Baskin Robbins
High school summer vacation meant increasing pressure from the parents to get a job. One lazy afternoon I stopped in the local Baskin Robbins to get a shake. The owner of the franchise, Rich, served me, and I broke through my usual shy nature to ask if he happened to be hiring. He wasn't, but asked me to fill out an application anyway. I gladly did so, and a few days later he called me in for an interview. I guess he liked my vast and varied qualifications.
I started at $3.75/hour which, believe it or not, happened to be above the then current minimum wage. Of course, I also enjoyed the "hidden income" of free ice cream, a benefit which I believe the employees took advantage of a little too much, as evidenced by their horrible complexions and noticeable weight gain. Training involved watching one movie about the inside "scoop" on ice cream, and another about how to count change and treat customers with respect. I got my brown Baskin Robbins shirt and began my career as a glorified shovel.
The night after my first day on the job, my left foot broke for no good reason. Really. It just broke while descending a normal staircase. This is due to genetics - four of us in my immediately family all broke the same bone doing basically nothing. So I arrived for my second shift with a cast on, unable to walk without crutches. My dad came along to beg Rich to maintain my employment despite this unfortunate turn of events, and he was cool about it. So for the next three weeks I hopped around on my right foot. The height of the ice cream freezers concealed my injury from the customers, who in turn looked at me funny as I bounced on one leg back and forth between the ice cream bins and the cash register.
The kids who worked there were a friendly and motley bunch: Debbie the bubbly assistant manager, Lisa the suburbanite, Nicole the popular girl with sprayed hair, Jeff the Anthrax fan, Jamie the moron, Jason who made vodka milkshakes, Chris the deadhead, and Chris's half-sister Shari who was a fellow moody moon child. Shari and I would take turns acting like each other's therapists during slow late shifts.
Speaking of late shifts, I had to work many of those, even on weekends, which sucked once I started trying to get a life. There I stood, stuck at the goddamn store, a dork with braces and a face full of zits, covered and stinking of warm milkfat and fudge. I anxiously waited to serve the girls who were unwitting focuses of my crushes. I remained at the ready to gift them double scoop waffle cones coated with rainbow sprinkles if they ever happened to swing by during their thrill-a-minute super-social Saturday nights, but you know what? They never came.
Instead I served the infinite crowds pouring out from the movie theatre down the way. The line would stretch out the door, and in a daze I'd dig and dig into the ice cream, all the time wondering why I even bothered. One night it got so busy I didn't realize I lacerated my thumb when changing out a large tub of vanilla. I only noticed when I handed a sundae topped with my fresh blood to a customer. Thank god they didn't notice as I pulled it away at the last second and made them a less sanguine version.
Winter was predictably much slower. One particularly snowy day found us free of customers and bored senseless. Jason took it upon himself to instigate a whipped cream fight. For a glorious few minutes this Baskin Robbins became a full-fledged combat zone. Fresh cans were dug from fridges or boxes and discharged with gleeful abandon. That is, until I noticed through the glass front door a horrified family - father, mother, daughter, son - huddling on the curb in fear and unwilling to enter. That was seriously awkward. They smartly took their business elsewhere (probably to the Haagen-Dasz across the way). I have no idea how we didn't get in trouble for that. Rich clearly gave us too much freedom and wasn't around enough to discourage such transgressions.
It wasn't all stupid kid stuff. I learned a tough lesson one night when a very stoned girl came to get a couple scoops to go, like $4 worth of ice cream. She handed me a $20 and then split in a daze, forgetting to wait for her change. I pocketed the $16 thinking, "sweet!" However later in the evening the phone rang. It was that girl wondering if she forgot to get her change. Presented with this moral dilemma I chose to lie and say there was no way to determine that after the fact. She then explained her boyfriend was really pissed, and now I felt terrible, but $16 was worth not changing my evil story. I justified my heartless greed but telling myself it wasn't my fault she spaced out and fucked up. Even then after we closed she suddenly showed up knocking at the locked door pleading that I count the money in the cash box and see if there's anything extra. I couldn't bear to guilt any longer, and so I went into the back out of view, dug the cash out of my back pocket and returned with the money which I handed to her. She was glowing with relief and thankful. I acted like a hero, but inside I felt like total shit. Still do writing about it now. And I ended up with zero dollars anyway - so I had nothing to show for it except eternal shame I was trying to take advantage of somebody's weakness to cheat them out of a paltry $16.
Anyway.. on the bright side during my tenure I became one of the better skilled cake decorators, which meant I got to write personalized messages when asked by customers. One couple came in for a chocolate cake and were pleasantly surprised by the option when I said I could write something on top. Usually it's "Happy Birthday" or "Congratulations" but the guy quickly requested, "Eat Shit, Tom." Without batting an eye I asked, "Red or blue icing?" The guy quickly answered, "Red." His girlfriend was embarrassed but the guy suggested to her, quite correctly, that I would enjoy scribbling that onto a cake. I totally did.
The pay and the hours never really increased, and it got more and more depressing to watch Rich's franchise slowly go under. I recall one night Jason and I doing all the math to figure out how much profit this place pulled in. On hindsight our estimates were incredibly naive and optimistic, and even then we couldn't see Rich making more than about $15,000/year.
One night somebody (who shall remain nameless but it wasn't me) turned off the freezer by mistake. The next morning Rich found $200 worth of cakes melted and dripping from the freezer door onto the floor. This kind of crap kept happening, and slowly, painfully drove him out of the business. I abandoned ship to work more hours for less money at a summer camp - a story for another time. Shortly after that I heard Rich finally ditched the franchise and got a job as a shoe salesman.
I feel bad for Rich