[Misc] Paper rounds

[Herr Tubthumper]

I loved my morning paper round. Used to read all the papers on the way round. My son gets £35 for 7 days for his round. Hardly any papers these days and we help at weekends which can be a pain.

35 pounds, that seems a decent rate.

 

[Blue&WhiteSea]

Simpler times!
Did a 7 day morning round for £12 a week, £2 more than all the other rounds in the shop because of all the hills.
Had to do it on the bike because of the distance it covered.
I remember my 1st day on my own it snowed and I must had crashed the bike 3 or 4 times spilling papers and the batteries to my cheapo Halfords bike lights all over the pavement!

 

[Blue&WhiteSea]

In the end, my burgeoning career as a paper led to promotion to the coveted role of 'marker'. You had the shop's big book of customers, and you had to make up the bag for the paperboys, write the address at the top right hand corner of the papers, insert the supplements etc. On the plus side, you got to stay in the shop and swerve the shit weather. On the down side, you had to get to the shop earlier than the paperboys, and you never got tips at xmas

I reached the same lofty heights, £59 a week for a few hours a day before school, I thought I was loaded!
It's the only job I've ever been sacked from, 1 to many times late waking up.

 

[Papak]

I had a connected job.

I worked for The Leader in Robert Street. My job was to divide the leaflets for all the rounds in Brighton and Hove. We’d get thousands of boxes of leaflets and I’d have to divide them up ie 100 for this round, 150 for that round, 63 for that round. It was all done by hand and I’d do it alone.

It’s how I got into TMS as a teenager. After a while Radio 1 would do your head in, so I started listening to Radio 4 and then Test Match Special.

Of course, half the time was wasted as I knew you little twats were all trying to dump the leaflets in bins. We had teams of watchers out checking bins for leaflets. Found loads.

I think our verified distribution was up to 350,000 so I’d be sorting something like 1.5million leaflets each week. Actually, about half that as some other poor bugger also did a day of it.

Did you actually count them all out or did you know the weight of say 100 and split boxes into piles accordingly?

 

[Green Cross Code Man]

@Herr Tubthumper you are corrrect , the Argus did pay more, I was lucky enough to get a round in Seaford when I was 13 due to being the right place at the right time. When I gave up 3 years later and funnily enough left school to be a postman, I was earning almost as much as the wage the PO gave me.

 

[Papak]

The Sunday supplements. Wow, those bags were heavy!

I vividly remember some grumpy old twat moaning at me for delivering the paper late to him: "go pick it up yourself then, you only live round the corner" was apparently not the way to talk to customers.

I got a telling off once because I was expected to push a fully loaded Sunday Times through a vertical letterbox about 1.5 x 5 inches in size and tore the front page of the main section.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

I reached the same lofty heights, £59 a week for a few hours a day before school, I thought I was loaded!
It's the only job I've ever been sacked from, 1 to many times late waking up.

I progressed to working in the kitchen at The Coach House, Rottindean by the age of 15. I was earning around 15 pounds for a Saturday lunch and evening and Sunday lunch shifts. Seemed a fortune back then (early 80s)

 

[Hamilton]

Did you actually count them all out or did you know the weight of say 100 and split boxes into piles accordingly?

I weighed 100s and 50s and would then create a shed load of those, but all the rounds had odd numbers Eg 174, 163 etc so inevitably there would then be some hand counting.

Towards the end of the shift it got a little more lackadaisical.

 

[Perkino]

From 1998 onwards I delivered the Argus. This is where my love affair with the Albion started

 

[Happy Exile]

I did the free paper for a few roads in the town where I grew up in the 80s. I still remember the smell of the fresh print and the bright yellow plastic delivery bag when they were dropped off after school every Thursday afternoon with a little brown envelope with £3.53 in it. I had to get them done by 9am Friday morning and every now and then would get asked to do a few extra roads if someone was ill or on holiday. I can remember the first time I got a £5 note in my pay for doing this, and how I felt rich! Used to really enjoy it except for the people with low-down, too small letterboxes. Especially those that had dogs too. The other really clear memory I've got is the smell of one house, so strong you could pick it up from outside the door and I'd hold my breath pushing the papers in. Something musty and floral and deeply unpleasant and nauseating. The woman who lived there was large, grumpy, and elderly (or seemed so to me at the time, maybe in her 60s), and always wore a lot of purple clothes in the style of how Hollywood thought gypsies dressed in the 1940s. God knows what she had in there to make the smell.

In school holidays I'd go round the local estate agents and a few other businesses that did leafletting and offer to drop their leaflets off same time as my paper round and made a good bit of extra cash doing that too, especially one estate agent that would get me to photocopy the leaflets as well so I'd get an extra couple of hours work. Off the back of that at 14, a guest house I'd leafletted for asked me to be their odd-job handyman for a few hours a day one summer (i.e. dish washer upper, leaf sweeper, grout cleaner, gutter sweeper etc). A highlight of that experience was a guy using a chainsaw sideways to try and take moss off a roof and causing all kinds of carnage. Happy days. I reflect sometimes on the number of jobs I had as a teenager just from asking people if they needed anything done - cleaning inside cars after they'd had a service at a BMW garage, emptying bins twice a day for a huge office block, shredding paper for a British Gas office etc etc. Not sure if that kind of easy employment is possible nowadays.

 

[papachris]

I didn't have a paper round. But I used to help the milkman. It's completely because if this that I started my lifelong passion for the Albion at the age of 12.
He was an Albion supporter and as part of my wages I used to go to the Goldstone with him and his mates. I started to go at the same time as Wardy broke into the team and Peter Taylor was manager.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

I also had a seagull lottery round as a lad. My father had a round at the factory where he worked, off the back of this I set one up myself covering the roads where we lived. It was in his name but I ran it. I got a free season ticket and 10% of any winning tickets I sold. The benefits were good but it was a pain at times as I had to repeatedly return to people who were out.

 

[withdeanwombat]

Nine bob a week to deliver the Argus in the Wish Road area. Paid for fishing gear and trips to the Goldstone. Got me “known to the police” because I had my name taken by the bobby for scooting my bike on the pavement.

 

[Sorrel]

I progressed to working in the kitchen at The Coach House, Rottindean by the age of 15. I was earning around 15 pounds for a Saturday lunch and evening and Sunday lunch shifts. Seemed a fortune back then (early 80s)

I was Sunday kitchen porter at the Grand (in Eastbourne, not Brighton) in the mid 1980s - got £35 for a morning’s work. It wasn’t the most pleasant work, but it paid well for a 16 year old.

 

[Tristram Fourmile]

My daughter does one around Fiveways. I cover it for her if she is ill (Covid normally 3 times so far) nothing pisses me off more than a house with no number. Why? So up themselves that they don't display where they live. Twats. That and a tiny letterbox. Or one with a metal basket that you can't actually push the paper into.

 

[Mr Bridger]

My paper round in Birmingham consisted on delivering to a hell of a lot of flats. One particular flat was towards the end of my round always had 6 x bottles of milk left on the doorstep which my young brain couldn’t work out how someone could drink 6 bottles of milk a day. Didn’t occur to me a family might be living there.
Due to being near the end of the round, getting tired, thirsty, also me being a milk monster at the age, I hatched a plan of helping the occupier drink all that milk. For a couple of days I was chuffed with myself, no harm done, I was helping the poor bloke out, but didn’t realise the choosen milk bottle would leave a wet ring on the concrete floor to prove the milk was delivered, but taken.
Not long after the bloke was waiting behind the door early in the morning to catch me when the milk was lifted. He marched me to the paper shop, handed me over and I was rightly relieved of my round.

Lesson learnt, until I got caught nicking 7” punk singles from W H Smiths a couple of years later.

 

[Shropshire Seagull]

Yep, ex paperboy here. Saltdean, early 70s for about 3 years, 7 days a week. I used a bike that had a carrier on the back so heavy bag was not an issue. Mornings before school. Worked damn hard, but helped me save towards buying my first moped.

Taught me the value of money, if you want something, you have to work hard for it. Good lesson that has served me well.

 

[kojak]

Baldwin's Newhaven mid 70's
Reading the football scores from the night before
Dogs barking and milk bottles

 

[Peteinblack]

6 days a week rain or shine, with the occasional Sunday covering someone else.
Loved it
The bigger the house the less the Christmas tip though.

Yup, the same with my after-school paper round in Lancing/Sompting. I'm sure that was what first prompted my contempt for the rich at a relatively young age!

 

[chickens]

Another ex-paperboy here. Though I think I got the princely sum of £4 a week for my Argus round.

My morning round paid an extravagant £7 a week when I started it, rising to a dizzying £8 a week by the time I finished.

Sundays were a nightmare, I used to leave the shop bent double under the weight of the supplements and not be able to fully straighten up until halfway round.