Your 1980s Saturday jobs

The now-defunct shoe shop Freeman Hardy & Willis in my local town. My mum stopped my £5 allowance as I was now getting paid. I was not happy as I started on 4 hours Sat mornings for £1.25 an hour, so was no better off for getting up early. Black skirt & white blouse, horrible old letchy boss, but the female staff were nice, and I happily did lots of hours over the summer holidays. We used to hide in the stockroom and bitch about the customers, their disgusting smelly feet and bad taste in white plastic stilettos.
Graduated to Asda checkouts as a student - gross nylon green overall, but I learned all the prices by heart, which really helped my food budgeting. Used to love chatting with the customers as I rang up the items, I think it helped knowing it wasn't forever. Earned enough each holiday (plus my termtime jobs) to graduate without debt (1989).
Had some nasty jobs whilst away at uni - cleaning pub toilets early in the morning being especially grim.

I was a waitress in a cocktail bar!

Sainsbury's in the early 90s was entirely staffed on Saturdays by hungover teenagers in nylon orange dresses. I was one of them. I can't remember what I was paid but we had to queue up at a checkout after the store closed and receive our week's pay in cash in a shiny envelope.

A bakers shop. £1.56 ph. I loved slicing bread in the big slicing thing. Had to do mental arithmetic to add up the purchases (couldn’t do it on the till). Despite having maths degree since, I was (and still am) quite rubbish at mental arithmetic so I found that a bit stressful .

Late 80s/early 90s, I worked in a shoe shop on a Saturday and Thursday night. I then moved on to a men’s clothing store, which made me really popular with the boys in my year because I was allowed to use my staff discount for anyone, not just family. It was so good because I generally hated school, was quite bookish and nerdy with few friends, and I met Saturday girls from other schools through work, as well as the glamorous older girls who had full time jobs there.

I was probably quite lucky with uniforms - the shoe shop was black skirt and white blouse, but they could be any black/white items. The gents’ shop was just no jeans. I got a bar job in a sports and social club when I was at uni which was fab, and I learned how to be very good at pool and how to “read” a bandit and know when it was about to pay out. (As a private club the bandits had big jackpot. The assistant steward and I would pool a few quid each and split the £100 win.)

C&A. I was the Clochouse girl so I was in charge of the juke box. We also got to wear the clothes instead of the general store uniform. Lovely store.

I worked in a bakery for £1.60 an hour. Brown nylon checked dinner lady overall with a brown tabard.

I also worked in the petrol station, all by myself aged 18. I could wear what I liked.

I grew up in a famous seaside resort so always jobs available for schoolkids. (1970s)
I did 2 seasons on the pot wash in a big hotel. Bloody hard work. Third season I got a job in a cafe on the seafront just in front of the theme park I loved it. We did teas, coffees, sandwiches and pies. Soft drinks and ice cream. We sold cigarettes as well and as big flared trousers were in fashion me and my fellow assistant used to secrete packets of fags down our knee length socks, undetected 😆 my absolute favourite time there was when the lads who worked on the theme park came in to buy lunch. Lots of good looking ones for us to flirt with 🥰 happy days 😀

Pick n mix counter Woolworths in the 80s , I remember some sort of nylon zip up uniform and a hat . I was desperate to move to the record department because that was cooler. sadly I stayed with the sweets, it was very busy we sold the most sweets in the country and got a free staff party 😂

My mum worked in Stead & Simpson and then Saxone when she returned to work in the 80s and they had targets from head office for polishes and stuff.

I didn't have an actual Saturday job as I had other commitments on a Saturday but I did do a very short stint working on a chippy. I caught flu after my second week so didn't even last a month as I was already far too slow for them. Some of the customers straight from the pub were vile.

I had various jobs at uni, including working in the uni library as holiday cover - we got to use the tannoy 😜 The best was the menswear hire company I worked for. I got the job for my needlework skills and I did quick alterations and a lot of ironing with a proper industrial steam generator. It was actual sweatshop conditions around August bank holiday when we had over 100 outfits to prepare and then take back but it was a fab job. The unit is a branch of The North Face, now. I sometimes pop in just to stand by the big arched windows.

Yep, DD was one of the these during A levels!

I delivered dental appointment cards by hand. Every Saturday. Dentist saves on the postage and paid me a pittance so deliver them to the local area. Must have walked close on 5 miles every Saturday morning before I was 10.

1st was in a hairdressers, second was at Saxone shoes. So easy to get a job in those days.

Local indoor market stall. One side sold cheese and ham which was sliced to order. Other side sold frozen veg and gateau which was weighed to order. Massive walk-in freezer which I was shut in on more than one occasion and a handsy boss who groped me even more. I’d spend my wages at Clockhouse in C&A every weekend to go clubbing in a new outfit.

Local library. Dull and easy but very well paid.

Also have memories of being a teenage bomb searcher… although different circumstances. I worked in a bookshop which sold Satanic Verses when the fatwa was issued. We had a lot of bomb threats so often had to crawl on the carpet looking under the book shelves for anything suspicious!
It was quite a big shop and had a small erotica section which they foolishly put in a secluded area behind the stairs… if we saw anyone wanking we had to alert the manager immediately “Sandra, DBA!” (Dirty Bastard Alert)
I had thought working in a bookshop was going to be sedate and intellectual… 😁

Bejam, which got taken over by Iceland. I retain a soft spot for Iceland as they paid better (I’d gone from £1.45ph to £1.60ph with Bejam, but when Iceland took over it went up to a whopping £1.97ph). On the tills, though I got taken off for a while when the checkout supervisor ran a fraudulent shop through to test me. She’d switched labels around on the products - like I was going to challenge my boss, even if I might think the cheese-filled burgers were cheaper than usual.

I think both provided a dress as uniform, blue and red respectively. I was a busty teen and barely fitted my Bejam one, but fortunately that came with a tabard as well.

I then worked in a leisure centre cafe that sold the most unhealthy food possible. I did a lot of washing up and smelled of chip fat. The uniform was something else - red skirt, white shirt with a red lattice pattern, little frilly white apron, and a straw boater.

My colleague who was also 16 did manage to remove the top of his finger on the meat slicing machine - and even worse he got bollocked by the manager for doing so 😂

Old Peoples’ Home as they were called; actually just elderly ladies. Sometimes waiting tables but usually working the dishwasher in the back. Steamy and hot, constantly burning myself and told to hurry, hurry, hurry. It was one of those industrial style machines where you pushed a tray of dirty crocks into the machine, pulled down the hatch, turned it on and then pulled out the boiling tray afterwards. Dry with an ancient tea towel.

Also a cleaner at 2 estate agents and warren of back offices in the evening when I was in 6th form. Meant to do them both by myself in about 2 and 1/2 hours. It was impossible and I always finished incredibly late. Spooked out working alone in Victorian buildings. Crap pay.

Babysitting - complete doss watching telly in a comfy house drinking their coffee and biscuits and sometimes glass of wine as offered! Only difficulty was being awake when they returned home from their gadding about!

Swimming pool life guard

I think our local theme park is run by teenagers! Especially over the summer.

My eldest sister worked in Woolworths , the other sister worked in a saddlers . I looked after our horses but if the sister who worked in the saddlers was sick or had something on I used to stand in for her .

I did that too! I still have the scar where I almost removed the top of my finger with a pate knife (you manually sliced a large pate into whatever size the customer wanted)

I then got a job in a jewellers which was far less dangerous ;-)

My first job was checkout girl at the co op. I worked 4 hours Thursday evening , 4 hours Friday evening and 6 hours on a Saturday. I got £14 a week and I thought I was brilliant! My dream was to work the pricing gun on the shop floor but that never happened!

Late 80’s local mini market/newsagents in our village. Most of my 6th form seemed to work some sort of shift there. Never very busy except maybe Sat morning. Used to piss about most of the time with afor mentioned 6th form “colleagues”

Still remember having to fish out “Burt’s” porn mag every Saturday from the stack of mags that would be put aside for customers less they sell out 😂

And the cringe of having someone I fancied ask to buy fags and me having to ask them for proof they were 16