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I've never eaten at Popeyes. All I hope is that working there long-term is not a local kid's ambition.
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I have never had it either, but I believe you may be disappointed in that some local kid will think that working there long-term is an ambition for some.
A movie line comes to mind: Coming to America...
"Soon I'll be on fries; then the grill. In a year or two, I'll make assistant manager, and that's when the big bucks start rolling in."
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that's when the big bucks start rolling in."
When I was 17 I worked at a Dairy Queen. A friend and I usually worked shifts together. The owner started asking us to close up, sometimes open up, he gave us each a set of keys, told us where the secret safe was so we could run a z tape and lock up the register cash. Looking back I later realized he gave us the responsibility of an assistant manager while paying us the burger flipper wages.
Now I wonder if he went home and said to his wife “paying those kids next to nothing, that’s when the big bucks start rolling in.”
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(05-04-2026, 08:21 PM)leilanidude Wrote: I've never eaten at Popeyes. All I hope is that working there long-term is not a local kid's ambition.
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I have never had it either, but I believe you may be disappointed in that some local kid will think that working there long-term is an ambition for some.
I really hope that's not the case. I started work as a caddy at Sunningdale Golf Course when I was 13. At 16, I started working as a nursing assistant at a nursing home (I would continue there part-time for six years, working the holidays as an undergraduate). After graduating from "high school", I worked during the summer holiday at a pet food factory. That was the best-paid job I'd had, but it was nasty. As an undergrad, I continued working at the nursing home when I could. These were all to make a little bit of money, not an ambition.
Working as a caddy was a crap job. There were one or two golfers who were generous, but most paid hardly anything - 5 quid for four hours of hauling a golf bag around. The pet food factory paid well, 90 pounds a week for the 6 am to 2 pm shift. I was a 19-year-old getting up at 4 am every morning, but the money was worth it. The nursing home job taught me about life, and I made some wonderful friends, but all those jobs made me realize there's so much more anyone can do with their life as long as they don't give up, keep learning, and stay in school as long as possible. You'll be rewarded.
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05-05-2026, 08:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-05-2026, 08:03 PM by terracore.)
That's why minimum wages were always considered a "training wage" when I was growing up. Kids took the jobs for experience and to have spare cash for new clothes, underage drinking, and weed. 99% of the kids finished school and moved on and got real jobs. Maybe 1% stayed within that ecosystem and moved up into permanent management careers with living wages. When I was a kid the minimum wage fast food jobs were the coveted jobs. Always more applicants than jobs. The rest of us worked in the berry fields. To this day I can't eat a strawberry and if "Strawberry Fields Forever" plays on the radio I want to smash it.
Then all of the manufacturing jobs got offshored and for whatever reason most kids don't work anymore. So entry level jobs got pressured into paying "living wages" and now they are very low paying "careers".
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My family used a different model, or at least the farm did. We were let into the strawberry fields with a basket and allowed to pick our own strawberries. We would take them back, they were weighed, and we paid whatever the price was. Of course, being five or six years old at the time, I ate half of the strawberries I picked. They probably should have weighed me on the way in and out as well.
And I still love strawberries to this day!
