I Lived On Minimum Wage

That was me you saw eating a peanut butter sandwich in the fast-food dining room

Except I couldn’t afford the jelly. Photo by Nima Naseri on Unsplash

I’ve always been amused by people claiming fast food is cheap. Even when I worked at a fast-food place, I couldn’t afford it.

Way back in the 1980s, when I was in high school and then college, minimum wage was $3.35. I put in my time at just about every major fast-food joint, except, oddly, McDonald’s.

I did my Hardee’s stint in 1987

It was the summer I married my first husband. He was spending the summer at home with his parents, but I had already moved into the place where we’d spend our first year of marriage and last year of college. We had the bottom half of a small bungalow.

Another couple rented the even smaller second story that was really just an attic. Their bed, tucked under the eaves, was the first thing you saw when you entered their space. It struck me as a place suitable only for poets.

The Hardee’s uniform in those days was hot, unbreathable brown polyester, and we were only issued one. I didn’t have a washer or dryer, but I washed it by hand each night and hung it up to dry. Some guys would let a disgustingly long time lapse between washings, even if they lived at home with their parents and had access to the luxury of a home laundry.

I didn’t have a car when I started the job. I bought a used bike to make it easier to get around, and if you’re wondering what it’s like to ride a bike in hot weather dressed in polyester pants, I can tell you it’s not pleasant.

But there was no place to change other than the women’s one-person restroom, and if I took it over to change in and out of my uniform, there would be no other facility for customers to use during that time. So I mostly just dealt with it.

If I thought I could get away with it, I’d slip into the walk-in freezer briefly before my shift and watch the steam rise from my sweaty body. My face and arms would cool down quickly, but my core would still be hot, sweaty and miserable.

Every shift was 10 hours

And I was grateful for that! It’s common for fast-food places to schedule lots of short shifts that run short of 40 hours, but I was consistently given four 10-hour shifts each week. That meant $134 each week to live on — before taxes, of course.

With that, I needed to cover rent — I can’t remember whether it was $200 or $250, but I know it felt like a lot back then. The house had no air conditioning so my utilities couldn’t have been much. I kept my food bill as low as I could, and that meant I could not often afford to eat any cheeseburgers — even though we were allowed to purchase one meal at half-price while working.

Of course, food that didn’t sell within a set time had to be thrown out. We couldn’t eat it. Gosh, can you imagine what would have happened if they’d allowed the workers to eat the just-expired sandwiches? We would be motivated to cook extra ones so we could eat them later. Such is the thinking of corporations that make millions on the backs of hungry young workers.

My solution to this issue was to bring a peanut butter sandwich to work. I left off the jelly because that would have been an additional expense and I could barely manage the bread and peanut butter. Plus, I was trying to save money to cover the cost of my wedding!

Nobody ever inquired why the girl in the brown polyester uniform was sitting there in a booth eating a sandwich from home. At first I felt embarrassed, and then I switched to feeling defiant.

That’s an attitude that has served me well. The working poor have nothing to be embarrassed about; society does.

It wasn’t all bad

The thing about being a poor college student is you believe it’s going to be a temporary arrangement. For some reason, I was under the impression that once I’d graduated, I’d have a normal standard of living.

That turned out not to be true, but it kept me reasonably content at the time.

Working four 10-hour days gives you a lot of free time, but I didn’t have any money to spend or a car to get around, so mostly I just socialized with my co-workers. Several of us worked the same shift, which was 4 p.m.-2 a.m.

That meant we worked both the dinner rush and the post-bar rush. The restaurant was directly across the street from the university and close to many bars. The kids who had more money than we did would often stop in after a night out. The bars closed at 1 a.m., and the last hour or two of the shift meant a packed lobby of mostly underage drunks.

You’d have a dozen orders in process

You took orders and took orders and took orders, and then you had to wait for the kitchen to catch up. It wasn’t possible to produce the burgers fast enough to suit the crowd.

When we got off work at 2 a.m., we were wired from the chaos of serving the bar rush, and it was impossible to go to sleep. Since I was the only one among us who lived alone, we often went back to my house after work. Sometimes, one of the guys brought over a charcoal grill (I didn’t have one, of course) and we’d make our own burgers on my front porch in the middle of the night. That never struck me as ironic until I just wrote those words.

No matter how poor you are, there’s always money for cheap booze, because that’s the least expensive entertainment there is.

I didn’t have a television or VCR, but a few times my friends brought over the equipment so we could watch movies.

Otherwise, our late-night entertainment was mostly whisky and listening to music on cassette tapes.

During the day, I did things like paint the apartment, because we intended to have our simple wedding reception in our apartment. If you ever need to figure out how to transport several gallons of paint across town on a bike, hit me up and I’ll explain my ways to you.

I had plenty of time

I did a lot of reading and sunbathing that summer. Since I wasn’t taking summer classes, it was the most time to myself I’ve ever had in my life. If I’d had just a few extra bucks, I could have enjoyed it more.

At the end of the summer, I got married and then started my senior year. We got a 1980 Chevette as a combination wedding-graduation present from my parents, which allowed me to get a part-time job as a cocktail waitress at a nice restaurant in another town. I was a lousy waitress but I made much more money doing that than I made at my first full-time newspaper job.

I still like peanut butter sandwiches, but now I put some jelly on them. That has never stopped feeling decadent.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules. Tips accepted here.

A version of this story first ran on Medium on Sept. 4, 2024.