How did you make money when you were a kid?

delivered flyers
robbed banks
mowed lawns
typical stuff

when i was 11 i started a zine -- i printed out hundreds of copies on my dad's printer (he was v. pissed), forced all the neighborhood kids to write for it, and sold it door-to-door!! i made about $100 that summer (each cover was meticulously colored in by hand in crayon: that wz to make them 'collectors items'!)

when i was 13 i got my first research job in a laboratory, something involving polymers and nmr spectroscopy: i made less than minimum wage that summer but i got to hang out with MAGNETS!

My parents set up at sports cards shows, back when that was a big deal, and I used to go along. In third grade, I started setting up a table at a Ft. Worth flea market where my grandmother sold jewelry, and sold cards and comics (I took a hit when the market for Image Comics/collectible comics - Superman's Dead! - died). I did OK, averaging maybe $50 a week in profit. The most I remember making was $200 in a day. I have no clue what I did with that money ($50/week is a lot of cash when you're 10).

One weekend the summer after seventh grade, I set up at the Canton flea market, and every last bit of my stuff got stolen - about $1000 in cards and books and so on. That soured me on doing flea markets.

After that, my first real job was working for two guys who set up an eight-computer LAN in the back of a comic book/game store, letting people play the original Doom, C&C and a few other games at $6/hr. I got paid $7.25 an hour to sit in the back room, play games and take money, and make sure no one blew up the computers. It's too bad they went out of business, that was the best/easiest job I ever had.

hiding things around the home and waiting for someone to say "has anyone seen the [x]?" so i could demonstrate my budding DETECTIVE SKILLS at $1 per day + expenses

Delievered fliers & working in a coffee store that I happened to live above.

I forgot about one - I stole two of my brother's Playboys, cut out individual pictures and sold them to my classmates in fourth grade. I still can't figure out how I never got caught with the stack of naked girls in my cubby-hole (or if the teachers knew and didn't care).

I don't know how my early capitalist/entrepeneurial streak led to far-left politics and a severe dislike for every boss I've ever had.

I started working under the table as an assistant when I was 12. I was tall enough to pass for 16 and I type v. fast, faster than the speed of some people's talking so I could take dictation v. easily if by computer. Cannot handwrite anything for shit though. Prior to that I babysat neighborhood kids starting when I was about 10 (see again really tall thing, everyone thought I was a junior high schooler since we'd just moved to the neighborhood).

Is it okay if I ask how tall you are now?

6'7".

!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh and on the money thing, I would do low-level farm work (shoveling mulch, putting sprounts in the ground, etc) and make money money make money money.

(I stopped growing when I was 12 thank you marlboro reds and espresso and not eating properly due to revulsion towards gov issue peanut butter, but I was 5'5" when I was 10, 5'8" when I was 12)

Shit I'm gullible, I really believed you! Then I started thinking...all those pictures...is New York the Valley of the Giants!?!?!

That's like the opposite of me, I was actually quite little until 13-14 (1990 = 5'6", 1991 = 5'8", 1992 = 6'1"!, 1995 = 6'4").

Yeah, all the guys here are like Shaquille O'Neal. Millar is like 7'3"! Don't even get me started on Tracer Hand and bnw, dude. ENORMOUS.

i http://www.tcp.com/~mary/tdr2ic.jpg

I was one of those luckies that got cash given to me when I was a kid, though THAT stopped once I grew some height.

I worked in a model shop; trains, airfix kits and radio controlled cars, planes and boats.

Wouldn't being so tall make it harder to work under the table though?

(sorry)

I had a bunch of shares off my dad's job and got a shitload of money when the company got bought out. Otherwise, paperrounds for years.

When we were kids, my sister had a dorm fridge in her room. She would sell us glasses of iced tea for a dime. If we walked to the kitchen on the other end of the house for FREE iced tea, she would mock and/or threaten us.

Note that she made the iced tea very weak to keep down the overhead.

my younger sister and i used to sell grapes off our grapevine, flowers from the garden and cotton from the fields. (all but the last were true... we didnt have cotton fields in west auckland)

I was a baker.

i can;t even make money NOW, i hate this thread

At sixteen I worked 45 hrs a week at a glove shop (Making) my pay was $0.52 per hour.(No Union at the time.)

In pretty much chronological order, I:

Did basic janitorial type stuff at my father's computer store;
did proof-reading and copy-editing suggestions on the papers a friend of my parents had to write for her Master's of Education degree;
proof-read a book manuscript a local guy wrote about ... the Roxbury School, iirc (I mean, that was it, I just can't remember if that's what the school is called);
wrote fanzines that I traded for comic books at the comic store and sold at school and Denny's;
told fortunes with M&Ms at Denny's in return for people paying for my coffee and key lime pie.

[quote]i can;t even make money NOW, i hate this thread[/quote]
Go sell pornography to pre-teen boys. It worked for me!

You know, Paul, I was planning a little party in your 'hood and specifically thought, oh, Paul! Not after that comment, though.

if magazines still coloured in their covers with crayon, the net would never have caught on

I really loved the paper route, it was big money for the time. Every few months I could hit record shows with $100 or even $200 saved up. I also shoplifted like hell with the paper bag & sold the dirty goods to other kids. I have no fuckin clue how I got away with that with a big neon orange shoulder strap on it, but I only got caught once.

Paper round, and then head paperperson. The latter was great, got paid 23 quid for what amounted to 3.5 hours work marking up papers each morning and an extra 2 quid a day (on average) for each rounds that needed doing on account of other kids being away/ill etc.

I babysit for local kids which earnt me a fair bit. I also did a paper round when I was quite young which i hated. it was only a weekly one though. Then when i was at college, i used to work in a newsagents. It was ok but it was right in the middle of the town I lived in & I spent the day seeing people in this awful overall thing i had to wear. Also hangovers were a nitemare!

I went in on a Jolly Rancher sales scheme with some kids at school; we'd bring a small box of Jolly Ranchers to the cafeteria with us and charge kids 25c for Jolly Ranchers we'd bought for 10c. Other things we sold: flavored toothpicks we made ourselves; "friendship pins," safety pins with tiny beads run down their spike in divers combinations. My mom: "if they're 'friendship pins' why are you selling them?" It is important to note that I was never the mastermind of these schemes, I was always either labor or lower-middle-management, and hence got screwed at least as much as any of our "customers."

When I was 6 or 7 each week I delivered the Sunday paper and the mail up to "Aunt Foster," the little old biddy who lived at the top of our hill. Her husband had died some years earlier, and it was he for whom Foster Lane was named. I received a quarter for this service, as well as free reign of the television set while she opened a week's worth of mail. Nothing much thrilled her besides the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, which she always entered. I was pressed into service assembling her entries, which stumped her with their complexity. I came to realize that she was getting more out of this exchange than I was—not just because the Sunday morning TV shows were several orders worse than the Saturday ones, but because I doubted she would ever share any of her practically guaranteed winnings with me. Also, there was Mandy. Mandy was Aunt Foster's little yipping dog who I was absolutely terrified of. She was no bigger than my shin but she had decided from the beginning that we were to be enemies. I was convinced she could smell me coming up the hill. As I approached I would hear that frenzied yipping and clutch the big Sunday News-Sentinel like a shield, my mouth set grimly. Remember there's a quarter in it for you, Sessions. I only ever had one true-blue run-in with Mandy, when she tore my Sunday School shoe off, and I ran loosey-goosey down the hill. When I showed up on my doorstep, one shoe missing, my father asked what had happened and I was ashamed. The dog was so little. Then he asked me about the paper. We looked outside and the big Sunday edition of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, as well as mail, was blowing lazily down the lane, crucial Publisher's Clearinghouse bonus stamps lodging themselves in bushes and stumps. I think I delivered the paper a few times after that, but Aunt Foster assembled her sweepstakes entries herself.

</Thurber>

I also worked in:

Kroger's
Office Depot (née OfficeTown)

One time my father gave me 25c to shovel ice off the driveway. It took FOREVER.

And my grandmother paid me to transcribe her parent's love-letters onto computer. They're still not all done, there are literally hundreds of them and it's slow-going, their handwriting is shocking.

Hmmm... I babysat. And for a while my dad had me set up on this allowance system based on how many plants I watered in the yard (we had a big yard). But my favorite job was housesitting. I would walk dogs, feed fish, turn lights on and off (that was a favorite) to make it look like someone was home... Mostly I liked just hanging out in other families' houses when they were away. I'd roll around on their waterbeds and look at their books and tiptoe in the master bedroom and just stand there quietly feeling ever so sneaky.
Also, I entered data for my mom when she went back to school.

My mother let me buy antiques and then sell them in her shop. Funny, because I would only buy antiques from her. But from a VERY young age I was very interested in shopkeeping: I would help out. Even work in another shop at times.

http://www.dekensonline.com/lawngarden/echo/trimmer_srm-2100_small.jpg I became VERY familiar with this piece of machinery during the summers between ages 13 & 16. Got my allowance from crap like this. $10 for trimming our front & huge backyards.

also, would wash the dishes, vacuum the pool, and mow both the lawns(which covered more than an acre).

all of this went towards supporting my comic book habit. I was fuggin' ADDICTED, yo. Couldn't break that shit's hold on my life.

At age 16, i got my first paying job at the local historical place.

The early teens, summer vacations: earned my very first pay for a two-weeks job for a 'collective farm', in a beet field. Bought m'self a transistor radio - a Selga, made in Latvia, natch - and for the rest of that summer was totally enthralled with this new toy's magical power to tune in to Radio Luxembourg, for at least a couple of hours every night (I'm talking the early 70s here).

In the following summers, in the countryside together with my father, did a variety of 'land or soil improvement works' -- that's what my dikshonari says it was, ha! -- toiling away with an axe, a scythe & a shovel. (No, I wasn't actually trying to predate Gravediggaz or anything)

Toiling away with an axe, a scythe and a shovel.
(Nope, I actually wasn't trying to predate Gravediggaz or anything)

I made a record! My school choir was picked to sing on Art Garfunkel and Amy Grant's lost 1984 masterpiece "The Animal's Christmas" (and I will send a special surprise to anyone who has a copy of this), and I was paid £150 for a week's work - fantastic riches in the mid eighties, for a 10-year-old.

(...then again, maybe I was? and I'm still in denial! :)

(Hello, Herr Freud) ) ) ) )

Wow! The top prize goes to Mark! How cool is that?

er, pocket money and birthday money and Christmas money and random money from relatives.

Haha wait I forgot my coolest one! I was in a newspaper ad for the psychiatric ward of a children's hospital!! Tagline: "Yesterday this child caused more trouble than most kids do in a lifetime." I earned myself what at the time was an unimaginable amount of money.

(sorry)

strike that; "caused more DAMAGE than most people etc"

Ally I'm imagining you typing away under there, expertly maneuvering around other peoples' feet and legs and your head crooked over. Your boss is talking to a client and without missing a beat he reaches under there to grab a sheaf of papers you hand him, pretending they just came from the FAX machine.

Selling snowcones among other things.
Slash and burn, baby. Slash and burn.

feeling around in the couch for coins fallen there; looking in the coin phone down at the corner; coins from dad's pockets in suits he hadn't worn for months, sometimes; "the Edmonzo show" that me and my sister put on for our parents and their friends (our last name was Edmonds) - involved riding a unicycle (I don't know why we had a unicycle but we did) and doing wheelies on a tricycle; some chores; did a garage sale once; got 25 cents when my dad's friend said he'd pay me fifty cents to eat an oyster - I only managed half and that is all the oysters I have ever eaten; tooth fairy; later got a thousand from my grandparents dying - had very restricted access to this though but I got a dinghy and a BMX out of it (amongst other things) eventually!

I remember I used to view money in terms of thirty cent units because that's how much my favourite purchase (Caribou candy bars) cost. I also remember the grouchy corner store owner refusing my 2 cent piece because it was bent, which made me cry.

oh I thought that weed chopper pic was a metal detector - oh how I wanted one of those when I was a kid!

Tracer, that's exactly what my current job is. I've gone down in status :(