Only had two jobs. First was at a regional supermarket, Market Basket, as a bag boy. Pretty standard stuff. About 4 months in, they asked if I could go to dairy department since they said I was a hard working and quick with my hands. I said yes simply because I was tired of wearing an apron and wanted to wear one of those blue smocks.
Worst decision, it blew, and I don't know why I stuck with it as long as I did. It was just overwhelming because they were always understaffed and there was always something you wouldn't have time to do and that they'd yell at you for. In dairy, we were in charge of filling eggs, cheese, milk, creamers, fruit drinks, and other assorted refrigerated items.
The problem was that they always expected by closing time for you to have "broken down" that aisle, plus the frozen food/deserts aisles which was pretty much impossible. By that, I mean you would have to bring forward products (or in the case of yogurt, which was always a bitch, stack them on top of each other 3 high in the front row) to make the cases look full. And they'd have you do it constantly rather than give you the time to actually fill them, so they'd either bitch about you not filling something or how it wasn't broken down properly. Wouldn't let you wear gloves either unless you were breaking down frozen food, but it was still cold enough for your hands to get all cracked and my finger nails to get bloody.
Not to mention you realize how bonking lazy people are, always putting things back where they don't belong (which significantly takes away from our time), like just tossing a can of soup in with the cheese. And people always bitching about how we don't have x product, forcing you to go to the back fridge to check for a product which you know had no shipments.
Quit that job because I got sick of it (they wouldn't let me move back to being a bagger boy or any other department). After a few months I found a job at another regional store, Christmas Tree Shop. Despite the name, it's year-round trinkets and other useless shit. I was put in shipping.
It was pretty shitty too but I enjoyed some aspects of it.
It was nice that because I worked out back in the warehouse and didn't have to interface with customers much, there wasn't a very stringent dress code, I could just throw on shorts, a t-shirt, a back belt for heavy lifting and some gloves when I used my box cutter. Much better than having to wear a shirt and tie, dress khakis, dress shoes, a smock, and having to be clean shaven at Market Basket. When we received shipments, one person would have to go into the truck and place all the boxes on an assembly line contraption while everyone else would take them off and sort them on to their respective pallets. Sometimes it would get way too hot in the truck and it was the most exhausting part of the job but the way I looked at it was that it ended up being a good workout.
Next we would take each pallet and unbox all of the products, price tag them or give them any other special treatments they needed (like assembling the lamps). Styrofoam was always a bitch. Then we would load them up on trays to be brought out front. This part of the job could really drag on and it got pretty monotonous. But the nice part was that while I was working there, the backroom manager had quit and they couldn't find a new one, so they just essentially had one of the associates as a de facto manager, but she didn't give two shits about anything as long as we were working. So we could talk about whatever and sometimes sneak off food shipments to eat lol.
All the guys that worked back there were nice too. Funny thing was that most of them were ex convicts, so I'd always get the odd story, like how one of them did some pearling in prison. The one really shitty aspect of the job was that it was minimum wage (Market Basket was pretty low but you got a 25 cent raise every 6 months, plus a Christmas bonus), so you had to put in a lot of hours.
When I studied abroad this past semester, I had to quit, and I told them I had no interest in coming back. Sooo, yeah, just came back, and I'll be on the prowl for another job soon. Not sure what I'll try looking for, I'd really like to get a job at my college though for convenience.
EDIT: Holy shit that was a lot longer than I thought it was, haha.
" so I applied. It was at my uni's Alumni Office of Development. I applied everywhere across school, and at GameStop/EB Games, Best Buy, Michaels, Joanns, Target, and Forever 21. 
