This Nostalgic Life #32
Early Paychecks
This Nostalgic Life is a free weekly publication rich with nostalgia brought to you by co-creators Eric Vardeman and Mick Lee. If this is your first time reading, you can subscribe using the button below so you don’t miss receiving any future issues delivered straight to your inbox
Welcome to another edition of This Nostalgic Life. In this issue, Eric and Mick are reflecting on some of the first jobs of their lives, which coincidentally saw both working in a grocery store. And we’d love to hear your story as well. If you’d like to share it, leave your story as a comment at the end of this issue!
Lawn Care and Salad Bars - My First Experiences With Employment
by Eric
The summer of ’83 was the first summer I mowed lawns. I had just turned thirteen in March of that same year and that seemed to have met some age requirement my dad had in his head because, without even talking to me about it, he lined up a couple of lawns for me to mow that summer. They only needed to be mowed every other week so, once a week, after dinner, my dad and I would load up the lawn equipment into his flatly unglamorous 1979 Ford Fairmont station wagon and go mow.
My dad would edge and sweep while I mowed. I made twenty-five bucks a pop which, for a thirteen-year-old kid in 1983, was more than enough spending money. Not wanting me to learn how to blow all that money, though, my dad made me open a savings account and deposit some of the money each week. Each summer after that, I picked up additional lawns to the point that by the summer of ’88, when I graduated high school, I was mowing six lawns on top of any regular job I had. In hindsight, I think my dad liked me mowing so many lawns because, on the days I mowed, he had to leave the Fairmont for me to haul lawn equipment around while he drove my Chevelle around town. I’m sure he loved droving the Malibu as much as I hated driving the Fairmont. Especially when I would see people I knew (read: girls). The beauty of mowing lawns is that it’s all paid in cash meaning NO TAXES. As a kid, you don’t realize how amazing that is. As an adult, you realize you were stealing money.
As far as real jobs go, my first gig was as a grocery sacker at a local grocery store, Plaza Fine Foods. I started working there shortly after I turned sixteen when the realization hit me that I needed a steadier cash flow to support the lifestyle that comes with having and driving a car. One day, I was dropping off my resume at several places to little or no fanfare but when I dropped off my resume at Plaza, they interviewed me and hired me on the spot. I started a few days later. The owner/manager was a miserly old grouch by the name of Davis. He never smiled, never had a nice thing to say to any of us and was quick to jump on you if he found you not doing something to his liking. His office was the only thing on the second floor, and it had two one-way mirrors that allowed him to look out over the entire store. And he was always looking.
My duties included sacking groceries and carrying them out for customers (which often came with tips), cleaning up after closing, and restocking shelves. If things were slow, we were also tasked with walking up and down the isles to “face” the products, meaning we turned boxes and cans so that the face was showing towards the customer and pulled product forward to plug holes and make the shelves always look full. One interesting duty we had if we closed on Saturday nights was hiding the beer. At the time, the sale of alcohol on Sundays was illegal in Oklahoma, so on Saturday nights, as part of closing, we had to pull down these window-shade-like covers to hide the beer from Sunday shoppers. There were usually two to three of us lackeys on duty at any given time and we never ran short of ways to get into mischief on the job whether it was playing with the trash compactor, pushing each other in carts up and down the isles while restocking (that ended badly once), or flirting with the cashiers (ended badly once, as well). But the best mischief we got into was with the salad bar.
Shortly after I started, the store added a rather large mobile salad bar that was rolled out before lunch and put up after the dinner hour. Customers could come in and fill a container from the bar purchase according to weight. If we worked evenings, our lackey duties also included cleaning up the salad bar and it’s utensils, trashing items that weren’t meant to be kept overnight and parking it in the freezer. However, nothing got trashed. We ate it all, didn’t matter what it was. We also ate the pudding, the hard-boiled eggs, pickles, seed toppings, bacon bits. It was ludicrous how much food we ate off that thing. And yes, looking back I realize how wrong that was (OK, I probably realized it at the time, too). The salad bar wasn’t around for very long. Seems they were losing money on it, though I have no idea why.
I only worked there for four or five months. Scrooge McDavis became too much to handle and a buddy of mine had a cushy job in the stock room of a department store and convinced me to switch over. I’m not entirely certain when it happened (probably sometime in the 90’s), but Plaza Fine Foods closed and is no longer there. Though the shopping center where it was located still stands, the store has been replaced by a Goodwill center. To this day, though, every time I see a salad bar I’m reminded of that job.
by Mick Lee
It was early summer 1994, June to be exact. I was out of school for the summer and had driven my Mom to the local grocery store to do some shopping. It was an abnormally sticky hot day for June, and I remember this detail because while my Mom shopped, I spent some time talking to my cousin who worked there. He was stocking the ice cabinet from a pallet load of ice. I leaned onto that cool stack of ice and cooled down as I distracted him from his task.
The conversation quickly turned to my older cousin asking me if I was planning to get a job that summer as he knew I was sixteen. I had thought about it, but wasn’t sure if I’d like working with the public. I already had a job working for my old man at his business, but that work was done outdoors, and this sticky June day had me rethinking my options.
“Sure”, I said. He followed that up by telling me there were hiring and he’d go grab me an application if I was interested. I once again replied, “Sure”. Thirty minutes later the application was filled out and turned in.
Now that store was only fifteen minutes from home, but when we got back there, there was already a message on the answering machine for me. It was the grocery store wanting me to come back and fill out more paperwork. It turned out that the paperwork was tax forms. They didn’t even bother to ask me if I wanted the job. They just assumed I did since I had filled out the application and was already signing me up.
Accepting that job was one of the absolute best decisions of my life. I started out as a bag boy and then moved on to the produce department. As the next two years rolled by, I was a cashier, a stocker, worked in what was the count room, and did other tasks that didn’t have a title. And when I turned eighteen, they promoted me to assistant store manager.
I stayed there in that role for the next eight years. And in that time I met people who have been friends for life and met the woman that would eventually become my wife. I was there when a baby was born in the cereal aisle. I was there when the place got robbed. And I was there when professional wrestler “Nature Boy” Buddy Landel helped save the life of one of our employees.
I got to meet Dale Earnhart and spend a summer traveling around with his show car selling #3 merchandise. I got to ride in the Red Baron stunt plane, and I got to turn laps with Jimmy Spencer around Bristol Motor Speedway. And it’s where my love for movies grew as we had a video store inside, and I rented movies to take home on an almost daily basis.
I honed my business skills there, as well as my people skills. I learned a lot of life lessons and was in a position to give working starts to several other young folks through the years. And many years later, my oldest daughter began her working career in the exact same store. I even got to point out to her in the employee handbook three rules that didn’t exist before I worked there. I’ve always prided myself on being a rule maker, not a rule breaker.
I’ve said all of that to say this…that first job prepared me for the rest of my life, and if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing about choosing that as my first job.