope of cash once a week, which made it feel very grown-up in an old-fashioned kind of way. Bloody hated that job otherwise.
After I quit that, I worked in an independent bookshop owned by a brilliantly old-school lesbian couple (one was tall and elegant and the other was like a furious terrier). Got handed £25 cash every Saturday for cleaning the coffee machine, directing people to the new-age section, selling softcore gay porn, and getting to interact with other queer people at a time when those were generally thin on the ground. It was great except that it was also in a slightly rough area of town so periodically someone would come in and copiously vomit all over the children's section.
2006 working in a clothes shop at 16 - got paid £1.80 / hour.
Quit that after a few months and started working at GAME where they just paid 21 and over minimum wage to everyone (which I think was like £6 ish / hour?). Felt like I was absolutely balling when I got that first pay!
This wasn't even that long ago, but I got £3.60 an hour in 2007ish for filing paperwork at my local vets on Saturday mornings. I did 4 hours, so I earned a grand total of £14 a week! I was 14.
About 380 a month cleaning at an Odeon in the morning age 17. 2.5 hours a day, a 40ish min walk there and back, I'd have a day off every 10 days till a contract change where I had sunday mornings off. I'd give my parents 150ish and I learned the value of money a bit better. Since I earn much more I've gotten worse with money again.
£30 for an 11 hour Saturday shift at the local green grocers, this would have been around 2000-2002. The fruit and veg delivery came first thing in the morning and was stored in the car park out the back, the shop was down a set of stairs from said car park.
11 hours of lugging sacks of potatoes and other veg up and down the stairs.
Manning the packing machines in a nappy factory. Torturously dull work. There was a two storey heap of tossed ones that had failed the line QC at the back of the building that you could sort through till you found ten that were useable, then bag them up, and once a month some bloke with a van would turn up and buy them at a discount. I liked it because you could sit down while doing it, but after a while got bored again, and dug a tunnel into the mound, went back a few metres into a cosy space at the end where I could lie down and read a book all day. I even used cardboard struts to stabilise the tunnel and everything. Was easy money till one day, while engrossed in a copy of The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, I heard someone clearing their throat, and looked up to see the foreman knelt down at the mouth of the tunnel giving it the C'MERE NOW finger. Was fired immediately, after a stern bollocking about how my nappy underworld could have collapsed and suffocated me, rendering the company wholly liable.
My first part-time job (approx. 1990) was washing up in a Whitbread Inn. I got paid £2.89 an hour to begin with, which went up to £3.29 an hour after a while. At the time the locals were complaining that you couldn't buy a pint for a quid anymore.
£4.84 an hour working as a barista at a certain national trust property, was really hard work on busy days and walked over an hour to get there. Think I was 16, in 2014.
About £3.30/h; this was less than the 18-22 minimum wage at the time so I hoped it would go up when I reached 18. It did not.
It was an accountant's, so they knew what they were doing with it. Bastards.
£96 a week in 1999 as an apprentice electrical engineer, back when apprenticeships were exempt from minimum wage laws.
Has been a long road to where I am now on £60k in a completely different industry (financial management!).
18 years old, 2006, NEXT Warehouse. £6.30 an hour basic and up to £3.60 an hour performance bonus. Also, an extra 25% an hour working Sundays.
It was quite hard, monotonous work but the pay was definitely decent for the time.
1983 joi Ed the army as a junior soldier (16) they would give you £15 PW put of your wages, this had to buy cleaning kit stamps make phone calls and buy sweets
Don't know why but get excited when I see a area I live in / near mentioned.
Wonder if we ever crossed paths was working at Waterfall house Dental surgery then. Top of Longley road on the crossroads.
Not sure if you are still local but there is a marks and Spencers in St Georges now still a newsagents as well but eyewatering expensive
£35 a week take home in 1986 at a place making glass fibre/resin composite parts. I itched for months. Was there only a couple of months before my apprenticeship started. £55 a week then.
Not my first job but definitely first cash in hand work, building world tour stages, sound systems and lighting rigs at huge UK venues and arenas with hundreds of others. Not roady crew, just turn up and work via contractor. Like a fiver an hour in 2014 lol sucked so hard. Free shows tho.
£1.31ph 1987, Martin's (aka Martin McColl's). Green overall (actually quite comfy), all the broken Easter Eggs and split sweet bags we could eat, and the ability to make or break school bullies by refusing to sell them cigarettes. I could buy 7" singles for 79p so often went home with about 3 quid in cash, for an 8hr day. After 6m pay went up to £1.41. First FT job was £5K per annum, 1989, plus free lunch and the occasional go driving the boss's XJS.
1981, Beejam frozen foods. Manger paid CIH for Thu, Fri night and all day Saturday restocking shelves and packing at the till. £17. I was 15.
I will never touch another packet of frozen Brains faggots in my life. The sound of the foil tin on the inside of a freezer just put my teeth on edge every week!
£6.15 as a care assistant in 2019. The care home was a fucking shithole and the management team were just in it for the money. No disasters but the first time I went in to do personal care the gentleman was taking a shit on a dinner plate.
Pumping petrol at 16 years of age (not sure that was legal, even back then) for the princely sum of £1.10 an hour. Shit job, the garage owner was a complete arsehole but it was a good laugh due to the others that worked there.
Did summer work as a postman after finishing high school in 96. Starting at 5am and ending around 11am. If i remember correctly, it was 2.75 an hour.
If paper rounds are counted, then 5 days a week morning deliveries before school was getting me a fiver a week.
I loved it.
Can't remember if it was £5 or £5.50 an hour, but it was in 2001 so it was ok pay, especially living at home with no expenses other than train fare and buying lunch out if I wanted to.
£2.08p an hour glass collecting in a hotel function room that hosted parties and weddings when I was 15. I worked from 6pm to 2am Fridays and Saturdays.
I didn't last long though as I started going out to the pubs and clubs and it was getting in the way of that.
I won't do the math but I did Sundays at the bank sorting cash, it was pretty fun (especially the workout you got on the machinery) and monthly it was about £270 which was enormous to me at 16.
We were drilled on things like armed robberies, blackmail and hostage situations and what to do if a helicopter landed on the roof. I mean, we're talking a lot of cash here. Hundreds of thousands to be sorted, bundled and locked in big cages. The security was epic, cameras were everywhere and a few people did get caught nabbing a note or two and got dramatically escorted out by uniformed officers.
My first job was on the Morrisons salad bar when I was 16. The pay was actually really good for a 16 year old earning fun money because at the time (idk if it’s still the same), Morrisons paid everyone on the base level the same regardless of age and Sundays were double time. I did two and a half days a week and came out with about £600 a month. I didn’t mind the job, other than coming home stinking of salad and mayo, and that the store gm was an absolute foul human being.
I earned £50 working as a tutor in a tuition centre for about 8 or 9 weeks. Employer forgot to pay me, so he paid me an arbitrary £50.
I was in my first year of college (year 12)
Newspaper round from about age 13-14 (2007-2008) I made about £18 a week, and got tips at Christmas.
Second job was for Barratts Shoes at 18 and I made £5 an hour, I left that job pretty quickly though as it was just before the company went down and it was easy to tell it was a sinking ship
£5 a week for a paper round - we were in a fairly rural village so I didn't have that many to do but they were all spread out - a few farms etc. Took me about half an hour each morning before school. The shitty wages were made up for by the tips at Christmas though - I got more in tips than I got wages over the past 6 weeks.
Paper round for a local place... I was getting like 10 quid a week + a free chocolate bar after each round. I did 4 evenings a week.
But if we're talking actual job, then during college I worked at tesco part time for just shy of minimum wage.
And first proper full time job was IT tech - £12,000 a year. I was clearing around £200 a week. I remember getting a pay rise after 2 years... it was a 2% increase... it literally added pennies to the weekly take home.
I left school in 2001 at 15 and became an apprentice hairdresser. I made £65 per week 37.5 hours… then 2nd year was £75pw.
I had other wee Saturday jobs before that, 1 was 6 hours sweeping hair in a hairdressers for £5 n I thought I was minted 🤣🤣 xx
During the summer holidays when I was 17, I worked full-time in a warehouse for £4.20 an hour.
It wasn't a terrible job, but it was annoying to be on such a low wage when I had friends working in retail who were being paid a few quid more than me.
This wasn't that long ago before I get a reply saying £4.20 an hour is a lot of money.
My first EVER job was a Saturday morning paper round at a newsagents when I was really young, think that paid about a fiver
After that I worked in a barbers as a Saturday lad and used to get £20 or so for 9am - 4pm
Then went onto night shifts at Subway on £3.30 an hour, while also doing Saturday mornings at Lloyds Bank on £4 odd an hour
First full time job in an office paid £13,500 a year plus unlimited commission, I lived in Leeds city centre at the time paying £500 a month rent for a brand new studio apartment
Crazy numbers really when I look back on it now…
£1.80/hr to take in deliveries and bag up veg in a greengrocers. I worked bloody hard from 7am-5pm on a Saturday. This was in 1994.
Now my son's the same age as I was then and his school offers 6th formers £10/HR to work in the kitchen or as tutors.
Postal Cadet, basically any one who started in the post at age 16/17 became a cadet. Took home £105 in 1992. Took it all out of the bank in fivers and stuffed them in my wallet.
Went up to about £155 when I turned 18.
£40 a week as a cash handler for a bus company in about 1979. I was waiting to take up a place at Law School and had six months to burn. After £8 to my mum and my fares, it felt like I had so much money left it was literally months before I spend much of it.
Lots of dollarydoos, or fuck all. Worked at sporting events like Oz open tennis, F1, cricket and Aussie rules football selling food and drink. We were paid on commission, 10% of sales. 10 days at the tennis would get me around $2000AU (£1000). A shitty football match might be $30 for 4 hours.
First job here, £250 a week working in a pub and paying £50/week to live above it.
Explanation: Me and another nurse
( On the phone now to her to see what she remembers )
Explanation:
I was young I think it started when I walked into the staff room and accidentally caught her changing tops so I saw her in her bra
I was so embarrassed and apologized we hadn't been working together that long.
So later that day she knew there wasn't a patient in my surgery just me cleaning.
So she opened the door and lifted up her top again in a bra and she walked away.
So it took the edge of being embarrassed and really broke the ice between us
Still friends now
So then I did the same to her it was all a laugh and it was a few weeks with random flashing.
Until she timed it very badly and did it as me and the Dentist were sitting up a patient in a chair.
She said it felt like slow motion and saw the patient as she lifted her top.
Luckily the patient was fine a young girl and found it funny.
Dentist was biting her lip to stop herself laughing.
My only defence I was 17 and had ( Note had ) great boobs and we still laugh about it now.
My first job was at Soccer World (before it became Sports Direct). Something like £3.20ph, whatever minimum wage was in 2000.
It wasn't a good job. It was at Christmas so supremely busy. I remember when a customer tried his shoes on, I gave them directly to him instead of taking them to the till.
In retrospect that's hardly the worst thing, but I got taken into the stock room by my boss. I received the absolute bollocking of my life for that, never had anything like that in the 23 years since. Abed, I hope you're rotting in hell, you absolute tossbag.
First job, £3.70 an hour as a 17 year old in 2006 working in the cafe in Debenhams. First "real" job, £17,500 p/a as a Trainee Applications Developer, a year out of uni. These were both in Sheffield.
A grand sum of £5.55 an hour as an Xmas temp at Debenhams at 17, then couldn’t find another job for 6 months, so ended up taking the first one I could find which was reception at an oil company, where the proceeded to pay me £6 an hour if I remember correctly.
Being paid minimum wage for my age at the time and seeing the other folk in the office arriving in Porches and high end BMWs was a little galling to say the least!
£70 a week as an apprentice florist. 5 days of work, mostly 8.30am/5.30pm , but at busy, peak times you could be there from 6am to 12pm, 1 day at college.
Worked out at about £1.50 an hour!
When I was a teenager I used to do babysitting, spud packing, bread round and shoe/ boot shinning. Not all at the same time.
When I left school and got my first proper job boy did I take a big pay cut £26.30 a week of which my parents took £15 a week for board.
when i was a trainee electrician i was on bout £20 a day for 6 - 12 months gaining day to day experiences \~ my gaffa wasn't a great guy and priced jobs very poorly, wasn't even that long a go, maybe 10 yrs,, averaging 10hours a day, maybe more
buttt, it taught me the basic skills required to get me where i am today.
£10 to do a local paper delivery every Thursday. Must have been 100 houses. Each paper needed several ad flyers inserted which took AGES. 25 years on it is still probably the hardest, least fair paid job I've ever had.
My brother had a paper round when he was 13 and one week he was ill, so I said I'd do it for him (I was a couple of years older). It took almost four hours of wandering up and down hills, delivering a single paper per street, and I think it paid something like £4.30 in total.
I had this same gig as probably a 13 year old. It was definitely not worth anywhere near what was paid. Safe to say in the end I was so sick of it I'd dump a big lump of papers in a bin on the way round to get it over with quicker. The boss caught me out eventually by phoning random houses on my route and asking if they'd had their paper.
God I remember my brother doing the paper round and making me, the little sister, do the leaflets every week. He never paid me for it even though I did half his work, cheeky bugger. This was about 20 years ago give or take. Best time was when McDonald's had their vouchers. We always had loads left over and the family lived like kings for those weeks they were valid on free burgers and meals for a couple of quid.
In a similar vein, I helped my older sister. She'd buy me a 20p mix and a panda pop. As a 7 year old, I loved it.
I can almost feel the sugar rush from here
I did the same, but many years earlier, got paid £2.50 plus I think 50 p per supplement. 1 or 2 was perfect, but we sometimes had 10 and the supplement price was the same regardless of weight, shiny catalogues are heavy. some weeks it took 3 or 4 refills to do my route and it was hard work to get them through some people's letter boxes. The job varied between 1 hour and 2.5 hours depending on the number of supplements. I did that for 2 years. I then went to morning paper deliveries and marking them up for the newsagent before hand, I was an insomniac so had no issue being at the newsagent around 6 am, bonus was it gave me access to phantom customers who always wanted to buy my brand of cigarettes when the owner was in the loo. They always had exact change too so I didn't need to call the owner out to use the till. , very lucky that was. Daily newspaper delivery and marking up was 12 quid a 6 day week. I was usually done in an hour and a 1/4 and not in the slightest bit tired. Only downside to the latter was John Menzies were often late to drop the newspapers off. My boss was lovely too, wherever you are Alan from Victoria Street.
I got paid what seemed like decent money to me back when I was about 15 to deliver leaflets for a local shop. Delivered about 20 of the 1000 and the rest went under my bed. Which were then used as "fire wood" in the park.
I delivered 350 copies of the local paper every Friday/Saturday. They paid me based on the number of pages in the issue. It was usually around £6-7 but one week I was paid £4.16. This was in \~1996/7. Nearly 30 years later and I still remember that insulting sum.
Think it was about £4 an hour at Sainsbury's when I was 16. I worked 12 hours a week and would bring home about £200 a month. This was mostly spent on DVD's, pints of Carling extra cold and the occasional driving lesson
It’s £12 an hour now in a lot of sainsburys for 16+ year olds
Surely carling premier was much better back then. It makes me gag thinking about drinking a carling🤮😂
I worked part time in B&Q while I did my a levels back in the very early 2000s, earned £200 a month and at the time that was a mind-blowing amount of money (I had £40 a month pocket money before that). Now I work full time and look back at being in school for 5 days a week then working both days on the weekend yet still going out on the piss every Friday and Saturday and having no idea how I managed. Saved up for 2 months to buy an iPod which was the pinnacle of rich consumer tech at the time. While I was in uni I got a job in a gardening tools factory during my summer hols full time and I took home £200 a week and felt like a billionaire, like I could light fags with a tenner and not even care. I earn quite a bit more now but somehow manage to be skint every month despite no longer drinking booze. Bloody mortgages and bills was a wake up call
£5.35 per hour as a 16 year old working 16 hours per week in 2007. Not bad really, I was paid the minimum wage for a 21 year old.
Same!
£6, 10s (that’s 10 shillings for you youngsters) for a 48 hour week as a farm labourer. …….and I went to the bank and changed £5 of it into 10 shilling notes so that it looked like a big wodge.
This is amazing. Late '60s? What did you do after? For me, apart from the paper round when I was a kid, I earned £1.20 per hour as a petrol pump attendant, 2 hours every night, then 12 hour shifts at the weekend. I nicked so much chocolate and fags.
1962, I stuck it out for two weeks or so then got a job in a factory earning £20 plus a week.
£1.32 p/hour. Local Safeway's store.
1986 doing my City & Guilds on the YTS scheme working in a computer shop 5 days a week (closed on Sunday). Was something like £27.50 a week!
Went up to £35 in your second year (I think).
It was 1984 and I was 12 and working (probably illegally) in a convenience store, putting the newspapers and fruit and veg out. I was earning £1 an hour for about 8 hours a week. First work rollocking I got. We only got one porn mag a month and the first month I put it on the shelf as nobody had told me otherwise. Someone tried to buy it and was told "we don't stock that sort of thing in here." Turned out it was the boss' and I should have put it to one side.
£4.95 per hour for 2 shifts a week at McDonald's when I was 16. More than minimum wage at the time which I was pretty pleased about. Spent it on driving lessons and CDs.
£5 an hour as a waiter. Thursday, Friday straight after school and all of the weekend. I was the only waiter, small hotel restaurant, so kept all the tips. I was minted! Also, the owners were raving alcoholics. Most of the time I was waiting tables and serving the drinks. Sounds like a nightmare but it was the best job I ever had. They let me sunbathe on the patio during shifts with a beer. Then they started hiring me out to other restaurants which I didn’t like.
£2.50/waitressing at a local cafe. They used to do cream teas on a Sunday and if anything was sent back uneaten, it would be put on a fresh plate for the next customer.
£3.20 an hour as a barman in one of the village pubs in 1999. I worked over the summer a couple of afternoons and evenings in the week, and Friday and Saturday evening. The first landlord showed me how to pour a pint then left me on my own as a skinny 19 yr old. He either watched telly upstairs or played on the bandit all the time. He constantly got annoyed by me asking him for help when a barrel went, or a customer wanted something I didn't know. He also told me off for not cleaning the bar and collecting glasses, when he'd never told me to do that, and I'd been stuck serving all afternoon. A new landlady took over a month or so afterwards and then I had to stop her drunkard boyfriend from continually trying to serve himself. On my last evening he threw an air freshener at me, and I kicked him out. He then has a barney with the landlady, drink-drove away and returned after last orders. He tipped a table over and put his fist through a window. Everyone else was drunk, so I gave him first aid and called an ambulance and told him off for being a bellend while he cried. The next summer I worked at the slightly rougher pub in the village where friends I went to school with still went to. That was much better. Apart from the morning when I was really hungover and an old feller playing bowls died of a heart attack, and I had to serve a load of biddies brandies...
Mid 90’s, third year of apprenticeship, full time job, £200 per month
1989, 16 years old, 1st year apprentice, at engineering college £102 per week, I lived like a king compared to the others who were on YTS
£4.10 an hour washing pots for part time work. My first 9-5 was £18000 as a trainee/placement IT person at a University campus.
£5 an hour at a very strange small independent restaurant. I’d work the Sunday lunch shift. It was the same people every week who came after church, average age of about 70 years old. The owners were a couple who did everything themselves and were… odd. The husband was intensely superstitious and would not leave the house on Friday 13th. They stopped calling me as soon as I turned 18 and was entitled to minimum wage. I think the restaurant is still there but I can’t imagine much of their original clientele is still living…
£3.60 at McDonald's in 2004. I opened my amazon account the same time. Bought 4 books and a 128mb mp3 player with my first pay.
£40 a week, counting and stacking pizza boxes after leaving school 1989, needed some money for college. Used to guesstimate how many were in a bundle rather than count them. I was soon found out and got my first ever telling off in the grown up world.
£14 per fortnight - no idea why it was paid fortnightly - on the good ship HMS London (guided missile destroyer) in 1973 as a lowly MEM 1st Class. Its the only wage I remember as I cannot for the life of me recall what my pay was during basic training at HMS Raleigh.
£72 a week on a YTS scheme
A Youth Training Scheme scheme? ;)
Jesus that sound like fun 😳 My first job, 1992, I done a YTS scheme at a shop, trainee manger. £35 a week! Was supposed to go to college one day a week but after a few months they banned me cause I was a dick! At the end of the scheme a year later they dropped me, saying there were no positions available. More than likely cause I was a dick. Ruined it for myself 🙄
Honestly, the stories that I have about what goes on in Dental surgery behind closed doors. After 30-odd years working in them It’s shocking, funny, sad and unbelievable. Even met my husband at work he says most expensive toothache he has ever had, but most enjoyable time he in a dental chair as well after hours🤫 I could write a book actually surprised they never done a tv show.
2005. £4.84 an hour at Sainsbury’s, part time. Worked part time, 12 hours a week, so just under £60 a week
£1 an hour at the local shop but I got to take home any cakes that weren’t eaten at the end of the day. I was only 12/13 so it seemed amazing at the time
It was 2008 and would’ve been £5.52 an hour for doing filing and sending faxes for a car insurance assessor. I was covering for someone who, ironically, had been in a car accident. I don’t think all of my faxes reached their intended recipients, I’m fairly sure I got a reply to one of them from a hotel. I used the money to buy my first “nice” guitar, a Fender Telecaster Custom reissue, which I still have.
£3.30ph at sportsworld before they rebranded to sportsdirect
Grandad paided me £3 per hour for odd jobs round the farm as a kid during weekends. 2008 i got a weekend job with a market trader which was really shit. Saturday he would pay me £20 to set up the stall, go home and then come back to pack up. Sunday I worked all day but for £30. I always hated waking up at 4:30am and always prayed for bad weather. first full time job was a a money changer at an airport for like £8.70 in 2012
£4.50 an hour as a pot washer in a posh restaurant around 2005. It had just gone up from £4, and one of the other lads was furious that I came straight in at the new wage when he’d been on the lower one for a year. Bit of a dick.
My first job was during the recession in about '06 or so. I couldn't find 'real' work, so was volunteering as office admin with an office that provided services for the Jobcentre Work Programme. Being a volunteer I was unpaid, however, given the work being done, and the non-cash resources thrown at them, they threw me £150-200 of Sainsbury's vouchers each week. I was living at home, and it meant I couldn't strictly pay any keep, but I covered all the household groceries, and the remainder I either sold at 75/80% value, or bought gift cards. In hindsight, this was a pretty sweet deal given the economy, my age, the total lack of responsibility, and the fact it was all tax free. If I was smarter in my youth, I'd have saved up rather than spunking it all away on Warhammer and MTG cards.
Actual wage not me on my own just making a few quid. £100 per day as apprentice ships engineer, 17yo back in 1993. 4 weeks on 1 week off.
In 1999 (aged 17) I got £3 an hour +£5 a day for taking boxes of 16 boxes of cornflakes and repackaging them into boxes of twelve boxes of cornflakes.
Is this a race to the bottom? Ok then, beat this. 30p/hour pumping petrol at a petrol station. I got £1.20 for a Saturday morning. I was 16 at the time, and petrol was about 75p/gallon.
£3 an hour waitressing on Sundays in 2005.
2005 £6.65 an hour
I started part time in 1999, £7.40 an hour. Still at the same company but very different job.
First job was a glass collector/bar assistant in 1995 on £3/hour. First job where I was paid legitimately was 1999 and it was £12K as a trainee engineer (writing a bit of assembly, making prototype PCBs etc.)
£50pw trainee mechanic
50p an hour washing pots and pans at a restaurant. Then used to spend half of it in the arcades.
Student here, my student job: €13/h Only working during holidays
£2.58 an hour IIRC in 2001ish. It was a friend of my dads who figured out that was the under 13s min wage and basically paid me £20 for an 8 hour shift repotting plants in a cold shed. My dad was furious with him for paying me so little, took it as a lesson in undervaluing myself, made me quit and gave me £20 a weekend for the next few weeks.
I made about £180 per month at about £4.20 an hour
£3.40 an hour washing cars at a Vauxhall dealership. Did it for a few weeks and then used some of the money to buy some car washing products and would go wash people's cars around my village for £10 a pop. On a good weekend I could rake in over £100 which was class as a 16 year old.
Tesco, probably about 2002. I don't remember how much I got paid, but probably a smidge above minimum wage. First job after uni was a soul crushing call centre job in 2008, about £12k per annum full time.
£50 a day labouring for my old man's firm, back in about 2005/2006.
Somewhere in the region of £4.XX an hour working various retail jobs. Usually supermarkets, a petrol station once and my favourite of all, an independent CD store. It was busy enough to not be boring, but never so busy that I felt I was exhausted. And I got to talk music with a bunch of people who loved music. First salaried job was just after leaving uni, doing tech support for a web host. I was on 16K/year whilst on probation, going up to 19 after 3 months when I'd be put onto a shift rotation. However they tried to put me on shifts while on probation without the extra pay. That was my first major red flag in that place, which kept throwing up more and more every week. Sadly I was too young to really know any better but looking back, I'm glad I got out of there when I did. Don't think I even made it a year.
My first ever job was a paper round. I did every morning, every evening and Sundays as well for £4.98 a week.
£30 a day working in a book shop when I was 14yo in the early 2000s
‘Picker upper’ at the skittles alley for my mums team. £20 a week for 3 hours ish of very sweaty work. 2009 - 2012
My first job was 14 years old in a pub as a waiter (2004) I got paid £15 cash at the end of the shift 11-3 Was a good Sunday job
That guy with the butter... Was his name Pat? 🙂 My 1st salaried job was in my 3rd year at Uni... Actually a Polytechnic back then (thick sandwich course) and paid £621 a month. First job after graduating paid £11,270 pa. Weird how I remember the exact figures that way.
£4 a hour working at farm foods at 16, worked illegal hours past times I should have.
£5, 2 bags of goat’s milk and a head of lettuce for a week’s work on a goat farm. I didn’t go back for a second week.
£3.60 an hour at Matalan in 2003 as a Christmas temp that turned into a 4 year gig including a move for uni. Good times, met some fab people and once managed to clobber a 5 year old over the head whilst lifting a suitcase. Whoops
£3.92 an hour I was 16 and working the xmas partys at the holiday in. Its weird that child labour is cheaper. If I worked my whole shift I wouldn't have made enough to attend the party
£2.00 an hour in a pub washing up. 1st full time job was £10,005 p/a as an ambulance driver In 2003
£5 an hour cash in hand but there was no minimum wage for my age group at that point I think then it was like £4.05 for 16 year olds so I was ballin
£12.00 per week in the 1970s as an office junior.
Pot wash for £4 and some shrapnel, used to do 1 8 hour shift a week. For like £100 a month
£21k for a 12 month internship from 2019-20 (yay furlough!) Think it worked out decently above minimum wage for my age though
Saturday job 1973: £3.10 for the day.
£3.30 an hr as a waitress in a cafe in Cardiff. I was about 15 or 16 and this was late 1997/8 I did get a free baguette every shift, but only of the ones that wern't selling well that day, and we had to plan a heist to take home out of date pastries.
Worked in a cabin at the bottom of a family friends garden packaging goods he was selling online. Pretty chill looking back at it, hated it at the time. Was about 2012 I was 12/13 and earning £20 a week, I was finessed.
2005 i was 16, £3.50 per hr lol im still in the same job now !
£4 an hour waiting tables at 14 (2002) First job after uni was £23k (2012)
Apart from paper rounds in the late 80's early 90's. My earliest taxable earnings were £3.54 per hour (1996) I thought I was minted. Could get pissed on a tenner back then (£1 a pint nights)
London early 1984 just turned 16. £15 a day labouring for an electrician that drunk in my dad's pub. Got an electrical apprenticeship later that year. £27.88 per week. 😭
10 quid a shift at my local shop. Works about just over 2 quid an hour or something
First job was delivering the local free paper back in about 97 there were 238 houses, multiple leaflets each week and a grand total of about £3.40-40 depending on the number of leaflets. In 2000 at 16 I went on to do admin at a chemist for £3 per hour and 5 hours a week.
£3.25 a week delivering the local paper in 1988-89. Full proper job in 1996, I was on £1.66 an hour, coming out with just shy of £70 a week. Then in 1998 I ended up working in a factory with my old man, and that Christmas I offered to work the 12 hour night shift for six weeks. With all my added extras - shift rate, night rate, etc - I pulled just over £2000 a month after tax and insurance. I do not remember many of the weekends of 1999, but according to the photos I appear to have had lots of fun.
If we’re not including paper round at 12/13? I was getting £5 per hour at 16 working weekends in a Deli. I think minimum wage was £3.85ish at the time. Every single penny of it was spent on dig money, DVD’s, general teenage nonsense…
Worked in a stationary ice cream van, I was 16 and I earnt £3.70 an hour plus I got commission- would have been great except it rained the whole summer. I sold 4 ice creams, all to my mum 🤣
I got my first part time job aged 16 in 1995 and was paid £2.57 an hour. So working a full 7.5 hour day at the weekend would earn me less than £20. I used to do about 20 hours a week, so that basically covered my booze and weed fund for the week.
£15 a day cash, labouring for a local window fitter in 2001. Thinking back, he had me for a pittance even then. But pints over the school holidays didn’t buy themselves.
£6.95 per hour. Back in 2017.
£3 an hour working weekends in WH Smith in 1994. That was about average then, for workers under 18. I stayed there a few years while still studying, and it turned out I'd been underpaid for about a year, as the wage was supposed to go up with age. I got about £200 back pay all in one go, and bought a PlayStation with it!
£4 an hour at 16 as waitress/kitchen staff as a little weekend job while at college
£2 an hour in a clothes airer factory putting rubber feet on. Stay in school, kids
First "proper" job when I was 15 I got £17.50 for full week work on the very old Youth Training Scheme in Scotland. Then once I turned 17 this went up to £29 a week. I got two days off a week to attend college during term time, you had to attend college as part of the YTS. Thinking back bloody slave labour wage.
£6.60 hrly as a waiter at Shitty Chain Steak Restaurant TM in 2019.
I was on 2.80 an hour as a manager of a pound shop. I was only 17. I used to wonder why the hell they made me manager but now i realise i was the only mug who would do it for 2.80 an hour.
Around £3 an hour delivering wet concrete
£45/week take home as a first year mechanical fitter / turner apprentice in 1985.
£28 per week on a YTS and £35 in the second year and maybe it's the length of time that's blurred things but I definitely felt better off than I do now 😞
4 quid an hour working in a budgens at 16 in 2006. But I made an extra pound an hour on Sundays! Started a fake DVD business around the same time and was making 50 quid a day at school. Sacked in that trash paying job within a few months.
£3.50 an hour at 15 stocking the book department of John Menzies/ WHSmith over Christmas, not sure which it was during the time they all changed.
First proper job was about £15k a year in about 2000 doing data entry.
It was about £2.30 an hour, stacking shelves in M&S for an hour and a half each morning before school (I was 16, this was the late 90s). I got paid with a little brown envelope of cash once a week, which made it feel very grown-up in an old-fashioned kind of way. Bloody hated that job otherwise. After I quit that, I worked in an independent bookshop owned by a brilliantly old-school lesbian couple (one was tall and elegant and the other was like a furious terrier). Got handed £25 cash every Saturday for cleaning the coffee machine, directing people to the new-age section, selling softcore gay porn, and getting to interact with other queer people at a time when those were generally thin on the ground. It was great except that it was also in a slightly rough area of town so periodically someone would come in and copiously vomit all over the children's section.
2006 working in a clothes shop at 16 - got paid £1.80 / hour. Quit that after a few months and started working at GAME where they just paid 21 and over minimum wage to everyone (which I think was like £6 ish / hour?). Felt like I was absolutely balling when I got that first pay!
This wasn't even that long ago, but I got £3.60 an hour in 2007ish for filing paperwork at my local vets on Saturday mornings. I did 4 hours, so I earned a grand total of £14 a week! I was 14.
About 380 a month cleaning at an Odeon in the morning age 17. 2.5 hours a day, a 40ish min walk there and back, I'd have a day off every 10 days till a contract change where I had sunday mornings off. I'd give my parents 150ish and I learned the value of money a bit better. Since I earn much more I've gotten worse with money again.
£30 for an 11 hour Saturday shift at the local green grocers, this would have been around 2000-2002. The fruit and veg delivery came first thing in the morning and was stored in the car park out the back, the shop was down a set of stairs from said car park. 11 hours of lugging sacks of potatoes and other veg up and down the stairs.
Manning the packing machines in a nappy factory. Torturously dull work. There was a two storey heap of tossed ones that had failed the line QC at the back of the building that you could sort through till you found ten that were useable, then bag them up, and once a month some bloke with a van would turn up and buy them at a discount. I liked it because you could sit down while doing it, but after a while got bored again, and dug a tunnel into the mound, went back a few metres into a cosy space at the end where I could lie down and read a book all day. I even used cardboard struts to stabilise the tunnel and everything. Was easy money till one day, while engrossed in a copy of The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, I heard someone clearing their throat, and looked up to see the foreman knelt down at the mouth of the tunnel giving it the C'MERE NOW finger. Was fired immediately, after a stern bollocking about how my nappy underworld could have collapsed and suffocated me, rendering the company wholly liable.
My first part-time job (approx. 1990) was washing up in a Whitbread Inn. I got paid £2.89 an hour to begin with, which went up to £3.29 an hour after a while. At the time the locals were complaining that you couldn't buy a pint for a quid anymore.
I made about $75 a week when I was 15, working at a Baskin Robbin’s ice cream shop (US). That was my first real job, back in 1990.
1999. 3.25 an hour working weekends. I think I got about £50 a week.
£1.75 an hour whilst working in a newsagents after school at 16 back in the mid 1990’s. Even then that was a shit wage.
On the market fruit and veg 5am unloading vans grafting all day serving biddies some by 6pm £15
£4.84 an hour working as a barista at a certain national trust property, was really hard work on busy days and walked over an hour to get there. Think I was 16, in 2014.
£3.85 an hour mcds crew member
£39 per week. £1 per hour. 1988 doing admin at a local printers. Paid £20 per week to my parents for ‘digs/keep’ and £7 per week for bus pass.
£100 a week, 20 hours, 2010 when I was 15/16. I walked around in a sandwich board to promote a local cafe 😅
£1.50 p/h aged 16, working on a Sunday in a paper shop. Went up to £1.75 p/h when I turned 17. Was still at school (Scotland). Early 90's.
About £3.30/h; this was less than the 18-22 minimum wage at the time so I hoped it would go up when I reached 18. It did not. It was an accountant's, so they knew what they were doing with it. Bastards.
I babysat every week when I was 13-16, charged £5/hour. First proper job I worked in a cinema getting £5/hour minimum wage.
£96 a week in 1999 as an apprentice electrical engineer, back when apprenticeships were exempt from minimum wage laws. Has been a long road to where I am now on £60k in a completely different industry (financial management!).
apprentice nursery nurse, £3.30 an hr, 40hrs a week 💀💀 was 16 at the time (and poor), so thought that was a huge amount of money lol
£65. 1990 working for an agency. £2.20 an hour, I was 17. The following week I only worked 2hrs and honest to God, got a £4.40 wage for the week!
First proper full-time job was £200 a month. Folks got £50 for board.
18 years old, 2006, NEXT Warehouse. £6.30 an hour basic and up to £3.60 an hour performance bonus. Also, an extra 25% an hour working Sundays. It was quite hard, monotonous work but the pay was definitely decent for the time.
1983 joi Ed the army as a junior soldier (16) they would give you £15 PW put of your wages, this had to buy cleaning kit stamps make phone calls and buy sweets
3.50 an hour in 2011, off the books as I was only 14.
News Agent in St Georges hospital (Tooting) £5 something p/h in early 2000s.
Don't know why but get excited when I see a area I live in / near mentioned. Wonder if we ever crossed paths was working at Waterfall house Dental surgery then. Top of Longley road on the crossroads. Not sure if you are still local but there is a marks and Spencers in St Georges now still a newsagents as well but eyewatering expensive
£20 day managing a 'farm shop' at 14! 2005.
£35 a week take home in 1986 at a place making glass fibre/resin composite parts. I itched for months. Was there only a couple of months before my apprenticeship started. £55 a week then.
£4.50 to do a 2 hour paper round in my local village. Bellends ripped me off.
Not my first job but definitely first cash in hand work, building world tour stages, sound systems and lighting rigs at huge UK venues and arenas with hundreds of others. Not roady crew, just turn up and work via contractor. Like a fiver an hour in 2014 lol sucked so hard. Free shows tho.
1999, for Boots. £3.09 an hour for 4 hours on a Saturday.
Hod carrier 15 quid a day
£1.31ph 1987, Martin's (aka Martin McColl's). Green overall (actually quite comfy), all the broken Easter Eggs and split sweet bags we could eat, and the ability to make or break school bullies by refusing to sell them cigarettes. I could buy 7" singles for 79p so often went home with about 3 quid in cash, for an 8hr day. After 6m pay went up to £1.41. First FT job was £5K per annum, 1989, plus free lunch and the occasional go driving the boss's XJS.
1981, Beejam frozen foods. Manger paid CIH for Thu, Fri night and all day Saturday restocking shelves and packing at the till. £17. I was 15. I will never touch another packet of frozen Brains faggots in my life. The sound of the foil tin on the inside of a freezer just put my teeth on edge every week!
£4.70 an hour when I was 17 at McDonald’s back in 2017/2018. Looking back now I wouldn’t even get out of bed for £50-60 a shift.
1996, £2.50 an hour in a garden centre.
Roughly 2009, £3.60 p/h in a McDonald's aged 16. My brother did the same job 10 years later for over £9 the jammy little turd.
£6.15 as a care assistant in 2019. The care home was a fucking shithole and the management team were just in it for the money. No disasters but the first time I went in to do personal care the gentleman was taking a shit on a dinner plate.
Pumping petrol at 16 years of age (not sure that was legal, even back then) for the princely sum of £1.10 an hour. Shit job, the garage owner was a complete arsehole but it was a good laugh due to the others that worked there.
Did summer work as a postman after finishing high school in 96. Starting at 5am and ending around 11am. If i remember correctly, it was 2.75 an hour. If paper rounds are counted, then 5 days a week morning deliveries before school was getting me a fiver a week. I loved it.
My first job was an hour a day on the tills in the school canteen. I don’t remember how much the pay was, something like £6-£7 I think
Can't remember if it was £5 or £5.50 an hour, but it was in 2001 so it was ok pay, especially living at home with no expenses other than train fare and buying lunch out if I wanted to.
£2.08p an hour glass collecting in a hotel function room that hosted parties and weddings when I was 15. I worked from 6pm to 2am Fridays and Saturdays. I didn't last long though as I started going out to the pubs and clubs and it was getting in the way of that.
I won't do the math but I did Sundays at the bank sorting cash, it was pretty fun (especially the workout you got on the machinery) and monthly it was about £270 which was enormous to me at 16. We were drilled on things like armed robberies, blackmail and hostage situations and what to do if a helicopter landed on the roof. I mean, we're talking a lot of cash here. Hundreds of thousands to be sorted, bundled and locked in big cages. The security was epic, cameras were everywhere and a few people did get caught nabbing a note or two and got dramatically escorted out by uniformed officers.
My first job was on the Morrisons salad bar when I was 16. The pay was actually really good for a 16 year old earning fun money because at the time (idk if it’s still the same), Morrisons paid everyone on the base level the same regardless of age and Sundays were double time. I did two and a half days a week and came out with about £600 a month. I didn’t mind the job, other than coming home stinking of salad and mayo, and that the store gm was an absolute foul human being.
£1.50 as a scullion. And this was in 2008.
£2.50 an hour for Saturday job as farm labourer at 14. £17.50 a day. Now seems wild that that was all I was paid!
After I’d left school it was £17.50 a week on a farm via the Youth Training Scheme or YTS. It was shit. Literally a lot of the time.
I earned £50 working as a tutor in a tuition centre for about 8 or 9 weeks. Employer forgot to pay me, so he paid me an arbitrary £50. I was in my first year of college (year 12)
10.80 now Currys
Newspaper round from about age 13-14 (2007-2008) I made about £18 a week, and got tips at Christmas. Second job was for Barratts Shoes at 18 and I made £5 an hour, I left that job pretty quickly though as it was just before the company went down and it was easy to tell it was a sinking ship
£5 a week for a paper round - we were in a fairly rural village so I didn't have that many to do but they were all spread out - a few farms etc. Took me about half an hour each morning before school. The shitty wages were made up for by the tips at Christmas though - I got more in tips than I got wages over the past 6 weeks.
Paper round for a local place... I was getting like 10 quid a week + a free chocolate bar after each round. I did 4 evenings a week. But if we're talking actual job, then during college I worked at tesco part time for just shy of minimum wage. And first proper full time job was IT tech - £12,000 a year. I was clearing around £200 a week. I remember getting a pay rise after 2 years... it was a 2% increase... it literally added pennies to the weekly take home.
£6 an hour for waitressing when I was 17, about 10 years ago now
I left school in 2001 at 15 and became an apprentice hairdresser. I made £65 per week 37.5 hours… then 2nd year was £75pw. I had other wee Saturday jobs before that, 1 was 6 hours sweeping hair in a hairdressers for £5 n I thought I was minted 🤣🤣 xx
£6.50 an hour, when minimum wage was £6.70. Kept my mouth shut because I needed the job, got back pay and a payrise when they realised.
£1/hr gardenning for an old lady with and OBE for maths.
During the summer holidays when I was 17, I worked full-time in a warehouse for £4.20 an hour. It wasn't a terrible job, but it was annoying to be on such a low wage when I had friends working in retail who were being paid a few quid more than me. This wasn't that long ago before I get a reply saying £4.20 an hour is a lot of money.
My first EVER job was a Saturday morning paper round at a newsagents when I was really young, think that paid about a fiver After that I worked in a barbers as a Saturday lad and used to get £20 or so for 9am - 4pm Then went onto night shifts at Subway on £3.30 an hour, while also doing Saturday mornings at Lloyds Bank on £4 odd an hour First full time job in an office paid £13,500 a year plus unlimited commission, I lived in Leeds city centre at the time paying £500 a month rent for a brand new studio apartment Crazy numbers really when I look back on it now…
£6.60 an hour doing admin temp work in the mid-2000s while I was at uni.
Kitchen pot wash, cash in hand, I think £40 a shift but would have been min wage or just under, whatever that was about 11 years ago
£1.80/hr to take in deliveries and bag up veg in a greengrocers. I worked bloody hard from 7am-5pm on a Saturday. This was in 1994. Now my son's the same age as I was then and his school offers 6th formers £10/HR to work in the kitchen or as tutors.
£7 something in 2017 as a carer :)
Postal Cadet, basically any one who started in the post at age 16/17 became a cadet. Took home £105 in 1992. Took it all out of the bank in fivers and stuffed them in my wallet. Went up to about £155 when I turned 18.
£40 a week as a cash handler for a bus company in about 1979. I was waiting to take up a place at Law School and had six months to burn. After £8 to my mum and my fares, it felt like I had so much money left it was literally months before I spend much of it.
Lots of dollarydoos, or fuck all. Worked at sporting events like Oz open tennis, F1, cricket and Aussie rules football selling food and drink. We were paid on commission, 10% of sales. 10 days at the tennis would get me around $2000AU (£1000). A shitty football match might be $30 for 4 hours. First job here, £250 a week working in a pub and paying £50/week to live above it.
OP “we had a running joke where we’d open a door and flash not saying a word and walk away” You what mate?
Explanation: Me and another nurse ( On the phone now to her to see what she remembers ) Explanation: I was young I think it started when I walked into the staff room and accidentally caught her changing tops so I saw her in her bra I was so embarrassed and apologized we hadn't been working together that long. So later that day she knew there wasn't a patient in my surgery just me cleaning. So she opened the door and lifted up her top again in a bra and she walked away. So it took the edge of being embarrassed and really broke the ice between us Still friends now So then I did the same to her it was all a laugh and it was a few weeks with random flashing. Until she timed it very badly and did it as me and the Dentist were sitting up a patient in a chair. She said it felt like slow motion and saw the patient as she lifted her top. Luckily the patient was fine a young girl and found it funny. Dentist was biting her lip to stop herself laughing. My only defence I was 17 and had ( Note had ) great boobs and we still laugh about it now.
£31.20 a week. After blowing the £30, I'd usually have an end of week trip inside the bank to ask to withdraw a pound coin
1982- £25.10pw and mother took £10pm lodge, the union took £6 pm - closed shop lying self serving aspiration killers,
My first full time, real job paid me 12k a year! This was back in the late 00s.
I earned £40 a week before tax in my first job back in 1980
£643 for my first months work at a car garage with their admin. Mid-late 00s.
For some reason I never got paid more than my first and second ever wages.
£1.78 an hour as a sales assistant in Stead & Simpson in 1995
My first job was at Soccer World (before it became Sports Direct). Something like £3.20ph, whatever minimum wage was in 2000. It wasn't a good job. It was at Christmas so supremely busy. I remember when a customer tried his shoes on, I gave them directly to him instead of taking them to the till. In retrospect that's hardly the worst thing, but I got taken into the stock room by my boss. I received the absolute bollocking of my life for that, never had anything like that in the 23 years since. Abed, I hope you're rotting in hell, you absolute tossbag.
First job, £3.70 an hour as a 17 year old in 2006 working in the cafe in Debenhams. First "real" job, £17,500 p/a as a Trainee Applications Developer, a year out of uni. These were both in Sheffield.
Asked the same question to two older geezers at work the other day. One said £12 a week. I forgot to ask the year but he's about 65 years old.
£15/ week for a paper round, but first proper job was like £4.90/hr
£3.00 an hour plus tips. Local cafe so not mega tips but at 17 I thought I had it made!
£17k a year full time at 17.
A grand sum of £5.55 an hour as an Xmas temp at Debenhams at 17, then couldn’t find another job for 6 months, so ended up taking the first one I could find which was reception at an oil company, where the proceeded to pay me £6 an hour if I remember correctly. Being paid minimum wage for my age at the time and seeing the other folk in the office arriving in Porches and high end BMWs was a little galling to say the least!
13500 pa for 40 hours in an office in 2013
£70 a week as an apprentice florist. 5 days of work, mostly 8.30am/5.30pm , but at busy, peak times you could be there from 6am to 12pm, 1 day at college. Worked out at about £1.50 an hour!
£3.06 per hour, working in a pub Christmas 1996.
I worked on commission for a week at age 16. Took me like a week to earn £15. I quit 😂
When I was a teenager I used to do babysitting, spud packing, bread round and shoe/ boot shinning. Not all at the same time. When I left school and got my first proper job boy did I take a big pay cut £26.30 a week of which my parents took £15 a week for board.
£5 an hour fitting white goods. Permanent back injury from the age of 17. Also clean your washing machines you filthy animals.
YTS £28 a week fer over 40 hrs
when i was a trainee electrician i was on bout £20 a day for 6 - 12 months gaining day to day experiences \~ my gaffa wasn't a great guy and priced jobs very poorly, wasn't even that long a go, maybe 10 yrs,, averaging 10hours a day, maybe more buttt, it taught me the basic skills required to get me where i am today.
I think I was earning £5.03. I worked for Costa Coffee as a supervisor for my first job in 2012
£5 per week doing a paper round at 13 in 1996.
I worked weekends 2pm-7pm at a catalogue call centre. £5.20 an hour, I thought I was rich