Your 1980s Saturday jobs

[Snooks1971]

I’m sure I’m not UR (!) to ask if you can share what your 80s Saturday jobs were.
Mine was WHSmith.The things I remember most:
nylon pencil skirt - horrendous
On the front till and selling Playboy magazine (dying having to look for the price to type in manually)
The woman who had worked there for 30 years still sniggering at the Smallholdings magazine
The designated fountain pen area - under glass 🥰

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.

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.)

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 .

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.

I was a waitress in a cocktail bar!

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.

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!

Dirty Bastard Alert🤣🤣🤣 Brilliant!

Asda as well but in Scotland lol

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.

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.

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

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. 🤢

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.

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 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.

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!

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!

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 😢

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.

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 .

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

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