What I learned from a summertime job at a greasy spoon

(CNN) — Josh the line cook leaned on the doorframe, burgers steaming on the hot plate behind him. He was arguing that “Point Break” is the best sports movie of all time. I disagreed. “Point Break” is no “Friday Night Lights.”

“Hot take, Ruskell!” He handed me a basket of fried pickles. “You’re so wrong!”

It was the summer before junior year. I was a waitress at Granby Grill, a little diner in a neighborhood of old millhouses in Columbia, South Carolina. The greasy spoon sat on the far end of the first floor of a massive brick building that had once been a cotton mill.

I was 17 but working behind the bar because Granby’s liquor license had not been renewed, rumored to be a casualty of a local legislator’s crusade to class up Columbia. Consequently, regulars brought their own drinks in plastic bags and coolers, and I’d refrigerate their bottles and hand out chilled pint glasses.

My duties at Granby were straightforward: Take orders, deliver food, clean tables. Open some days, close others. I got really good at managing multiple tasks, and having a lot of responsibilities made me more responsible.

These values and skills — strong work ethic, organization and responsibility — are what numerous studies hold up as the important reasons teenagers should work part time or during the summer.

They’re what teachers mention at school assemblies when they encourage us to get jobs or internships. And yes, I developed those skills. But I don’t think that’s the main benefit high school students get from working. It wasn’t for me.

As a waitress, I was in conversation with both coworkers and complete strangers more than I’d ever been before or since I had that job. I had more arguments, too. Standing behind that bar, people talked to me like the adult I wasn’t. They talked to me as a confidant, a trusted friend. The stories they told felt like hints of the bigger life I was desperate to lead, taking my place in the immense world outside my school’s hallways.

So much happened in the interstitial time and spaces between our official roles of waitress, cook, customer. This is where I think the value of a high school job lies: learning how to form community with people I never would have otherwise known. People older than me whose lives were vastly different. People whom I otherwise never would have talked to or learned from.

High school students like me spend about seven hours a day in classes, then often stay afterward for school-sponsored sports or activities. High school feels all-encompassing when you’re in it. It can be hard to remember that there’s a much bigger world in which no one cares what lunch table you’re sitting at in the cafeteria or what you got on your chemistry test.

When we get home, we eat dinner, do several hours of homework, scroll on our phones and go to bed. There seems to be no time for a job.

Less than a quarter of American high schoolers held jobs in 2023, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be wrapped up in school. But what I found is that a job can feel like a relief from the academic and social pressures of high school, a place where you relate to others because they’re people, not because they’re popular or in your social strata.

Teen employment is making a slow comeback from a low in 2010, but the rate is still lower than it was before the start of the 21st century. I don’t think it’s because teens can’t get jobs. In my hometown, there are “Help Wanted” posters plastered everywhere. Every single one of my friends who wanted a job — granted not their dream job, but it’s a start — has found employment. On a larger scale, workers are still needed.

According to Stephanie Melhorn of the US Chamber of Commerce, the United States has “a lot of jobs but not enough workers to fill them.” So why aren’t high school students working the way they once did?

I think high school has become more intense and time-consuming than it used to be because of the college admissions environment. Kids are taking harder classes to have more impressive resumes. We also feel the need to participate in impressive extracurricular activities to get into college, a perception encouraged by the social media apps we spend so many hours on.

Handing out fried pickles and slinging ice cream don’t seem good enough for the college resume anymore.

I also think that boredom comes into play — or, really, the lack of it. With phones and the internet, teens never have to be bored again. One can happily doomscroll for hours. Why get a sometimes-boring job to assuage boredom that isn’t there?

Whatever the reasons for the decline in teenage jobs, the result is that some students graduate high school without ever having held a paying job. As a result, they may not develop the particular skills and unique endurance that can only come from a low-paying service job.

For example, at Granby Grill, people regularly sent back their meals when a certain line cook added his secret “JoJo Sauce” for extra flavor. But there were also people who sent their meals back because they “just weren’t as tasty as they were last time.” In truth, their burgers just didn’t have the special JoJo Sauce they’d unknowingly eaten on their previous visit. The problem was no one except JoJo knew how to make JoJo Sauce or even what was in it. There’s no math or history class that can teach you how to smooth that over.

The daily tasks that came with being a waitress taught me customer service skills, multitasking and better time management. But the people I met at Granby Grill taught me that you can become friends with those decades older than you and strangers who have none of the same interests or hobbies as you. They taught me that you can wildly and stridently disagree with someone and still respect them, still learn from them, still love them.

I don’t work at Granby Grill anymore. The little greasy spoon closed a month after school restarted that year. I still think about all the people I met there though and what I learned from them. And I can’t wait to get another job this summer.

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