Long live the Saturday job
What sets millennials and Gen Z apart? Turns out it’s not just the way we part our hair or the length of our socks. One major difference could, in fact, be the humble Saturday job – and the fact no one’s doing them any more.
A survey out this week suggests that, rather than take traditional Saturday jobs in retail and hospitality, Gen Z would rather have an independent ‘side hustle’. This stands in stark contrast to every 30-something I know, who started their “career” serving cappuccinos in local cafes, restocking rails in high street shops or – in a memorable move from one subset of my sixth form mates – becoming cleaners at our actual school.
My own Saturday job was quite cushy in comparison. I worked in Accessorize, which was mainly exciting because I got 75% discount, although the catch was I had to use it to buy all my ‘uniform’ from Monsoon, a shop not particularly known for dressing 16-year-old girls. My tasks in Accessorize primarily involved untangling necklaces, reaching hats for short people (the story of my life) and speed-wrapping hundreds of pieces of jewellery at the till while customers checked and double-checked I’d taken the price tags off.
Really though, the main point of the job was gossiping with, and learning from, my older colleagues. They ranged from Accessorize lifers – all characters, and proper retail folk who could spot a shoplifter from fifty paces – to Cardiff University students working part time around their studies. As a gawky, self-conscious teenager wearing a frumpy Monsoon dress and too much Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse foundation, being embraced by these people was not only confidence-boosting, but a step towards becoming a fully-functioning adult. Before, I’d basically only known people my own age and my parents’ age (teachers obviously didn’t count as humans), but suddenly I could see the next chapter of my life more clearly – and from what I could tell from the uni students, it mainly involved taking it in turns to throw up in the tiny staff bathroom on Sunday morning after a big night out at the student union. Heaven.
Dealing with customers was an eye-opener too. It wasn’t always fun – the worst job was being put on ‘greeting duty’ at the door, where you basically had to stand there saying hello to people who didn’t want to be acknowledged. This was made much more bearable by the fact one of my best mates worked in Miss Selfridge opposite, so we could spend the hour waving at each other across the arcade in between making shoppers jump. However, other experiences in that job truly made the 16-year-old me step up: helping a young woman going through chemotherapy to find the perfect headscarf, for example, or supporting a lovely but quite confused old lady as she chose Christmas presents for her grandchildren.
I can totally understand why kids these days don’t fancy an old-fashioned Saturday job, particularly if they can make more money flogging secondhand things on Vinted or setting up their own TikToks or whatever. I had plenty more part time jobs after that Accessorize gig, from making giant buckets of milky coffee in Costa to selling expensive soap to posh ladies in Fortnum & Mason, and I can’t say all of them were totally life-enriching. But I do think there’s something to be said for teens taking on jobs that get them out of their bedrooms and into ‘the world’, if only because I know that, if this journalism malarky doesn’t work out, I have a strong skillset in speed-wrapping and reaching hats to fall back on.