What was your first paying job as a teenager? I worked at a pizza joint, How about you??

[3catwoman3]

172. My first non-babysitting job was in the women's clothing section...

...of the local J C Penney's. 1967, and I was 16. $1.60 an hour. The one and only raise I got after many months took me up to a whopping $1.65.

It was not unusual for customers to come in 10 minutes or so before we closed at 9 PM, take a massive armful of clothes into the fitting room, buy nothing, and leave everything in a heap on the floor. To this day, I cannot leave a mess in a dressing room.

Once the customers were gone, we'd get straightening the stock. Buttons buttoned. Zippers zipped. Belts buckled. Shoulder seams symmetrically on hangers.

If you happened to work closing on an evening and opening the next morning, it was kind of a pain. The store manager, a prissy sort, Mr. D.W. Hockridge, liked his employees to "look busy." If there were no customers to be attending to, he'd want us to be straightening the stock. First thing in the morning, there was no real straightening to be done because we'd done it all the night before, so we'd just walk around shoving hangers back and forth on the racks so it looked as if we were doing something.

The "D" in D.W. stood for Dorris. No wonder the boss wanted to go by his initials.

Interesting perspective - the last raise I ever got in my final nurse practitioner position, some 50 years later, was a paltry 65 cents an hour. The 5 cents was a 3% raise. The 65 cents was a mere 1.6%. I was sorely tempted to tell my employers that if they couldn't see their way clear to at least a dollar, to just keep it. I thought about quitting, but was in my early 60s by then, and the idea of starting over somewhere else wasn't appealing.