See, this is what always amazes me about the states, you guys have so many itty bitty jobs no wonder your wages are so low.
Here it's very rare to see an employee whose sole purpose is to pack your groceries into either the plastic ones or the recyclable cloth ones. All that is done by the person staffing the till - the "check-out chick" as it were.
Same thing with restaurants, in the restaurants here we don't have "bus boys," the waiter is responsible for all orders and transport of food/drinks to and from the tables. For a waiter my age in a restaurant employed as a casual (most common for wait-staff) and earning the government legislated award wages, the lowest they'd be earning would be about $17 an hour, rising to $20 on a Saturday and about $24 on a Sunday, public holidays are closer to $40ph. Mind you we don't tip (although most people do, it's just not expected of a customer and there's no "standard" 10% or 15%) but I still think it's insane how low wait-staff and the like's wages are over there.
In 3.5 months in our ski fields I saved about $5500 dollars ($US4200) and that was paying "snow tax" on all food, drinks and living pretty well too. I was only working maybe 30 hours a week. In Canada at the ski fields I was working well over 40 hours a week, paying basically the same price there as I would here for food but scrimping and saving everything and in 6 months I earned about CAD$2000 (A$2400, US$1800).
The difference? CAD$6.50ph wage. No increases for weekends, and $6.50 was considered "good"!!!
Because it was above the $5.90 considered "minimum wage" in Alberta. It was the lowest I'd ever earned, the next lowest was nearly twice the rate.
