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 🥰

Just remembered another job I had, this was early 90s. Summer temp at John Lewis Oxford Street. At the time the uniform was navy and green in various combinations. Permanent staff would buy their uniform cheaply but temp staff were loaned. Unfortunately they didn’t have any navy skirts on loan so I spent the whole summer in a hideous bright green a line skirt with matching blouse. The job was great and we got so many breaks - 45 min morning coffee break, 45 mins for lunch and a 30 min afternoon tea break! Sometimes you’d only have been on the shop floor for less than an hour and then had a 45 min break 😂

Hairdressers then bakers.

The shampoo and set ladies were my favourite. There was a French lady who liked her hair to be washed face down & forward. She liked me to wash her hair as I had a firm way of doing it! I used to get great tips from them - 50p, 20p. My tips would add up to £5 some Saturdays. I was only paid £10 by the owner! I remember a customer whose hair was stiff from over bleaching.

I moved onto a bakers and earned £15 for the Saturday. We started at 7am. The owner used to make us sell the "fresh" bread that was left over from Friday. It was so embarrassing when a customer would call us out on it I could take bread and cakes home at the end of the day. I used to stink when I got home, of dough/yeast, as my mum would always tell me.

🤣🤣. I was exactly the same except mid 80s. I remember my ‘crash test dummy’ days well and it was certainly character building.

Woolworths in the coffee shop in the mid 80s. It was £1.14 an hour or something . Basically making sandwiches and portioning up cakes and serving/clearing tables. Started off in brown checked dress and Tabard and then the new uniforms of a hideous red pinafore dress, striped shirt, frilly duck egg blue aprons and plastic boater hats. You were so filthy and sweaty by the end of the day. Skills in sandwich making and coffee filter machines stayed with me for life, as well as number entry.

Local newsagent - nothing particularly special and didnt have an uniform but the owner was a sleaze who used to check out the skin magazines before putting them out.

1978. Army and Navy. £5 for a Saturday

Im old so my part time schooldays job was in the 1960s not the 1980s! Nor was it a saturday because by the time I got around to it all the little saturday jobs in local shps had gone. My sister was mates with the daughter of the chip shop owner and heard him say his son had gone to collecge so he was looking for someone to help in the shop. I turned up and was taken on for 3 shifts a week to begin with. It was all cash in hand plus a fish and chip supper (or whatever I wanted) when I finished. I was very well paid compared with my friends who worked in Woolworths or Debenhams and had to get the bus into the city. The shop was 5 minutes walk from my parents house.

Some of my friends were a bit snippy about my working in a chip shop until they learned that I came out with almost twice what they did for the same amount of hours, not to mention the fish suppers and the convenience of a short walk. I learned some useful skills like how to handle money confidently. how to serve customers and how to look busy when the shop was empty. I kept that job on and off for several years and always got some extra hours when I needed to save up. When I began my first full time job (civil service) I was disgusted at having to tax tax and NI. It was the kind of side hustle people now dream about.

Late 70’s. I worked in a mall in a book/card shop. Spent too much time discussing books with customers and was admonished. Most of my friends worked in “The Mall” so would try to coordinate lunches. A fancier mall went up across the street and my mall was knocked down in the 90’s

Woolworths late 80s - loved it! Uniform not so much - navy nylon pinafore with a navy/cream stripe shirt underneath.
Also worked in a coffee shop - hot sweaty nylon overall but free cakes!
And Barratts shoes - from memory wore own clothes. Hated it, measuring sweaty feet !

Cleaning narrow boats, used a get a backy there on a lad from schools bike, he was a bilge boy! We used to race for the boats that had been taken out by foreign tourists because they would leave good stuff on the boat.

I looked after four children on Saturdays and occasionally in the holidays if the weekday nanny was away. They ranged from 9 years to 3.
Sometimes the parents would be around, they owned a lovely shop in the town we lived in and we would go out for the day otherwise it was just me and them. They lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a lane so quite isolated should anything go wrong and I was paid the princely sum of £10 a day!

Cleaner in a psychiatric hospital. Every bit as much fun as it sounds.

More of a holiday job - working in a local (Lincolnshire) factory packing broccoli off a conveyor belt. Half of our school was there. One of the boys, very nerdy, (looking back was perhaps ND), extremely clever, wrote quite a funny poem about seeing broccoli in your minds eye after a day at the conveyor belt - he read it out in assembly during the new term.

Washing up in a restaurant. Babysitting. Working in a “casual” clothes shop selling Pringles and cashmere on the weekends (I was a surly goth). It was 1983-85, I was 16-18.

My parents ran a newsagents shop for years-started working there at the age of 14.

I forgot to actually put the card in once.. bollocking followed

Woolies, scratchy sweaty pale blue nylon shop coat. Record bar, pick and mix and little book of 30% staff discount vouchers. Kimball (?) tags for the Ladybird clothes. Massive stock room and bailing machine that I couldn’t use as needed to be 16. Remember switching from cash wages in an envelope at lunchtime to BACS transfer so had a cheque book at 15!
cashiers were (to me) old ladies that would march off to the bank with the Saturday lunchtime take in one of those big brown old lady market style shopping bags. No Securicor then! Oh I also had three paper rounds and babysat. I was minted!

I lived in the middle of nowhere and was a waitress at a nearby restaurant. Loved it!

Greggs 😂 1986, I was 13!
Things I remember, I was paid £1 something per hour, we got 50% discount and we didn't even have a till that added up, had to do it on scrap paper. Oh and I loved using the bread slicer machine.

I too worked at WH Smith then! Tie neck blouse with coloured flecks and a mushroom coloured wool and polyester skirt! I remember stocktaking and being allocated the bloody Parker pen counter with all its tiny bits and bobs!

Tesco. 8hrs Saturdays & 2 x 2hrs weekday evenings. I loathed it. Couldn't wait to hit 18 so I could work in a pub. Loved working the bar, 11pm last orders & the place was bouncing. My shift would pass really quickly then the landlord would drop us at the nightclub with our little brown wage envelope of cash. Happy days.

First thing in the Saturday morning was working in a newsagents shop marking up the paper rounds, and doing a couple of paper rounds myself afterwards, then back to helping in the shop, typically 5 am to 10 am, the busy morning "shift".

Then I'd go to a boarding house and clean/change the rooms 10 am till around 3 pm as Saturday was the usual changeover day back then. Back-breaking work as I was on my own and they had 13 rooms to clean and change over 4 floors, plus then also vacuuming and cleaning the communal areas, staircases, dining room, lounge, etc. A lot to do in around 5 hours!

Then back to the newsagents for the 4 pm to 7 pm evening paper and football paper "busy" evening shift and two paper rounds, one for the evening paper and one for the football special paper!

Finally, 7pm onwards, waitressing in a local restaurant around the corner, till around 11 or 12 depending on how busy it was.

Then back to the newsagents for 5am Sunday morning for the Sunday papers where I had usually 2/3 rounds after marking up the papers first thing, or maybe a 4th round if one of the others didn't turn up.

Finally finished around lunchtime Sunday so I could go home to have a bit of weekend relaxation and do my school homework!

(Forgot I'd also have done the Friday evening shift waitressing in the same local restaurant again until around 11 or 12 midnight).

I was on a mission to earn money and saved many thousand pounds over the 2-3 years I was doing all that. Tips from the waitressing and the boarding house cleaning was more than the wages I earned. Xmas was brilliant for the tips from all the paper rounds!

I ended up earning less once I left school and started a proper full time job, as I had to give up the weekend work which was a shame! Really missed the tips too!

When I was 14/15 I used to work Saturdays and Sundays in a Londis (as it was at the time). I had this housecoat esq dress of a uniform. I used to get the bus 4 miles or so there and back. In the summer I was lucky enough to be able to stand over a fan on the floor when it was really hot. I’d stack shelves when there were no customers and work behind the till the rest of the time.

Can’t remember what the pay was, but we were allowed to take damaged stuff home with us, including boxes of cigarettes (I was a smoker at 14, rebel I know!). Most of the damaged cartons of ciggies were Mores in a long red or green packet, red being regular tobacco and green being menthol.

My best mate and I used to think we were dead cool smoking Mores upstairs in our local Maccies, back when smoking was allowed, but we probably looked like right twats! 🤣

My other non-Saturday job was a cleaner at a head office in town, 6pm to 8pm Monday to Friday. Used to get £50 every fortnight, which always felt a heck of a lot of money. The office workers thought we were all scum, looked down their noses at us, and were were always the first to be accused when something went missing. I never would have stolen anything, other than the odd chocolate from a box of Quality Street or similar at Christmas. 🙈

Local corner shop from age 14. Was paid 35p per hour and had to use a meat slicing machine!

sorry if already mentioned but getting your wages on a Friday in a little brown paper envelope meant that the world was your oyster