I managed restaurants my entire life and it was the NORM to work 60-70 hours a week! What a bunch of PANSIES!!!!! Being on salary my pay was far below min. wage these damned workers today are just ridiculous and they DEMAND 15.00 an hour, I would have thought I died and went to heaven for 15.00 an hour!!!
Yes but, this is manual labor they are performing. Non-stop except for a break or two. I’ve worked for a shipping company and when walking through the warehouse in summer time there is no AC, the fans barely do anything and it is just awful stifling until I get to air conditioned office. These are young men, and a handful of women, lifting and stacking small and heavy packages for hours in those conditions.
My first job out of high school was working for a Maryland based convenience store chain. I started out part time, thinking it would be temporary until I decided what I wanted to do, saving up some money, then going back to school to college or nursing school, then I was promoted to full time and then was promoted to managing a store at 19 years old and the money I was making was too good to give up. I don’t know how it works in that chain now, but managers were paid a salary + a % of sales. But out of that amount, the store’s workers were paid, leaving managers with what was left over.
I typically worked 60 hours a week, sometimes closer to 70, sometimes more, sometimes from 6AM to 11PM and all of it on my feet and often without any breaks and working those hours several days in a row until all I could think of was getting off my feet and getting at least 6 hours of sleep. I had to fill in when I was short-handed or when one of my workers called off at the last minute. I was making a lot of money but now realize that if I divided my gross by the number of hours I was working, a lot of times I wasn’t even making minimum wage.
Then again it was a great experience. I learned a lot at young age about the business, about managing inventory, customer relations, how not to allow slick sales brokers take advantage of my age and perceived lack of experience to over order merchandise, and how to manage (and sometimes how not to manage) workers. I also learned the importance of showing up and being on time and setting a good example to others, those who worked under me. I would never ask a worker in my store to do something that I wouldn’t and didn’t do – like scraping dried milk off the walk in cooler floor, defrosting the ice cream freezer, breaking down and sanitizing the deli slicer…etc.
After doing that for over 6 years, I got an office job as an entry level “office clerk” then a “secretary” then an executive assistant, and eventually moving into bookkeeping, accounting and payroll. Working 40 hours a week and having weekends and holidays off felt to me like I was working part time. Then again as I moved up in an accounting and payroll career, some times of year, especially at quarter and year end, I still put in a lot of hours.
When I got into the accounting field, I didn’t, and still don’t have a college degree. But I out performed and out worked a lot of people who had not only their BA’s in accounting but their MBA’s.
I tend to think that I learned a lot in the school of hard knock and practical experience, sometimes more than those who were good at studying for and passing exams but end up lacking much if any real world experience and common sense.
I recall, surprisingly a speech made by the actor Ashton Kutcher that was praised by many, including many conservatives where he said:
“I believe that opportunity looks a lot like work. When I was 13, I had my first job with Dad carrying shingles to the roof, and then I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant, and then I got a job in a grocery store deli, and then I got a job in a factory sweeping Cheerio dust off the ground.”
"And I never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a stepping stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.”
And I would add that he was right. I’ve never had a job that was beneath me, or where I didn’t learn something or didn’t eventually lead to a better opportunity, even in some of the crappiest jobs I’ve had before I moved into accounting and payroll, like the summer I worked for a painting contractor friend of my husband’s painting BGE utility boxes on 90+ degree days, sometimes in very bad neighborhoods, or the job I had for about 3 months working the front counter at a dry cleaning store. I always learned something that I could take to my next job.
I have worked in restaurants as well.
It isn’t even close to the same category as manual labor of this type.
Apples and Bowling Balls comparison.