My First Job . . .

I enjoyed Donald Trump’s trolling Kamala Harris by working a brief stint at a McDonald’s restaurant to challenge her claim that she once worked at a McDonald’s franchise – a claim that only recently appeared on her resume, and a claim that she will not substantiate.

The topic of first jobs has probably come up here at Ricochet before, but Donald Trump’s stint at a McDonald’s provides a fun launching point for readdressing the topic.

Many Americans began their working lives at fast-food restaurants or in similar low-wage, low-skill jobs. Some years ago I heard a claim that one in ten American workers had worked at a McDonald’s, often as their first paid job.

My first paid job was in fast food, but not McDonald’s. It was during my first year of college, at a Tastee-Freeze franchise in Orange County, California. The establishment served soft-serve ice cream and an assortment of hot fast-food and had only outdoor seating. Parents of a church friend (a friend with whom I still get together on occasion, so he can vouch for the fact that I did work there) owned it, so many of the employees were youth from our church. My friend’s mother ran the Tastee-Feeze while his father ran their stand-alone cafeteria-style restaurant across the street. Yes, I can tell you exactly where it was and I can pinpoint the exact location on Google Maps. The building still stands, though new owners have changed the restaurant format and the name.

In the Tastee-Freeze, when I was there in 1974, the staff girls tended to work the ice cream side, and the staff guys (like me) worked the cooked fast-food side. (In hindsight, I have suspicions that this was in part an effort to reduce on-premise hanky-panky among the youthful staff by keeping the boys and girls mostly apart.) Each side (ice cream and fast food) had its own ordering window. On the fast-food side, we had a wider menu than a typical McDonald’s of the day. We had a griddle for cooking hamburger patties and for warming pastrami portions (and toasting buns), and a deep-fat frier for onion rings, French fries, fish sticks, and other items.

Side note – when I did work the ice cream side, my least favorite order was a banana split. A banana split took a long time because it required a lot of labor – peel and cut the banana, arrange the banana halves in the dish, deposit the three piles of ice cream in the split banana, scoop three different toppings on the ice cream piles, apply the nut and whipped cream toppings, and then crown each pile of topped ice cream with a maraschino cherry. A real pain to assemble.

As I was completing law school and looking for a job as an attorney I included that Tastee-Freeze job on my resume. Several people told me I should not do so, since the job did not pertain directly to the law career I wanted. But, I found that entry prompted a number of interesting "ice breaker" conversations with the senior hiring partners at large law firms who were interviewing me. They often recalled their first job flipping burgers or washing dishes or performing some other low-skill labor.

By the time I retired from the paid labor force in 2018 as a senior attorney, I too had risen to a position of economic power and success. I was on the executive payroll of a Fortune 200 company (complete with bonuses, deferred compensation, stock options, etc. totaling well into six figures). I controlled a departmental budget of tens of millions of dollars per year. But it all began forty-five years earlier with cooking burgers and fries, mopping floors, and emptying trash at a fast-food establishment. Learning that there were jobs to do, even if I did not “feel like it,” that I needed to be there at a particular time because there were customers who expected someone to be present to prepare their food, that there were sometimes hidden benefits in the most distasteful jobs (the owner let me keep a $20 bill that remained unclaimed several days after I found it while tidying up around the outside trash dumpster), that customers who were sometimes difficult and maybe even unreasonable still needed to be dealt with as they paid the bills, that cash flow, inventory, and waste had to be managed, that standards of cleanliness and consistency of product preparation and service needed to be maintained, and so forth.

Few of us stay in such fast-food or other "minimum wage" jobs for long, as we learn a lot during those stints at low-wage labor that we parlay into “bigger and better” work. Minimum wage jobs are often a critical and personally valuable first step into the world of paid labor.

Let’s hear it for those “first jobs”!