In Amitai Etzioni’s article, “Working at McDonald’s”, Etzioni asserts that teens should avoid working at places such as fast food restaurants since it provides meaningless work experience for future professional careers. Throughout his essay, he describes how those jobs provide their workers with close to nothing skills since they require them to work as if they were working in factories. He also asserts that teenagers buy useless products that they don’t need from the money they earn working at their part-time jobs (Cooper and Axelrod, 248-249). I disagree with Etzioni’s views on teen employment at places such as fast food. Fast food jobs are important to young teenagers without prior work experience because they equip teenagers with valuable …show more content…
Covie Edwards-Pitt, a chief wealth advisory of Ballentine Partners, writes the following about the invaluable financial lesson jobs teach teenagers, saying, “There’s nothing like making $7/hour to show you how much that $500 skirt you bought on your parent’s credit card really cost. That is a perspective you can’t buy your child. They have to learn it for themselves.” (Edwards-Pitt, Forbes.com). As Edwards-Pitt pointed out, learning the value of the dollar is something that has to be learned through experience when working. I have gone through this lesson that working has taught me on the value of the dollar. The first job I ever had was when I was sixteen working at Taco Bell as a team member. The year I spent working at this job, I learned to appreciate the value of the dollar because of the hours of work that I had to put in to just get $9 an hour. As a team member, I would be doing several tasks around the restaurant. I would work the cash register, clean the restrooms, prepare the food, make sure the restaurant was presentable all while maintaining an excellent customer service. The tasks seem easy but in reality, it was tiresome and it occasionally frustrated me. That is why whenever I would buy something I always made sure to check I was not spending a lot since I knew how hard it is to earn money from working. When it comes to learning the worth of the dollar, there is no better way than learning it through