Do you remember the first time you got paid for work? Not a weekly allowance for washing the dishes, not the handful of ones from the neighbors for babysitting their kids (in a house filled with brazen mice who hid under the sofa in the daytime but came out after dark. Wait. That’s another story.)
Not those stuff-the-coins-in-your-pocket-not-really-a-job jobs, but a real job.
For me, it was Kmart.
I was Number 29. “Number 29 to the registers. Number 29.” My ears perked up like a puppy hearing car wheels in the drive whenever I heard that over the loudspeaker. They always called me first. Always. Because I loved being Number 29. And, I would race the entire length of the store and have my register open before the manager could call a second time. I loved being needed.
It was only for a year, maybe not quite that, from my senior year in high school until I left for college.
Courtesy Devils Lake Daily Journal, via Creative Commons.
It closed last year.
I still remember that first pay envelope. I kept it for a long time in a folder of important things. (Important things that my mother went through one day and threw out. Wait. That’s another story.)
It was kinda like this.
Kmart paid in cash on Fridays. The H.R. person, who looked weirdly like Penny Marshall’s Laverne, would write our hours and pay total on the little brown envelope and fill it with the cash we earned. (My starting pay? $2.70 an hour which was, Kmart never failed to remind me, a generous five cents more than the minimum wage everyone else in town paid.)
We got our weekly envelopes of cash at the back of the store – a trick, I later learned, to encourage workers to spend their pay before they even reached the parking lot.
Which is what I did.
Toasted coconut marshmallows. A bag a week, maybe two if they were on sale. Every week.
Mine were the house brand.
I saved a little each week, sure. But, I spent the rest on toasted coconut marshmallows and other things I don’t remember.
I should have saved more. It took 10 more years before I embraced pension plans and the value – literal and figurative – of saving.
Embed from Getty ImagesWhich brings me to 26-year-old Bryce Harper, who this week agreed to a $330-million, 13-year contract with the Philadelphia Phillies.
(Bryce can now buy 330 million bags of house brand toasted coconut marshmallows. But only if they are on sale.)
The deal, which should make your eyes bug out with pulsing dollar signs, is huge.
And, by huge, I mean the hugest. But, it’s pretty similar to the 10-year deal the Washington Nationals offered him and which he eschewed last season.
Baseball’s cynics will chortle that Harper failed to anticipate the slow free agent market, that he left his home team – the one team that loved him – and took what might be a somewhat lesser deal (which is, I remind you, the best deal ever) with a Phillies team that, depending on the day, has either raw potential or a forever hold on the middle of the NL East.
Bah, cynics.
Maybe Harper saw $330 million over 13 years and thought, “Yes, that’s exactly the security I was looking for.”
Maybe Harper hemmed and hawed through the first weeks of Spring Training – spurning overtures from the Padres, the Giants, and who knows who else – because he thought, “I want the security of a job. One team for 13 years. These millions will give me the future I envision for me and my family.”
No opt-outs. No “no-trade” clause. Once he signs, there will be no freedom from Philadelphia.
(If you think I’d miss the opportunity to post Elton John singing “Philadelphia Freedom” on Soul Train in 1975, you don’t know me as well as I thought you did.)
I do not begrudge Harper or Manny Machado their hundreds of millions. I do not begrudge the lowest paid major leaguer his $555,000 minimum wage.
But, I also will not argue with those who note that the lowest-paid major leaguer’s salary could fund more than a dozen public school teachers.
That’s the way it is. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but it is “what the market will bear.”
And, we are the market. We buy tickets, we pay for overpriced beer and stadium food, we watch the games. We are the market that paid Bryce Harper. If you have a problem with that, blame you. Or me. Blame us.
Which brings me to 1907.
And, this …
The Pittsburgh Press, 12/27/1907
Yankees’ owner Frank Farrell offered a spreadsheet of what it cost to run the 1907 Yankees, who were, technically, still the New York Highlanders and who were, just five years earlier, the Baltimore Orioles. (Wait. That’s another story.)
- Salaries of 25 players: $60,000
- Travel expenses: $11,000
- Hotel Bills: $6,375
- Spring Training: $5,000
- Incidentals, clerks, attendants: $15,000
That’s an average salary of $2,400, or about $64,000 today.
Farrell admitted he preferred horse racing, but as a “steady money maker, baseball is undoubtedly the better.”
And, that steady money maker of 1907 is the steady money maker of 2019 and it is what allows the Phillies to pay Bryce Harper $330 million.
When I was in high school working at Kmart I held that weekly pay envelope in my hand as though it was filled with hundred-dollar bills, which it wasn’t. It could have been filled with $330 million. It meant the world to me. I earned it.
It was at that moment that I knew I could be a grownup – on my own and successful.
Maybe not Bryce Harper successful as it turns out, but successful enough to have as many toasted coconut marshmallows as I could ever want.
Wasn’t your first payday as wonderful?
The Baseball Bloggess 
What a skill you have to entwine untold MLB riches with teenage memories in a way that made me nostalgic and NOT insane! Thanks, Jackie. My first job was waiting tables in a teensy, small town diner. I was terrible at it, but the tips felt like my fortune.
There’s something about a first job, isn’t there? I remember it vividly. It’s the ones that came in-between then and now that have grown hazy over the years.
My first payday was for 40 hours at $1.25/hr. I inspected work gloves at a factory. It was a fortune for me, but I hated the job.
Thankfully I was only there for three months before I was hired as a secretary on the War on Poverty Program. I loved that job.
After mowing yards as a teenager, it was as a dishrunner at a Morrison Cafeteria operated college cafeteria. Helped me stay in school.
I like the title “dishrunner” … it sounds very athletic! :)
I’m forever grateful for those jobs I had while in school that helped cover the costs. I know how hard it is for young people today to make ends meet with the ever-growing cost of a college education!
Inspecting work gloves! I did for a moment imagine that the “work” those gloves did was catch a baseball. But, I’m guessing those work gloves did a very different job. :)
I think I started babysitting at age 12 for 50 cents an hour. My first real gig was at the Barrel Drive in restaurant as a carhop when i was 14 for $1.70 an hour. I also spent a couple years at White Mart as a cashier. Unlike you, I didn’t remember any one thing on which I spent my hard earned dollars.
I only remember those toasted coconut marshmallows … every single week. I ate my lifetime quota during that year. I haven’t had one since.
You are younger than I. My first job paid only $1.97 an hour! :) As always, great blog!
Lynne
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.” William Faulkner (1897-1962)
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Back in the day, Kmart would start you a few pennies over the minimum wage and then every three months they would boost you a little bit more. It wasn’t particularly hard work, so I considered it a good wage! :)
My first job was during the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I was a file clerk/switchboard operator in an insurance broker’s office in Chicago for the princely sum of $40/week. I worked that job every summer and Christmas holiday until college graduation. By then I was keeping the books and doing secretarial work. I loved my bosses there and passed the job on to my younger sister when I took my first full time for $600/month.
A summer job that lasts from high school through college is a rare job, indeed!
“I used to be a Rolling Stone…if the Cause was right…”
It was short-sighted of me not to mention that Philadelphia Freedom was written for Billie Jean King.
1) My first job was as a prep cook in a Mexican restaurant. I would go to work and pre-make whatever I was told that day. some days, I would make 400 burritos and put them in the walk-in cooler. Some days, I would make 100 gallons of salsa in a giant kettle using a canoe paddle as a stirrer. Thanks to the piped-in overhead music in that place, to this day the Phil Collins ear-worm “Sussudio” gives me a Pavlovian response to make 2,000 taquitos.
2) Philadelphia Freedom was my favorite song when I was 6.
3) It’s a goddamn shame what happened to Kmart. I worked for Sears Holding Corporation (Kmart’s parent company) for three years as an auditor. The Kmart you describe was the one I would hear about from the “old-timers” who pined for the “old days” when that company wasn’t run by idiots.
I have fond memories of Kmart. (Well, fond-ish.) I remember that one’s birthday was a paid holiday which I thought was fantastic and foolishly believed that every employer did. And, I remember that they made me watch films about the value of pension plans and of unions. It was a little over my head at the time, but a nice thing for a part-time high school kid/employee to be exposed to.
I was a student assistant at the local public library. I made 1.65 an hour! That was in the early 70’s. But i was proud of it. It took me a beat to get the idea. I got soundly bawled out a couple of days into my time there, for not being up to par. As soon as i got the hang of what was expected, I did fine.
At about the same time, I was playing softball. Even though I was a skinny little thing, I could mash! However, I risked death any time a batted ball came my way. I was a horrible fielder with a rag arm. I wasn’t fast, either. Ron Blomberg was my spirit animal.
I always appreciate a shout-out to Ron Blomberg, baseball’s first DH. Because I love the DH in the AL and I love the No-DH in the NL and I think that is part of the game’s perfect imperfection.
(I think a library job sounds like heaven.)