Your 1980s Saturday jobs

Crawfords 2nd Day Baker’s Shop in a shopping centre near me. They sold all the bread and cakes that hadn’t sold on the day they were made for half price. We always opened to a long queue of old folks hoping to get a cheap cream cake or scotch pie before they sold out. There was another Saturday girl and I and we wore a brown and cream checked nylon overall. It was a unit in an indoor market type area full of stalls. There was a music stall opposite and they ran music videos all day. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” still takes me straight back there.

Moved to Wimpy in town, red “unisex” dungarees that were made to fit 6ft3in tall blokes that we weren’t allowed to cut. Mine were turned up inside the legs almost to my knees. Working in back kitchen slicing tomatoes with a razor sharp thing that always got your fingers, rehydrating buckets of dried onions and squeezing them out…vile. Feeding the broiler with burgers and buns and trying to remember how many of each bun type you had to feed to match the burger requests coming in. Dressing up as Mr Wimpy for parties and promos outside. We did get into a spot of bother when we stood him outside the newly opened McDonalds though.

Final Saturday job was in a big proper department store. In a cafe, but a naice one, with blue rinsed old ladies ordering sandwiches, cream cakes and pots of tea. It was table service and there were half a dozen of us teenage Saturday staff. Uniform was a hideous cornflower blue a-line skirt, matching tabbard and white shirt with blue spots for the women. Men were in black trousers, white shirt, black tie. I did feel jealous. We had great times there though. Being sent to the main kitchens, huge up in the eaves of this old building to fetch the days sandwich fillings and cakes, squeezing into the tiny potwash at the end of the day as we were allowed to eat leftover cakes if “off the sales floor”. We did have to train for bomb scares with the ominous “Will Mr Bracken please go to the General Manager’s Office” relayed over the tannoy if something suspicious was found. The first time I heard the Inspector Sands message on the London Underground I thought that sounds worryingly familiar!

Blimey. How times change.

I delivered magazines for a swank central London estate agent. All round Pimlico, Victoria, Chelsea, S Ken. Properties were over £1M even then. I got £6.20 for a 6 hour Saturday. I was an analogue version of Right Move.

on the til in Key Markets, i was lucky to get the job
before then I cleaned for an old lady and walked her dog
also baby sitting
fruit picking

i remember a furious obviously tired woman on a friday accusing me of bashing her biscuits
a man i knew buying sanitary towels for his wife i assume and i was too embarrassed to wave and ask for assistance, there was no price on it, so i made it up
a woman coming in after christmas, furiously looking for the manager to complain about her turkey, i didnt know who the manager was , and she said Arent you allowed to tell me

I was thinking how much more exciting your experience of Preemark was (I’d have loved an excuse to get out for a while!) until I got to the bit about the pervy manager. Dirty oul so and so🤢

The library at Crystal Palace.
Reshelving books, stamping them out with a date stamp. Cleaning the returned LP records with a special brush.

Saxons shoe shop - nylon flowery blouse with nylon navy culottes. Real pressure to upsell shoe polish all he time.

C&A - I don’t remember the uniform
bit my job was to manually put credit cards in a contraption that made an ink and paper copy of them to process the payment - the manual card imprinted

Very funny comment, I bet Hitler was shitting himself at sister working at Woolies lol

Also worked for “Preemark”-remember those horrible dresses .The tills were emptied of the mornings takings at 1 pm .I used to count this with the manager and compare it with the read from the till .He would then put it into a blue bag with a zip and a padlock and I was then sent to the bank (walking through town centre with ££££)to put it into one of those external chute things .
I was 16 ,and on reflection I think I only got this job because the manager was a pervert who used to stand real close to me while counting the cash .

Woolworths.

Estate agents - late 70’s, early 80’s. I was 13 when I started, working for my DM.
Earned £1 per hour.
Usually office admin tasks, filing, photocopying hundreds of detail sheets, mail, counting the lines of each house advert to charge for the newspaper entry - things are so different now with the internet. Tea girl and had to was up and clean the kitchen sink before we closed.

That bit of the job is outdated, but scarily the other part of my job is even more outdated. I was the ‘accompanier’.

YEP!

At 13, I would accompany prospective buyers (strangers!) , in their car, to empty houses!

Saturday would go something like this.
Arrive at the office, check the diary for anyone who had rang in to book a viewing, sort out the house keys, await house viewer, jump in their car and go to the house for sale, unlock the house, wait and (thankfully) be dropped back at the office!
(all pre Suzie Lamplugh).

Woolworths 1987. I started on £1.87/hour. Uniform was navy blue tunic and striped blouse. Loved being on the till, I was fast! However one day I ended up with sunstroke after being on the till all afternoon during a heatwave. Sun was streaming in to the till area. I felt horrific for the next few days and missed a GCSE exam 😢

75p an hour sounds generous. I used to get 25p an hour in my first job in 1976!

I worked in a similar sounding café on Saturday afternoons and was the only person on the premises from around 2pm until the owner came back at 5ish, having spent all day at the races. When he got back (usually drunk) he would retire upstairs, where he had a bedroom. Before I left for the day I had to go up and give him the afternoon’s takings (all cash in those days).

There was an old-fashioned till but it didn’t add
up or have a roll of paper in it, so it was basically just somewhere to keep the money. I had to hand write and add up the bills. I didn’t make copies for the owner, so he would never have known if I had kept a few pounds for myself.

Looking back, it was an extraordinary amount of responsibility to give a 15 year old!

80s? I worked on the Dolcis concession in Top Shop. Then I worked in an Animation attraction where we did tours and had to take turns dressing up in character costumes along with a huge fibreglass head! We would then walk around outside (with another staff member supervising!) having photos taken with kids etc. That was actually a fun job. Best was Pleasure Island in Liverpool Festival Gardens. I worked on the bowling alley and we had free use of the other activities like the roller rink and giant play frame! Loads of fun. I had lots of Saturday jobs through the 80s and 90s but they are the ones that I remember the most. When I was a bit older and at Uni I worked in a few pubs which was fun - and I met my Dh of 30 years working in one!

I worked at a greengrocers/florists in the mid 80s. It was an old fashioned one where you weighed everything out for the customers, tally it up on a piece of paper and take the cash into a manual (not electric) till. I got paid £10 a day.

Library assistant (£3.50/h), which meant I got paid to go where I went most Saturdays since I was about 5 anyway. (Went on to work FT in academic libraries for a couple of years after uni.) Supplemented in the school/uni hols and term time at uni with lifeguarding (£4.95/h) and swimming teaching (£7/h), and the occasional bit of cleaning (holiday chalets and private houses.)

I worked as a waitress in an upmarket country hotel. We worn a white blouse and a green floral pinefore. We kept a white cloth in our pinafore pockets to use to serve the crockery. The chef made all the deserts on the sweet trolley and I was chuffed to bits when I graduated to the desert trolley. I would stand at the end of the table and describe in great detail all the many deserts on the trolley and point them out to all the guests, rather like Anthea Redfern on the Generation Game.
When I was 18 I progressed to working behind the bar. The young woman who worked as a barmaid was incredibly glamorous. She wore stiletto heels and a white blouse and a black pencil skirt. She always wore matching make-up, either all brown or all pink. As it was the 80s she had big hair. I thought she was the epitome of chic. Melanie was her name.
I can’t remember what the wage was but we made a lot in tips.

I worked in a frozen food shop,with the pretentious name of 'Cordon Bleu'. This was in 1981, when I was 17 and at college. I think this shop was the predecessor of Bejam,which was the predecessor of Iceland! I worked on the till mainly,no barcodes back then,you had to type in the price of everything manually. Everything had to be 'priced up' with a yellow sticker before being put out in the shop. I remember having to wear a horrible blue checked nylon overall. And one of the greengrocer boys from the shop next door asking me on a date. I can also remember making myself a cup of 'coffee' with gravy granules,which had been put in an empty coffee jar. 🤢

Worked in a local bakery where I learned to add up very fast in my head, miles better than maths class but also where I developed a fondness for a cream cake (having previously hated cream). Not good for the backside!

Then moved onto the coop deli, underage worker and was told to lie by the manager if anyone ever asked me how old I was. Fond memory from there was seeing how high we could get a new, unopened block of brawn to bounce of the floor as so much jelly. It bounced surprisingly high. Oh, and being grossed out by the jars of rollmops. I have no idea if anyone still buys that type of food or that generation have since passed, barely sold any back in the 80's as it was.

Chelsea Girl was a Saturday Girl then part-time I loved working there great fun and we wore Chelsea Girl uniform changed with the fashion trends

In the cafe at Sainsbury’s Savacentre.

Different roles were
Working out in the cafe and clearing tables;
Working on the fish’n’chips counter which involved coating and frying the fish, serving teas and coffees, and then when the counter closed at two I had to empty and clean out the deep fat fryer, meaning that I stank of grease;
Or the main task I got was in the kitchen taking the dirty trays off the conveyor belt, emptying left over food into the waste disposal and loading the plates and cups into the giant dishwashers.

I can’t remember what I wore, or what I got paid but I remember working 4 hours from 12 til 4 on a Saturday which was great as I could have a bit of a lie in before getting the bus and get back in time to get ready to go out on Saturday evening. I used to buy a packet of lemon Bon-Bons on my way out and sit and eat them on the back seat of the bus on my way home. Always the same sweets.

My first job was helping set up/take down/wash those big white marquees for weddings etc. It was hard work for something like 2 pounds an hour but we got to travel all over and it was great.

However I remember arriving one Sunday afternoon to take one down - and the north face of the marquee was stained yellow. The dirty pricks had decided to use it as a urinal for some reason. We had to fold it all up, haul it back and then spend hours pressure washing the piss off. The job wasn't so great then.

Asda as well but in Scotland lol

Dirty Bastard Alert🤣🤣🤣 Brilliant!

British Home Stores and C&A, both now sadly gone from the high street. Used to get free lunches and free cakes and snacks during the morning and afternoon tea breaks. Those were the days!