Part-time jobs lead to…

Think back to the first job you had that you got paid for by someone other than your parents. Depending on your age, that could be a wide range of things, and the amount you earned probably seemed like a gold rush at the time!

My first paying job was walking beans for some friends of our family. A group of us trudged up and down the rows of beans, yanking out those pesky weeds by the roots. It also was the first time I ever encountered marijuana, though I didn’t really know it at the time; it was just another weed to pick.

I don’t remember exactly how much money I made, but it was a substantial number to a kid who was probably about 12 years old. Plus, the mom in the family fed us well each day, including taking us to the Godfather’s lunch buffet on the last day!

Part-time jobs are the backbone of many businesses, including farming. As I grew up, farmers would hire you not just to walk beans but also to help with baling hay. Anything for money, and they paid more than my parents did for the chores I did around our place.

When it’s time to drive a vehicle, money becomes more important. You need a job to at least pay for gas. If you were like me, the first place you looked for a job was where a parent worked. In my case, I applied at Randall Foods in New Ulm, where Dad worked for most of his life.

The first place they put me, in October? The Christmas shop on the other side of the store parking lot! I didn’t sell much in October, but I did eat a lot of ginger snaps and drank plenty of hot cider. Things picked up when the trees came in, and we kept plenty busy through the holidays.

After that, I was moved inside and learned how to bag groceries. There is an art to doing that, and I started when we just used paper bags. We even had a test cart to prove that we were ready and knew not to put the laundry detergent in with the produce. We also had drive-up service, so sometimes we’d battle the elements to load groceries in vehicles, which was also an art form.

Obviously, your job has to work around your school hours, but if you’re involved in extracurricular activities, there’s even more wrangling. Since I played basketball and baseball, I couldn’t work until after practice during the week and certainly couldn’t on game nights. I also played pep band in the fall. But I found myself at the store most Saturdays and Sundays for sure.

After a time, I got moved to the grocery crew. Trucks came in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and it was our job to unload them and stock the shelves. Rotation is important; you don’t just shove the new items in front of what was already there. Plus, we had to face the shelves, to make them look nice with everything pulled forward.

I was able to transfer to the Randall Foods in Winona when I departed for college. There, I eventually ended up in frozen and dairy and even ran those departments when my boss had to take a medical leave. I loved my time in the grocery business!

Sometimes, teenagers will hop from job to job when things don’t go their way. That’s no way to get a higher wage much of the time. When I started at the store, I made $3.85 an hour. By the time I was done seven years later, I was up around $8 an hour, pretty good back in the mid-90s.

I finished up my career in the produce department and was offered a full-time job. However, I had just gotten my teaching job at NRHEG and figured I should use my college degree!

As my children have progressed through various part-time jobs, they reiterate the most important lesson they have learned: Getting their degree was important because they didn’t want to continue where they were/are. These jobs might be what some people enjoy, but my kids are just trying to earn some money.

Jayna started at Casey’s in Ellendale and didn’t mind most of it, except cleaning bathrooms. But managers make a difference, and when she came home from her first year of college, she didn’t have much interest in working there anymore. So she joined Anton at Arby’s in Owatonna.

He had started there the previous year and raved about the good atmosphere there as an employee. They would have fun contests, like who could upsell the most cookies, and they’d also have dress-up days with costumes. No matter where you work, if you like the people around you and have some good leadership, it can be an amazing experience.

In college, both kids have worked at restaurants. Now that Jayna is on to her first teaching job, she says she’ll never do that again. Anton is trying to move up from dishwasher at his place of employment.

But he also has gotten a chance to work in the graphics department at MSU for work study. This is his area of study, so it’s one of those great part-time jobs that can help strengthen your resume. My grocery store experience didn’t get me my teaching job, but this might help him down the road.

As I enter the last quarter of my career, I think about what I’ll do when I retire. The answer I always tell folks? I think I’ll go back to the grocery business. I still prefer to bag my own groceries, and I want to face the shelves when items are pushed back a ways. I guess a part-time job won’t be such a bad thing again.

Word of the Week: This week’s word is agnoilogy, which means the study of ignorance, as in, “The teenager engaged in agnoilogy with some of the customers who entered the store where she worked.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!