Liam Murray

C period

 When the school year ends and summer begins its important to find ways to occupy your time, many students at triton spend that time working at a part-time job. 

There may not be a huge selection of jobs in our area, but there is a great variety of things to do. When selecting a summer job it’s important to make the right choice because you can spend some long summer days doing something you hate. 

Market basket is a local grocery vendor that’s been selling food and employing new England area for a little over a hundred years. Being one of the cheapest and most abundant grocery stores in the area I’m sure many Tritonians have found themselves in a market basket at one point or another. Visiting a market basket in its prime hours of the day will reveal a busy community of shoppers searching up and down the isles and waiting to check out. There’s a lot going of work to be done at any market basket in and behind the scene. Within a market basket, there is a wide variety of jobs and roles that they designate to workers based on skill sets and desires. If you’ve applied to market basket you can receive a vast number of rolls, register worker, bagger, cart corraller, customer service consultant, meatpacker, restocker, and the top dog manager.

 Overall working at market basket is a great gig, the starting pay is minimum wage but can be raised to up to 15$ an hour, workers consistently get Christmas bonuses and the management really goes above and beyond to care for the workers. After talking to dozens of market basket workers it’s clear that they all have a comfortable schedule tailored to their activities and hobbies. If you have to take a shift of because of sports or extracurricular activities and give a proper warning you can get the time off. Some negative occupational reviews for market basket make claims that it is only a good starter job. Its an easy job we’re your given a simple task and you do it, growing older and looking to expand yourself as a worker however you might want to look on to a new job. A management position is achievable but only so many people can be the cream of the crop and rise to that position. One of our fellow Tritonians Barry Nangle has been a bagger and cart corraler at Market Basket for two years now and claims Market basket is a great place for him. “Market Basket has been a good job to me, it may get boring some days but you can’t beat the benefits and time and a half on Sunday.”

Now that the holiday season is in full swing delivery companies are in overdrive to get all presents delivered and in time. Although it’s a busy job around this time of the year companies like ups and fedex are always looking for an extra hand delivering packages. Among the many rolls at Ups are package handler, delivery driver, loader, and warehouse workers. Working at ups is a unique job because it involves a lot of independent work and If your a delivery truck driver lots of traveling. Although it’s independent when you work for ups your always on a clock. Everything about ups is timed and recorded to make sure every stop is as fast and efficient as possible. This is probably the largest downside of this job for most people, ups drivers are put under lots of pressure to get house to house delivering packages and making their time constraint. Fortunately the salary at UPS makes up for the constant state of pressure a deliverer endures. The average salary of a delivery driver is 15$ an hour. 

One of the most common first jobs for any teenager is working at a restaurant. I personally have experienced working in a restaurant firsthand in middle school. I worked at the Plumisland Beachcoma a small restaurant/ bar right on the Plumisland boulevard. I started there as a dishwasher which wasn’t my favorite position but was a great way to get introduced to the working world. Some days washing dishes got to be the most boring task in the world other days I enjoyed the mindlessness of throwing dishes through the washer and putting them in the kitchen. After washing dishes for about a year I tried out bussing tables. Bussing tables is nice because you get to be on the floor seeing customers and delivering them the food as opposed to being stuffed back in the dish room all alone.In my last year at the Beachcoma I got to work easily my favorite position available there, pizza cook. Making pizza was fun, you have a good time working with and getting to know the other line workers. The hours were good mostly 5-10 o’clock days. The pay starts at 12.75 but if you pick up extra shifts and really put your nose to the grindstone the raises will follow. One of my fellow co workers when I worked there James corneau had this to say about his experience at the beachcoma. “It’s a great starter job, there is a nice friendly community with all the regulars and a steady mix of newcomers. It’s a very relaxed job and it can only really get stressful on band nights.”