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 🥰

A bakers shop with an instore oven. Baked hot x buns at easter, so many buns....

My mum was always pleased with the unsold rolls and cream cakes for Saturday tea. 🍰

Washing up in a pub aged 13, walked 2 miles there and back. £1 an hour. This continued for years until I eventually ran lunchtime food service, mostly with the microwave and fryer.
£1.75 an hour at Pizza Hut aged 15 at the same time, must have done a couple of shifts a week. I remember having to clean after the shift and not paid for this if we ran over a certain time (ie customers who were slow to leave). Was the making of me tbh in many ways, my work ethic is very strong!

My Saturday job was Chelsea Girl ( now River Island) back in the early seventies. I earned £1 a day but took home 99p as I had to pay 1p National Insurance. My first pay packet I bought a brown leather handbag. Have loved handbags ever since.

Late 80’s, Saturday job at Littlewoods food hall in Leeds. Horrible brown polyester A line skirt that clung to your tights and an apricot blouse on top. I started off on the meat/cheese counter, I remember one sleazy man often coming in and asking for some tongue (meat) with a salacious look on his face 🤢. I then ran the bacon counter (there was only me 😂) which I much preferred and there were some lovely regulars that came in. Towards the end, they shut the food hall and we were moved to womenswear which was so dull in comparison.

After my A levels I went into the local Job Centre to see if they had any bar work or similar, to tide me over before starting Uni. There wasn’t much available but the bloke said he had just got a job in that may suit me. This was Nanny to 2 children (the current Nanny was ill). I went to visit them and was offered the job on the spot. They must have asked for references but I remember starting very quickly afterwards. The kids were around 4 and 6, I remember feeling absolutely knackered every evening. They were lovely kids but hard work and the days were very very long. How times have changed, employing an unknown 18 year old to take care of your kids for 9/10 hours a day!

Boots veteran here too! Although my era was early 2000s.

I don't remember if it was expected or we just wanted out of the house but my siblings & I all worked weekend jobs from early doors.
I started at 12 in a fashion shop. £7 a day for 9-6. I even skipped school to work.
Next job from 14 was a retail warehouse (6am-2, sat & sun) I physically worked as hard as the grown men, needed to prove myself so I wasn't relegated to making tea all day!
The owner was a creepy fucker, he discovered I wasn't going to allow him to molest me (just having a laugh apparently) when I knee' d him in the bollocks 😅
I worked behind a bar at 15 after the landlord believed I was of age!

I always had my own money, I learnt to see creepy fuckers very quickly, and I spent very little time at home.
Great success 🙌
ETA I name changed for this

I could not wait to get a job, started at 14.
Also used to do some hair ‘modelling’ as my friend had a YTS at a posh salon so it saved me a fortune and I got a fresh hair do every few weeks.

I worked in Sterile Products at the Wellcome Pharmaceutical Factory for two summers running when I was at university. The first year I was a cleaner and had to dress in full Haz-Mat. The second I was sorting phials of insulin for packing. We had to check for any tiny filaments or specks in the liquid - if we found any they were rejected. Because we were young with 20-20 vision, we spotted loads and the older women on the conveyor belt got really annoyed with us.
I also worked as a library assistant for a number of vacations and got told off by the chief librarian for being

Oops that should say ‘for being too helpful to the public’ .

My friend worked underage in a local pub collecting glasses, she was 16. They sent her to the barrel store alone with stories of ghosts there and she was petrified!

In the late 70s I worked on the record counter in Woolies. Best Saturday job ever. Loved it. Played punk all day, flirted outrageously with blokes when the pubs closed and giggled with my full time colleague.

Woolies in the 70’s was the dream, and the record counter as well..

Never had a Saturday job but did a lot of babysitting for a well-off couple who went out a lot - the husband often drove me home in his E-type!

But I badly wanted a summer holiday job once I was 16, but wasn’t allowed to - had to stay at home to mind younger siblings while Dm was at work. She said she’d make it up to me, but never did. 🤬

I did once (in upper sixth) have a Christmas holiday job with the post office, despite our headmistress disapproving strongly of holiday jobs and trying to tell us it was forbidden!

Elder sister had a summer holiday job in Woolies for IIRC two shillings an hour! This was in the 60s.

1980’s babysitting always reminds me of Rita, Sue and Bob, Too…. 🤣
You sounded safe enough in the E-type though?
A nun at school told us that we would go to hell if we worked on a Sunday. It was before official Sunday training but the paper boys on my class are destined for the devil.

McDonalds.
Their uniform. Lunch. (1/4lb with cheese, choc shake and fries)
I got shoes too as they were trialing them.
Loads of nice people worked there.

We broke £100 hour record on the tills. It'd be about 5 orders worth now rather than 20.

I had to mentally warm up to do the till... I loved organising the back room and managing the stock levels. I ended up doing kids parties on a Sunday.

We used to work really hard. We also used to drive to a service station after we'd finished closing up for a coffee and to unwind.

My babysitting was brilliant - one under-2 who never woke up, and they always left me lots of very nice nibbles. Plus they were quite happy if my boyfriend joined me during the evening.

Just once I was unable to go, but recommended a schoolfriend, and was a mite pissed off when they started using her now and then too - I relied on that £1.50 or whatever it was then - £2 IIRC, if they returned after midnight.

Cleaning in a country club bar and restaurant area. I also did, for extra money, ironing for the restaurant manager's wife, who had rheumatoid arthritis. I would clean in the bar and restaurant then head to the living area upstairs to do the ironing. Would have been around 16 or 17 at the time. I also cleaned in our nearest large hospital, chiefly evening shifts on day wards so after everyone had left.

Fantastic. Also love your name @GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER

My early Saturday jobs were in a cafe and chip shop, making toasted cheese and onion sandwiches, dusting doughnuts in sugar, washing up and funnelling potatoes through first the peeler (it was well noisy) into a bath of cold water, and then through the chipper! I was paid £1 per hour in 1986, one weekend I earned £25 and I thought I was minted. (Edit - it was school holidays and I did Friday to Monday, I can count, honest).

Between GCSEs and A levels I worked in a relative's off-licence and video shop, selling alcohol and cigarettes to people from my school that I knew full well were underage.

During A levels (1990-91) and for a while beyond, I enjoyed a life-changing salary increase to £3.23 per hr at C&A in Colchester. Uniform was a not unpleasant black skirt and white blouse, and I was on menswear - mostly folding sweaters, foiling shoplifters and checking for incendiary devices. I liked it there, they were a good bunch of people and management were ace. Big-up, Mrs Fitch!

So many jobs.
At 14 I worked an hour after school in a village shop cum list office. The sub PO guy was revolting with wandering hands in the stockroom, while his wife was locked in the PO cubicle.
WH Smith in the music dept. Also revolting pervy manager.
At 18 I did night shifts at a biscuit factory. Couldn’t eat biscuits for ages after seeing some very unsanitary practices.
Best casual job was in a fish n chip shop. Lovely family business and I got to take home all the unsold food after lunch. I think we all put a lot of weight on the summer of 87!

Also Boots the Chemists, started in 70s when I was 16, but still worked there during Christmas holidays while a student in the 80s. I remember offering Durex to a man who’d asked for Earex. Also, in those days you could buy ‘over the counter’: a huge bottle of 100 Paracetamol, kaolin & morphine, codeine & a product called Zoff which removed the sticky residue after removing a plaster, but youngsters used to sniff it, so you had to keep a record of who was buying it.

Sorry, the 80s were too late for me. I had a daily paper round before school in the early 60s I was 13. I was paid 10 shillings (50p) a week for 5 early mornings, 6am to 8am.

One of the blokes who had something to do with the bar - not the restaurant manager - he was in his 30s and had a girlfriend/partner called, let's say, Carla. Which is also my, let's pretend, name. Anyway, I'd be minding my own business mopping the restaurant floor, and, let's call him DickHead, would say, "Right, I'm off now, maybe going out for lunch later, and then I'm going to have sex with Carla." Of course, 16 year old me just thought, "What. An. Utter. Fucking. Knob. Head." But he wasn't paying my wages, so I just got on with my job, and pitied poor girlfriend Carla, and wondered what she was doing with such a Neanderthal. Actually, that's insulting to Neanderthals, now I think about it.

@cheapskatemum that stuff with morphine in it used to settle like chalk in a bottle of olive oil. I can remember being given a few glugs of it, everyone had a bottle in the house.
Also - the amount of sleazebag male bosses abusing their roles to abuse young girls it’s horrible to remember how normalised it was.

I worked at a large newsagent chain on a saturday and school holidays...manager was greasy and slimy and combed over his few hairs on his bald head, wore a shiny brown polyester suit and was often squeezing past female staff...yuk...
One day the lift broke down and I was stuck in it, bored I decided to look into some big boxes that were piled up...they were full of swedish hard core porn, gay and straight....lift got working and manager rushed into lift and grabbed the boxes and scowled at me...
a few months later he didnt return to work..we discovered he was sacked as in the evenings, he converted the staff room into a porn cinema and showed films and sold the magazines, vile creep, he once tried to fire me for not getting a receipt for a battery for the staff room radio and accused me of stealing it ....