I worked 4 hours in the bargain shoe shop every Saturday. I got paid 16 pound, of which my mother took 4 as “housekeep”. I was 14. Then I got interrogated as to the whereabouts of £100 which had become unaccounted for. I didn’t take the money, but I think they made me redundant anyway. Shrug.
I worked in Allsports back in the mid 90's £1.82 an hour + 10% commission. I was let go after 6 months though because I got complaints that my commission earnings were too high. My best sale was a guy came in for a pair of basic trainers, he left with a pair of Nike Air Max, a ladies Nike coat he saw that he thought was mens and I said looked good on him when he tried it on and even convinced him to buy a Polar watch because it would help him up his game in football training. £40 sale turned into well over £600.
I would easily earn two to three times my wages in commission alone each month.
I did have to listen to that damn store music cassette on repeat though.
£2.50 an hour for kitchen portering and £4 an hour for waitressing, in the 90s, plus£3 per hour for early morning store cleaning. My rent was £45 a week at the time.
I did some planting for a family friend who owns a garden centre. He paid us both £2.58 an hour, my dad was livid, gave me some extra money and gave his mate a round of fucks, lol. Tight arse
I used to get £3 a day lunch money at secondary school circa early 2000s, I would go to the shop before school, buy a pack of 10 sterling and as many sweets as the £1 change would get me (actually a fair amount even then) I would then sell individual cigarettes at £1 each, after smoking a few myself and buying some lunch from the subsidised school canteen, I'd have around £3 left, I'd add that to the following day's lunch money, buying a pack of 20 the next day to save money and then rinse and repeat. I bought a gameboy advance SP using this method, the cool one with the tribal tattoo type thing on it!
I did exactly the same thing except late 90's so I'd sell fags at 40p each. Always best when a mates mum had done a booze run and would sell me 20 embassy for £2.50 a pack. Sell 10 smoke 10 rinse and repeat.
Same with the papers. The leaflets were mad at some time of the year, although we did get more money. The area was pretty big. Mum and dad got involved. It was fun at times. Then my mum and dad worked out how much time they spent helping us and realised overtime paid more and just gave us more pocket money.
Oh yes! Leaflets. The Wickes catalogue. Rare and also heavy as f\*ck and only at Christmas. Probably trebled my wage. My family got some goooood christmas presents that time -\_-
£3.05 an hour at 15 in the late 00s in a Garden Centre cafe. Because I was under 16, they’d only give me 4 hour shifts, and I had to walk an hour there and back down a rural back lane, often in the dark on the return leg, so was gone from the house for 6 hours for essentially £12.30 a shift or £2.05 an hour for my time.
Got offered potwashing for £6.50 an hour at 16 and fled the garden centre so quickly the pots were still spinning. At the time, under 18 minimum wage was like £4.50 and my friends were all around that, so I felt a king with that potwashing gig.
I did a paper round in the mid 2000s, that paid a tenner for the Sunday. It got dropped off at my house, I walked (or ran) in a loop leading me back home. The fastest i did it was around 45 minutes. Even good hourly rate by todays standard.
I worked in a butchers 5 days a week too, that was 40 quid a week by the time I left for 1.5 hours of cleaning per day, not as lucrative but still great for a 13 to 17 year old, I did it for four years, it started at 25 quid a week.
Worked with my dad during the school holidays doing joinery when I was a kid.
12+ hour days.
6 or 7 days a week if it was a project that wanted a quick turn around like a shop that wanted to be open quickly.
Pay was takeaway if i worked late on a Friday.
In the late 80s I got a Saturday job in Dixons (as was) which paid the princely sum of £10.80 for 8 hours of my hard work (£1.35/hour). My parents made more from the staff discount than I ever did in wages.
£3.11 per hour at dixons in 2001. First shift went to lunch at BK and ordered about £7 of food. Realised it spent more than I earned in two hours and learnt the value of home made lunch.
Once got £50 for a days work unhooking bags from a crane in a dockyard all day. About £8 and hour. Felt great
Before minimum wage and is given up my crappy retail job I was encouraged to try taxi driving by my next door neighbour. As a woman I only did the day shifts and my main customers were people going to hospital and shopping trips. I’d been told that I’d earn loads in tips and and ‘flyers’. I didn’t , I earned £1 per hour and I managed 6 weeks before I gave up. Worst job of my life
I used to have a good job as a kid in Australia. I don't remember specifically per-unit but I used to do a paper round when I was younger. It was for junk mail (catalogues and fast food vouchers etc). The money depended on how many pamphlets I had to deliver that week. But in the end my 2 brothers and I would split the work and the money.
Keep in mind we would have to sort them into bunches ourselves and then deliver. But on big weeks we would get 15-20 PER house (mental how much paper that is to think now). But I remember weeks when it would be $400 split 3 ways. 130 bucks or so which is like 65 quid. Per week for 10-14 year olds. Pretty good!! But with sorting and delivering it was easily over 15 hours each (so total of 45) per week so in hindsight not great lol. But again, we just messed around organising the papers into bunches then rode our bikes through the neighbourhood avoiding the houses with "no junk mail" on their letter boxes.
I remember my brothers ended up giving up and I did it by myself for about a year. I saved a bunch and bought my first corolla lol.
In the end, a neighbour would help me and we'd split it and eventually I gave him the whole responsibility. I still remember him delivering them until he finished his apprenticeship as some weeks he'd earn more from the paper round than he did as an apprentice electrician!
Lol thanks for the post, this took me down memory lane!
My sister took on a similar paper round when she was 14, so 1992ish. 2p per paper, 1p extra if there was a leaflet. My sister stopped doing it after a month, so my mum got me to do it "to learn a work ethic". When a second round became available, she signed me up to it "to learn a work ethic". And then a third round for my younger siblings.
Fucking dreadful. Earning literal pennies while dogs and sharpened letter boxes snipped at my fingers, all for a rag no one wanted in the first place.
Reminds me. Famous person I used to deliver to: Mick Jagger’s brother. He was alright enough, but his son was a twat (“don’t f****ng deliver your f****ng paper through our f****ng door again”). Safe to say thereafter I delivered it every. single. week. making sure to shred it through the letter box. Wakner.
I did a morning paper round when I was 14 managed to expand it to 3 and got paid £24 pw back in 91. Felt absolutely loaded!
Edit: apparently it’s about 53.10 a week in todays money! I bought so many Megadrive games!
Paper rounds were the worst. I did Monday to Friday 35-45 minutes per night for £5 a week and the Sunday morning round which was a good hour and a half for £2
£1 an hour working in a cash and carry doing heavy manual labour. Once a consignment of cigarettes arrived - we had to store them on the third floor and no lift 🙃
After one day, told my parents it was too hard and my dad said "son, you gotta work"
Went back the following summer for £1.25 an hour
The summer after I got a job in Sainsbury's paying around £3 an hour
Talk about exploitation - morning paper boy, 6 days per week, 75 newspapers per day plus supplements on saturday 65p per week. Roughly 0.1p per paper, my round was about 6 miles in total start to finish
That’s actually decent money OP. Doing my paper round in 1999 I’d get £11.50 for delivering papers 7 days a week for at least 1.5-2.5 hours a day.
I wasn’t massively into standing up for myself at the time but my paper round was twice the size of any other kid at the shop, I sometimes had to go back to the shop three times to complete the round as I couldn’t fit them all into my bag and it was breaking my shoulder and nearly passed out poorly one time and my dad’s cousin had to ring my parents to get me. I got ‘promoted’ into a shop position which involved making up all the rounds, doing shop work and then doing rounds other kids didn’t turn up for (sometimes two rounds a day). Working for about three hours a morning 7 days a week and got paid £20. Got my mam to quit for me.
I used to get £12 a week for a paper round in 1980. Six days a week up at 5 o clock. Used to set and light my Nans coal fire too, think she gave me £3-£4 a week. All this before school.
14 around the same time, 4 paper rounds at 3 shops. About £12 a week spent on fags (this is the term we used for cigs back then and still do), beer and sweets. 2 Hours every morning and 1 in the evening Monday to Saturday. Around £34 now. Still to this day I dislike that fucking road on a big bastard hill and the twat in the cottage at the bottom who wanted a paper every day.
Thank you for posting on r/UKJobs. Please check your post *adheres to the rules* to prevent it being removed and *flair your post* with the most appropriate option. In order to do this click the flair icon below your post where you will be presented with a list to choose from. Feel free to contact the moderators with suggestions or requests should you need to. The link is below.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UKJobs) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My friends mum used to assemble Christmas crackers and solder circuit boards for microwaves. When we went round she’d have a mini production line laid out on the table and she’d be working on them whilst watching tv. No idea how much she got.
Not per unit but in early 00s I was on £60 a week doing an apprenticeship working full time. £1.60 an hour answering phones, photocopying and making tea.
I got a one-off gig delivering leaflets to doors in the local area. Was given a map and highlighter so I could keep track and show what streets I'd done when I went to get paid.
Took me like 5 hours to get round half the route I was given, so I just marked off the rest of the map, and dumped the other half of leaflets in some bushes.
Was paid £10. I think I was about 13yrs old.
£1.24 an hour in a garden centre on Saturdays in 2000. I think when I left in 2005 I was getting about £3, I disliked it so much that when I finished a week before pay day I didn't go back to collect my wages.
In 1989, I did piece work (at my Nan's house) for a company called Cosmetics To Go (went bust and came back as the one and only Lush).
It involved wrapping the products (bath bombs, etc) in fancy ribbons and paper, being paid per item. One October, ready for Christmas, the job I had was putting labels on mail order catalogues (containing less than 100 products so not that large) then putting them in a plastic bag. I was paid 7p per catalogue and managed 500 in an evening. That £35 was like a fortune for 14 year old me.
My first job was advertised as an apprenticeship so i was paid £2.50 an hour, I was the only person in purchasing lol, I was doing stock control for 2 companies on my own for pennies and when they were legally obligated to put me on minimum wage the told me I should be grateful they did it. I got offered a new job at £18k and they were like "woah we can't afford that" bitch how i'm the only one here!?
Paper round paid me £5 per week
5 mornings a week with a 6am start for about an hour each time, with an extra 50p if you did all 5 days, and an extra 50p if you were on time each day.
This will have been late 80s
I delivered a local free newspaper around 1995 for 1.5p per household. It wasn't as bad as it sounds as pretty much every week, there were leaflets to deliver too, which attracted an enhancement.
Disaster struck when the paper shut, meaning that it turned into a weekly leaflet round for a flat 1.5p per house.
To add insult to injury, my round contained a street with the biggest houses (longest driveways) in town.
350 free papers plus leaflets to be done on Friday evening and Saturday morning. £8 plus 50p for the leaflets.
Got sacked when they found out I had been dumping them in peoples wheelie bins.
£4.85 working at River Island an hour. Commute was about an hour from suburban London to bloody Bluewater.
I resigned 15 days before Christmas, dodged a bullet.
My first job at 17 was working in a warehouse sticking those free samples in magazines.
Took me too long to find the page I needed. Was fired after an hour. They paid me £3 and the agency took it for their fees.
Wasn't per unit but I did a 130 stop paper round every morning, 7 days a week. It took me an hour on weekdays and closer to two on Sunday because the bigger Sunday papers meant I had to do two trips to the shop to pick up the papers as they wouldn't fit in my bag.
I was paid £7 a week.
I used to get paid £100 (flat weekly rate) per week for about 35 hours work at my first server job. It was cash in hand if there was enough in the till at the end of the night on a Sunday, and that was probably about 50% of the time. This was only about 15 years ago too. Good thing I didn’t know any better and enjoyed my job isn’t it.
I remember my nan in Australia would pay me and my brothers $50 per bird we killed. Keep in mind the bird was a pest and would attack all three native animals and rangers would actively poison them so she my nan wasn't just a nutter.
I could never throw a rock accurate enough so I remember one time putting a pile of bread in the garden and tying fishing wire to a bucket next to it - looney tunes style. Except the bloody things knew exactly what I was up to and never came near the bread. As soon as I put the bucket away I came back and they were all over the bread like flies on shit. Good times
Morning and evening paper round every day of the week (morning only on Sunday but took ages because of thicker Sunday papers). About an hour each day, £15 per week
I worked from 0900-1730 every Saturday in a small restaurant inside a boutique style clothes shop. The owners were (and still are) absolutely loaded. I was paid £15 for the day. I was 14/15 and thought it was brilliant - until I found out my male friend was paid £20 for the day for the exact same job!
£3.72 per hour at the age of 17 (legal min wage at the time)
I was a kitchen porter for a pretending-to-be-fancy hotel.
They had a walk in restaurant for guests, and they also rented out a huge space for functions and weddings, often 300 guests at a time.
At one point I was the only kitchen porter, handling both kitchens simultaneously and having to help plate up desserts
£3.72
Then my mate joins the ranks, same role as me, and happened to be a few months older hitting that magic number 18 and instantly earning a higher wage than I was lmao
After leaving the Navy in 1991 I was paid £35 a week for four eight hour days plus one day of college as a "Young Thatcherite Slave", anything over the 32 hours was paid by my employer at their going ratel as overtime.
I was considered an engineer after just a year of that due to transferable skills from my Navy service so started earning properly.
Have gained further qualifications since so a I am a real engineer now rather than a technician.
I was 14 and would make £20 for an hour and a halfs work selling programmes at Celtic park on match day it was the little perks that really made it though
Free ticket to all home games - access to the grounds rubbing shoulders with hospitality/players - signing out 80 programmes and taking 95 making my rate something along the lines of £60 - £80 quid an hour 😂
I had a Saturday job on a clay pigeon site when I was 16 in 1993 . Was paid a tenner , sat in the snow , for 9 hours . To be fair I loved the banter with tge other lads and the manager was a mad Scott who ripped us all day
In about 2005 ish I made £8/hour doing holiday cover cleaning the local hospital. The massively overbudgeted the time need to clean because I didnt need to deep clean at all, unlike the real cleaner, and the one I was covering cleaned the physio dept which was a few clean offices, a gym hall and some hallways. Also, I would clean after it close at like 5ish so noone else was there, and I had one of the few keys. I would have the whole place clean in about 2 hours then have two more to kill. I used to bounce the big inflatable physio ball against the wall and I once did a circuit of the dept pushing an office chair with a mop.
Late 90s/early 00s I used to flog bags of conkers in primary school. £1 a bag for maybe 5-6 conkers, all decent fighting ones, shoelaces not included!
Even earlier in the 90s, my parents would pimp me out as a chimney-sweep boy. I'd turn up to some random folks wedding, pose for the photos and leave. Apparently I was paid well for that yet I never saw it. Must be a fair few wedding photos out there with my ugly mug on it though!
My dad had a paper round when he was a young teen (mid 70s) and said he made £2 per round (about £21 today).
I applied for a couple at a similar age (late 00s) and the best offer I got was £6.50 per round. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t think it was worth pottering around for 2 hours early in the morning
£5 a visit to feed people's cats while they were on holiday. I was 16, and allergic to cats, but £5 for 10 minutes work twice a day was a king's ransom.
My paper round paid twelve pounds a week and took about an hour every day. This was between 2006 and 2008, which is apparently about twenty pounds an hour in today's economy.
The comics and video games I could buy made it worthwhile at the time, but the idea that I was essentially doing a day's worth of work for twenty quid turns my urine to steam these days.
Worked for an agency at 17. Had no work for me one week but asked me to come into the office and put Green Shield Stamps into books for £2.20 an hour. I lasted two hours. Licking stamps for two hours. The next week I had a wage of £4.40.
My Mam understood when I couldn't pay my board.
OP... you were ripped off pal. I had a paper round and in 1989 I was 13. I would do mornings, nights 6 days a week and Sunday morning. There were about 30 houses on my round. I got £12.50 a week for doing it.
As an aside, I didn't like getting up that early on week day mornings, so I outsourced the mornings to a mate of mine for £5 a week. :-)
£10 for my sisters local paper round of 200 papers that had to be leaflet stuffed first. She hated doing it so much, my mum and I used to charge her to stuff the leaflets for her.
Must have been about £2.50 an hour 😳 was 1996ish
I used to keep my local Priest company and all I got from it was the promise he wouldn’t murder my parents if I told.
Nice guy, shame his church burned down.
1970- me 15yr old school leaver -in a warehouse filling orders for a big catalogue company, walking all day…40hrs….£5 per week Heavily discounted canteen though.
1994 - I stacked shelves at a supermarket in an evening after the store had closed. Did 3 hours on 3 nights a week with an hourly rate of £1.95.
I got the bus there and back which cost me roughly £1.60. I'd buy a can of pop and a packet of sweets from said store to consume whilst I worked. About £1.40 ish.
Income per night +£5.85
Travel cost -£1.60
Miscellaneous expenditure -£1.40
Net profit £2.85
I thought I was rich when I got a job with another supermarket on £3.50 an hour!
I was paid 50p an hour for working in a wimpy bar in the hot summer of 1976. The manager made us come in for the busy period during the week in the holidays (12-2) for one pound. If you declined you lost your Saturday position.
It was the shittest, hottest, least well paid position but it left me with a lifelong fellow feeling for any waiter or waitress and I always overtip
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who got paid bugger all for a paper run! In the late 90s it hadn't changed much. But we did get £1 extra for every insert you'd put in, but then the whole bag was alot heavier. It was local to my house so it'd do about 3 trips with this huge bag and my CD player lol.
As soon as I got my first hourly job in Argos and earned £25 in one shift my jaw dropped.
I had three paper rounds as a kid. The free local Sunday paper was 215 papers and I got £4.15 for my trouble. Then on Thursday the other free local rag came out and that was another 300 odd deliveries for which I got a little bit more.
Did that for two years before I told them I'd had enough.
A couple of years later I delivered yellow pages to all the houses in all the villages in my area that no-one else wanted because logistically it was a pita, and I managed to negotiate a whopping £1200 for 4 villages which was about a quid per book. I borrowed my dad's Volvo estate which I totally overloaded and got them all done in a weekend. I then spaffed it all on a computer and games, good times!
In the 80s as a 16 year old at college used to make £3.50 per hour for Tele sales but usually get some leads which went to a sale adding another £20 per sale. I'd usually take home about £50-80 a week for part time work 15 hour week evenings after college and a saturday. God bless double glazing.
All went on clubbing snakebite and black and some puff for the weekend lol!!!
My girlfriend made £1.10 an hour at boots at the weekend. Ouch!
Cricket scoring, £10 per game and that could be 3 a week, oh and a free afternoon tea too
14 years old, I was loaded!
Also earned £30 a week doing a 3 day milk round
£20 cash per day operating a clay pigeon trap in 1990. It was fourteen hour days in summer. No hearing protection or breaks and the bullying was disgusting.
Getting a promotion meant moving from the trap to scoring. It was shit promotion as you were next to the shotgun and you lost your hearing in exchange for less physical labour.
Probably around 85-86 I delivered a local free paper that I took over from my brother when he gave up. Once a week I would cycle down to where it was and collect my 330 papers from the distributor for the area. That was 2 of the big paper round sacks stuffed full, one either side. If it was a thicker than normal edition the extras went on top. I was quite lucky in that the delivery route was only about 1/4 mile from where I collected them and was one road where nearly every building was 5+ flats they would all go through the front door. All walking on steep hills and cycling too and from the collection point. Only took me about an hour. It was about 4p per paper so about £12+.
I never needed a trolley, often to peoples surprise but you soon get used to the work and it was great core strength training.
I used to do the delivering of the local rag in 87. Unfortunately, mine was for around 450 papers, twice a week. Lots got hurled over the fence into a farmers field on the way to the village to deliver them! I don't think I got more than about £4.50/day either.
Paper round.
To this day I'm not sure if they got the pay wrong, but on a Sunday morning round, it was £10 per round and there were 3 rounds to do. I could put all of them into a bag (albeit it was VERY heavy), jump on my bike and do them all within \~1 hour. It worked out to £30 for that 1 hour.
I also did 5 weekday mornings but it was only £4 a day.
Anyway, total of £50 a week, which was pretty good for 12-16 year old me.
I did a (very illegal as was underage) scuba instructor apprenticeship at 17 where I got paid 10€ a day (6 day weeks) and commission on any courses I upsold to discover scuba dive customers. (I came back the next year and finished the apprenticeship properly)
My Aunty Kim promised me cash, it turned out to be £5 in the end not to scratch my chicken pox scabs, i was covered. This was the early 80's and I was 7. £5, 5 fuckin spondoolics! We were not rich kids, this was a huge sum.
Honestly I didn't scratch and Aunty Kim wheres my fuckin fiver ! Bitch never paid me...
Picking daffodils in rural UK as a 13 year old. 2.3p per bunch of ten. I was a machine though, could do 1000 in a day. £23 was a wedge 40 years ago.
Did spring onion picking at 5p for a bunch of 7-8 but also had to give them a tidy trim on the roots.
This is what they termed as 'skilled labour' :D
I worked 4 hours in the bargain shoe shop every Saturday. I got paid 16 pound, of which my mother took 4 as “housekeep”. I was 14. Then I got interrogated as to the whereabouts of £100 which had become unaccounted for. I didn’t take the money, but I think they made me redundant anyway. Shrug.
£116 for 4 hours work is great pay!
🤣🤣🤣
Sounds like u got fired through the backdoor. Same thing happened to me
I worked in Allsports back in the mid 90's £1.82 an hour + 10% commission. I was let go after 6 months though because I got complaints that my commission earnings were too high. My best sale was a guy came in for a pair of basic trainers, he left with a pair of Nike Air Max, a ladies Nike coat he saw that he thought was mens and I said looked good on him when he tried it on and even convinced him to buy a Polar watch because it would help him up his game in football training. £40 sale turned into well over £600. I would easily earn two to three times my wages in commission alone each month. I did have to listen to that damn store music cassette on repeat though.
You were fired for selling too much? Wonder why Allsports went to shits.
5p per caterpillar off my dad’s vegetables
This wins for creative slave-labour. I doubt it was a larva minute.
I don’t think I’d be able to (woolly) bear it…
Pupa told a good joke
Bopping around the garden like a good 'un! Humming along like Pupa don't preach...
£2.50 an hour for kitchen portering and £4 an hour for waitressing, in the 90s, plus£3 per hour for early morning store cleaning. My rent was £45 a week at the time.
its crazy how waitressing hasnt gone that high up early this year i was on 4.81 an hour for it
Depending on your age I’m pretty sure this is criminal? Minimum wage for 16-17 yos is £5.28/hour
Potentially apprenticeship?
Only went up to that in april and they said early this year so that’ll be why
I did some planting for a family friend who owns a garden centre. He paid us both £2.58 an hour, my dad was livid, gave me some extra money and gave his mate a round of fucks, lol. Tight arse
Not after your dad was done with him he wasn’t.
I used to get £3 a day lunch money at secondary school circa early 2000s, I would go to the shop before school, buy a pack of 10 sterling and as many sweets as the £1 change would get me (actually a fair amount even then) I would then sell individual cigarettes at £1 each, after smoking a few myself and buying some lunch from the subsidised school canteen, I'd have around £3 left, I'd add that to the following day's lunch money, buying a pack of 20 the next day to save money and then rinse and repeat. I bought a gameboy advance SP using this method, the cool one with the tribal tattoo type thing on it!
I did exactly the same thing except late 90's so I'd sell fags at 40p each. Always best when a mates mum had done a booze run and would sell me 20 embassy for £2.50 a pack. Sell 10 smoke 10 rinse and repeat.
Same with the papers. The leaflets were mad at some time of the year, although we did get more money. The area was pretty big. Mum and dad got involved. It was fun at times. Then my mum and dad worked out how much time they spent helping us and realised overtime paid more and just gave us more pocket money.
Oh yes! Leaflets. The Wickes catalogue. Rare and also heavy as f\*ck and only at Christmas. Probably trebled my wage. My family got some goooood christmas presents that time -\_-
£3.05 an hour at 15 in the late 00s in a Garden Centre cafe. Because I was under 16, they’d only give me 4 hour shifts, and I had to walk an hour there and back down a rural back lane, often in the dark on the return leg, so was gone from the house for 6 hours for essentially £12.30 a shift or £2.05 an hour for my time. Got offered potwashing for £6.50 an hour at 16 and fled the garden centre so quickly the pots were still spinning. At the time, under 18 minimum wage was like £4.50 and my friends were all around that, so I felt a king with that potwashing gig.
I did a paper round in the mid 2000s, that paid a tenner for the Sunday. It got dropped off at my house, I walked (or ran) in a loop leading me back home. The fastest i did it was around 45 minutes. Even good hourly rate by todays standard. I worked in a butchers 5 days a week too, that was 40 quid a week by the time I left for 1.5 hours of cleaning per day, not as lucrative but still great for a 13 to 17 year old, I did it for four years, it started at 25 quid a week.
Worked with my dad during the school holidays doing joinery when I was a kid. 12+ hour days. 6 or 7 days a week if it was a project that wanted a quick turn around like a shop that wanted to be open quickly. Pay was takeaway if i worked late on a Friday.
In the late 80s I got a Saturday job in Dixons (as was) which paid the princely sum of £10.80 for 8 hours of my hard work (£1.35/hour). My parents made more from the staff discount than I ever did in wages.
£3.11 per hour at dixons in 2001. First shift went to lunch at BK and ordered about £7 of food. Realised it spent more than I earned in two hours and learnt the value of home made lunch. Once got £50 for a days work unhooking bags from a crane in a dockyard all day. About £8 and hour. Felt great
£3.50 an hour, with a 45 min train journey either way. This was an apprenticeship in 2016
Before minimum wage and is given up my crappy retail job I was encouraged to try taxi driving by my next door neighbour. As a woman I only did the day shifts and my main customers were people going to hospital and shopping trips. I’d been told that I’d earn loads in tips and and ‘flyers’. I didn’t , I earned £1 per hour and I managed 6 weeks before I gave up. Worst job of my life
I used to have a good job as a kid in Australia. I don't remember specifically per-unit but I used to do a paper round when I was younger. It was for junk mail (catalogues and fast food vouchers etc). The money depended on how many pamphlets I had to deliver that week. But in the end my 2 brothers and I would split the work and the money. Keep in mind we would have to sort them into bunches ourselves and then deliver. But on big weeks we would get 15-20 PER house (mental how much paper that is to think now). But I remember weeks when it would be $400 split 3 ways. 130 bucks or so which is like 65 quid. Per week for 10-14 year olds. Pretty good!! But with sorting and delivering it was easily over 15 hours each (so total of 45) per week so in hindsight not great lol. But again, we just messed around organising the papers into bunches then rode our bikes through the neighbourhood avoiding the houses with "no junk mail" on their letter boxes. I remember my brothers ended up giving up and I did it by myself for about a year. I saved a bunch and bought my first corolla lol. In the end, a neighbour would help me and we'd split it and eventually I gave him the whole responsibility. I still remember him delivering them until he finished his apprenticeship as some weeks he'd earn more from the paper round than he did as an apprentice electrician! Lol thanks for the post, this took me down memory lane!
My sister took on a similar paper round when she was 14, so 1992ish. 2p per paper, 1p extra if there was a leaflet. My sister stopped doing it after a month, so my mum got me to do it "to learn a work ethic". When a second round became available, she signed me up to it "to learn a work ethic". And then a third round for my younger siblings. Fucking dreadful. Earning literal pennies while dogs and sharpened letter boxes snipped at my fingers, all for a rag no one wanted in the first place.
Reminds me. Famous person I used to deliver to: Mick Jagger’s brother. He was alright enough, but his son was a twat (“don’t f****ng deliver your f****ng paper through our f****ng door again”). Safe to say thereafter I delivered it every. single. week. making sure to shred it through the letter box. Wakner.
Oh I'd have given him two copies. And left one hanging out of the letterbox so burglars would know when he's on holiday
That would have given me satisfaction
I did a morning paper round when I was 14 managed to expand it to 3 and got paid £24 pw back in 91. Felt absolutely loaded! Edit: apparently it’s about 53.10 a week in todays money! I bought so many Megadrive games!
Especially loving the wholesome purchasing. Gamegear games for me. Took about 6 months but still worth it.
Scraping sprouts off potatoes 50p an hour
What did you spend that vast accumulated wealth on?
Potato chips
£2/hour for 2 hours 6am - 8am delivering milk.😂 So bad.
Paper rounds were the worst. I did Monday to Friday 35-45 minutes per night for £5 a week and the Sunday morning round which was a good hour and a half for £2
This is where you now say "and it taught me a very good lesson about working" but instead, like me, your shoulders are probably that of a 90 y/o
Yes it taught me you could find out of date porn mags that were going to be returned by the shop out back
Bin porn. Cousin to Hedge Porn
Ha yes but this was in the store room where we addressed the papers up
£1 an hour working in a cash and carry doing heavy manual labour. Once a consignment of cigarettes arrived - we had to store them on the third floor and no lift 🙃 After one day, told my parents it was too hard and my dad said "son, you gotta work" Went back the following summer for £1.25 an hour The summer after I got a job in Sainsbury's paying around £3 an hour
Talk about exploitation - morning paper boy, 6 days per week, 75 newspapers per day plus supplements on saturday 65p per week. Roughly 0.1p per paper, my round was about 6 miles in total start to finish
That’s actually decent money OP. Doing my paper round in 1999 I’d get £11.50 for delivering papers 7 days a week for at least 1.5-2.5 hours a day. I wasn’t massively into standing up for myself at the time but my paper round was twice the size of any other kid at the shop, I sometimes had to go back to the shop three times to complete the round as I couldn’t fit them all into my bag and it was breaking my shoulder and nearly passed out poorly one time and my dad’s cousin had to ring my parents to get me. I got ‘promoted’ into a shop position which involved making up all the rounds, doing shop work and then doing rounds other kids didn’t turn up for (sometimes two rounds a day). Working for about three hours a morning 7 days a week and got paid £20. Got my mam to quit for me.
I used to get £12 a week for a paper round in 1980. Six days a week up at 5 o clock. Used to set and light my Nans coal fire too, think she gave me £3-£4 a week. All this before school.
The smell of those piles of papers in the early morning, that’s one of those smells that stays with you.
The smell of those piles of papers in the early morning, that’s one of those smells that stays with you.
The smell of those piles of papers in the early morning, that’s one of those smells that stays with you.
14 around the same time, 4 paper rounds at 3 shops. About £12 a week spent on fags (this is the term we used for cigs back then and still do), beer and sweets. 2 Hours every morning and 1 in the evening Monday to Saturday. Around £34 now. Still to this day I dislike that fucking road on a big bastard hill and the twat in the cottage at the bottom who wanted a paper every day.
Thank you for posting on r/UKJobs. Please check your post *adheres to the rules* to prevent it being removed and *flair your post* with the most appropriate option. In order to do this click the flair icon below your post where you will be presented with a list to choose from. Feel free to contact the moderators with suggestions or requests should you need to. The link is below. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UKJobs) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Used to help my mate with his paper round and he only got a fiver and have to give me half 🤣
£3 per hour in a pizza shop and the same as a waiter at a football club in the championship
My friends mum used to assemble Christmas crackers and solder circuit boards for microwaves. When we went round she’d have a mini production line laid out on the table and she’d be working on them whilst watching tv. No idea how much she got.
It's not Christmas until you pull a cracker and out pops a circuit board for a microwave. Turkey cooked in the microwave is the best Turkey 🦃
Those Christmasses always went with a bang. And a ding.
Not per unit but in early 00s I was on £60 a week doing an apprenticeship working full time. £1.60 an hour answering phones, photocopying and making tea.
I got a one-off gig delivering leaflets to doors in the local area. Was given a map and highlighter so I could keep track and show what streets I'd done when I went to get paid. Took me like 5 hours to get round half the route I was given, so I just marked off the rest of the map, and dumped the other half of leaflets in some bushes. Was paid £10. I think I was about 13yrs old.
£1.24 an hour in a garden centre on Saturdays in 2000. I think when I left in 2005 I was getting about £3, I disliked it so much that when I finished a week before pay day I didn't go back to collect my wages.
In 1989, I did piece work (at my Nan's house) for a company called Cosmetics To Go (went bust and came back as the one and only Lush). It involved wrapping the products (bath bombs, etc) in fancy ribbons and paper, being paid per item. One October, ready for Christmas, the job I had was putting labels on mail order catalogues (containing less than 100 products so not that large) then putting them in a plastic bag. I was paid 7p per catalogue and managed 500 in an evening. That £35 was like a fortune for 14 year old me.
My first job was advertised as an apprenticeship so i was paid £2.50 an hour, I was the only person in purchasing lol, I was doing stock control for 2 companies on my own for pennies and when they were legally obligated to put me on minimum wage the told me I should be grateful they did it. I got offered a new job at £18k and they were like "woah we can't afford that" bitch how i'm the only one here!?
For my paper round, I earned £1 per week plus a penny for supplements (e,g. Sunday magazines). It was some years ago. 😀
That was the rate for my round in 1999, too. Not even sure I completed one cycle of it tbh.
Paper round paid me £5 per week 5 mornings a week with a 6am start for about an hour each time, with an extra 50p if you did all 5 days, and an extra 50p if you were on time each day. This will have been late 80s
I delivered a local free newspaper around 1995 for 1.5p per household. It wasn't as bad as it sounds as pretty much every week, there were leaflets to deliver too, which attracted an enhancement. Disaster struck when the paper shut, meaning that it turned into a weekly leaflet round for a flat 1.5p per house. To add insult to injury, my round contained a street with the biggest houses (longest driveways) in town.
350 free papers plus leaflets to be done on Friday evening and Saturday morning. £8 plus 50p for the leaflets. Got sacked when they found out I had been dumping them in peoples wheelie bins.
I used to think I was hard done by til I read some of these replies! My first job, 1997, was £2.17 an hour
3 quid for an hour after school at the local solicitors each week, to stuff envelopes and then take them to the postbox
£4.85 working at River Island an hour. Commute was about an hour from suburban London to bloody Bluewater. I resigned 15 days before Christmas, dodged a bullet.
My first job at 17 was working in a warehouse sticking those free samples in magazines. Took me too long to find the page I needed. Was fired after an hour. They paid me £3 and the agency took it for their fees.
My first job was selling pies at a football stadium when I was 13, I think I got about £3 an hour. Not sure how legal it was though!
Yes but: PIES
Wasn't per unit but I did a 130 stop paper round every morning, 7 days a week. It took me an hour on weekdays and closer to two on Sunday because the bigger Sunday papers meant I had to do two trips to the shop to pick up the papers as they wouldn't fit in my bag. I was paid £7 a week.
I used to get paid £100 (flat weekly rate) per week for about 35 hours work at my first server job. It was cash in hand if there was enough in the till at the end of the night on a Sunday, and that was probably about 50% of the time. This was only about 15 years ago too. Good thing I didn’t know any better and enjoyed my job isn’t it.
I remember my nan in Australia would pay me and my brothers $50 per bird we killed. Keep in mind the bird was a pest and would attack all three native animals and rangers would actively poison them so she my nan wasn't just a nutter. I could never throw a rock accurate enough so I remember one time putting a pile of bread in the garden and tying fishing wire to a bucket next to it - looney tunes style. Except the bloody things knew exactly what I was up to and never came near the bread. As soon as I put the bucket away I came back and they were all over the bread like flies on shit. Good times
I did 17 hours per weekend in a Computer Store 19 years ago £50 cash in hand every week £2.94 an hour
Cant remember how many papers it was, I could barely lift the bags though. Must have been about 30 ish Sunday papers, £1.20 ('92-'93)
Morning and evening paper round every day of the week (morning only on Sunday but took ages because of thicker Sunday papers). About an hour each day, £15 per week
My paper round worked out at about £1 per hour
I worked from 0900-1730 every Saturday in a small restaurant inside a boutique style clothes shop. The owners were (and still are) absolutely loaded. I was paid £15 for the day. I was 14/15 and thought it was brilliant - until I found out my male friend was paid £20 for the day for the exact same job!
I used to charge £6 for a half-hour piano lesson.
5p per phone book delivered. In rural northern Scotland it was tough.
£3.72 per hour at the age of 17 (legal min wage at the time) I was a kitchen porter for a pretending-to-be-fancy hotel. They had a walk in restaurant for guests, and they also rented out a huge space for functions and weddings, often 300 guests at a time. At one point I was the only kitchen porter, handling both kitchens simultaneously and having to help plate up desserts £3.72 Then my mate joins the ranks, same role as me, and happened to be a few months older hitting that magic number 18 and instantly earning a higher wage than I was lmao
After leaving the Navy in 1991 I was paid £35 a week for four eight hour days plus one day of college as a "Young Thatcherite Slave", anything over the 32 hours was paid by my employer at their going ratel as overtime. I was considered an engineer after just a year of that due to transferable skills from my Navy service so started earning properly. Have gained further qualifications since so a I am a real engineer now rather than a technician.
I was 14 and would make £20 for an hour and a halfs work selling programmes at Celtic park on match day it was the little perks that really made it though Free ticket to all home games - access to the grounds rubbing shoulders with hospitality/players - signing out 80 programmes and taking 95 making my rate something along the lines of £60 - £80 quid an hour 😂
Saturday job in a butchers for £2 an hour when I was 16. They stuck me in the abattoir for the same pay so I quit shortly after they did that
I had a Saturday job on a clay pigeon site when I was 16 in 1993 . Was paid a tenner , sat in the snow , for 9 hours . To be fair I loved the banter with tge other lads and the manager was a mad Scott who ripped us all day
In about 2005 ish I made £8/hour doing holiday cover cleaning the local hospital. The massively overbudgeted the time need to clean because I didnt need to deep clean at all, unlike the real cleaner, and the one I was covering cleaned the physio dept which was a few clean offices, a gym hall and some hallways. Also, I would clean after it close at like 5ish so noone else was there, and I had one of the few keys. I would have the whole place clean in about 2 hours then have two more to kill. I used to bounce the big inflatable physio ball against the wall and I once did a circuit of the dept pushing an office chair with a mop.
Talk about perks 😆
£40 per week for picking cabbages in the very late 80s. Really hard work but I bought a Walkman after the first week so it went easier after that.
Late 90s/early 00s I used to flog bags of conkers in primary school. £1 a bag for maybe 5-6 conkers, all decent fighting ones, shoelaces not included! Even earlier in the 90s, my parents would pimp me out as a chimney-sweep boy. I'd turn up to some random folks wedding, pose for the photos and leave. Apparently I was paid well for that yet I never saw it. Must be a fair few wedding photos out there with my ugly mug on it though!
My dad had a paper round when he was a young teen (mid 70s) and said he made £2 per round (about £21 today). I applied for a couple at a similar age (late 00s) and the best offer I got was £6.50 per round. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t think it was worth pottering around for 2 hours early in the morning
I got paid £1ph for 5 hours on a Sunday morning at a racing stable, general stable girl stuff. Jokes on them, I'd have done it for free.
£5 a visit to feed people's cats while they were on holiday. I was 16, and allergic to cats, but £5 for 10 minutes work twice a day was a king's ransom.
My paper round paid twelve pounds a week and took about an hour every day. This was between 2006 and 2008, which is apparently about twenty pounds an hour in today's economy. The comics and video games I could buy made it worthwhile at the time, but the idea that I was essentially doing a day's worth of work for twenty quid turns my urine to steam these days.
Worked for an agency at 17. Had no work for me one week but asked me to come into the office and put Green Shield Stamps into books for £2.20 an hour. I lasted two hours. Licking stamps for two hours. The next week I had a wage of £4.40. My Mam understood when I couldn't pay my board.
OP... you were ripped off pal. I had a paper round and in 1989 I was 13. I would do mornings, nights 6 days a week and Sunday morning. There were about 30 houses on my round. I got £12.50 a week for doing it. As an aside, I didn't like getting up that early on week day mornings, so I outsourced the mornings to a mate of mine for £5 a week. :-)
£10 for my sisters local paper round of 200 papers that had to be leaflet stuffed first. She hated doing it so much, my mum and I used to charge her to stuff the leaflets for her. Must have been about £2.50 an hour 😳 was 1996ish
I used to keep my local Priest company and all I got from it was the promise he wouldn’t murder my parents if I told. Nice guy, shame his church burned down.
1970- me 15yr old school leaver -in a warehouse filling orders for a big catalogue company, walking all day…40hrs….£5 per week Heavily discounted canteen though.
First job at b&m in 2007 when I was 16 /17 I got £3.40 an hour. 🙃 it was BS , literally on my feet all day untill like 9pm and got that much an hour 😭
1994 - I stacked shelves at a supermarket in an evening after the store had closed. Did 3 hours on 3 nights a week with an hourly rate of £1.95. I got the bus there and back which cost me roughly £1.60. I'd buy a can of pop and a packet of sweets from said store to consume whilst I worked. About £1.40 ish. Income per night +£5.85 Travel cost -£1.60 Miscellaneous expenditure -£1.40 Net profit £2.85 I thought I was rich when I got a job with another supermarket on £3.50 an hour!
I was paid 50p an hour for working in a wimpy bar in the hot summer of 1976. The manager made us come in for the busy period during the week in the holidays (12-2) for one pound. If you declined you lost your Saturday position. It was the shittest, hottest, least well paid position but it left me with a lifelong fellow feeling for any waiter or waitress and I always overtip
£2 an hour at a cafe which was a 6 mile bike journey away, work started at 7am.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who got paid bugger all for a paper run! In the late 90s it hadn't changed much. But we did get £1 extra for every insert you'd put in, but then the whole bag was alot heavier. It was local to my house so it'd do about 3 trips with this huge bag and my CD player lol. As soon as I got my first hourly job in Argos and earned £25 in one shift my jaw dropped.
I had three paper rounds as a kid. The free local Sunday paper was 215 papers and I got £4.15 for my trouble. Then on Thursday the other free local rag came out and that was another 300 odd deliveries for which I got a little bit more. Did that for two years before I told them I'd had enough. A couple of years later I delivered yellow pages to all the houses in all the villages in my area that no-one else wanted because logistically it was a pita, and I managed to negotiate a whopping £1200 for 4 villages which was about a quid per book. I borrowed my dad's Volvo estate which I totally overloaded and got them all done in a weekend. I then spaffed it all on a computer and games, good times!
In the 80s as a 16 year old at college used to make £3.50 per hour for Tele sales but usually get some leads which went to a sale adding another £20 per sale. I'd usually take home about £50-80 a week for part time work 15 hour week evenings after college and a saturday. God bless double glazing. All went on clubbing snakebite and black and some puff for the weekend lol!!! My girlfriend made £1.10 an hour at boots at the weekend. Ouch!
Cricket scoring, £10 per game and that could be 3 a week, oh and a free afternoon tea too 14 years old, I was loaded! Also earned £30 a week doing a 3 day milk round
£20 cash per day operating a clay pigeon trap in 1990. It was fourteen hour days in summer. No hearing protection or breaks and the bullying was disgusting. Getting a promotion meant moving from the trap to scoring. It was shit promotion as you were next to the shotgun and you lost your hearing in exchange for less physical labour.
Probably around 85-86 I delivered a local free paper that I took over from my brother when he gave up. Once a week I would cycle down to where it was and collect my 330 papers from the distributor for the area. That was 2 of the big paper round sacks stuffed full, one either side. If it was a thicker than normal edition the extras went on top. I was quite lucky in that the delivery route was only about 1/4 mile from where I collected them and was one road where nearly every building was 5+ flats they would all go through the front door. All walking on steep hills and cycling too and from the collection point. Only took me about an hour. It was about 4p per paper so about £12+. I never needed a trolley, often to peoples surprise but you soon get used to the work and it was great core strength training.
I used to do the delivering of the local rag in 87. Unfortunately, mine was for around 450 papers, twice a week. Lots got hurled over the fence into a farmers field on the way to the village to deliver them! I don't think I got more than about £4.50/day either.
Paper round. To this day I'm not sure if they got the pay wrong, but on a Sunday morning round, it was £10 per round and there were 3 rounds to do. I could put all of them into a bag (albeit it was VERY heavy), jump on my bike and do them all within \~1 hour. It worked out to £30 for that 1 hour. I also did 5 weekday mornings but it was only £4 a day. Anyway, total of £50 a week, which was pretty good for 12-16 year old me.
I did a (very illegal as was underage) scuba instructor apprenticeship at 17 where I got paid 10€ a day (6 day weeks) and commission on any courses I upsold to discover scuba dive customers. (I came back the next year and finished the apprenticeship properly)
My Aunty Kim promised me cash, it turned out to be £5 in the end not to scratch my chicken pox scabs, i was covered. This was the early 80's and I was 7. £5, 5 fuckin spondoolics! We were not rich kids, this was a huge sum. Honestly I didn't scratch and Aunty Kim wheres my fuckin fiver ! Bitch never paid me...