The death of the after-school job

But, with the recent news that youth unemployment has now climbed to its highest level in a decade, it’s not just the pint prices that now seem a relic of a bygone era. What has happened to all the teenager’s jobs?

According to the ONS, there were 383,000 fewer retail jobs in 2025 than there were in 2015. The chief executive of the British Retail Consortium has warned that “the UK faces the prospect of a jobless generation.”

I’ve written in these pages many times before about the NEET crisis facing the UK, and the hellscape that is the graduate job market, but this was always through the lens of my peers in their mid-twenties struggling to get on the career ladder. But the death of the Saturday job isn’t even about careers. It’s about the bottom rung of the ladder being taken away altogether. 

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The BRC said, “one in five people had their first job in retail, yet this vital step on the career ladder is cracking under the high costs of employment.” Though they might improve pay packets, could recent government increases to minimum wages be pricing inexperienced teenagers out of entry-level work?

Since April 2025, the minimum wage for 18-20 year olds jumped from £8.60 to £10 an hour (16-17 year-old wages also rose by 18%), while employer National Insurance contributions also rose. For businesses already operating on thin margins, a teenage employee now costs significantly more than before, while also often needing extra training and supervision. 

Furthermore, the old model of a teenage or student job economy depended heavily on department stores, bustling high streets, and in-person shopping. But now the retail economy has shifted by almost a third to the online world, and the existing physical stores are often much more automated than they would have been even five years ago. 

I admit, I very rarely shop for clothes in person, and the few times I have done so in recent years I’ve been shocked by just how many big clothing stores are entirely self-checkout now. If you’re a store manager, why spend hours training a teen to understand a complicated till and teaching them how to deal with difficult customers when a robot can process the transactions for you?

Speaking of robots, while we do love to blame AI for almost everything going on in society (and you’ll get no complaints from me), it doesn’t seem immediately obvious how ChatGPT could steal a 17-year-old’s paper round or pot washing job. 

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However, as I have written about before, the number of entry level corporate roles has taken a nose dive in recent years – coincidentally starting around the same time as LLMs became widespread. 

Could it be then, that as twenty something graduates searching for internships and full time roles are being increasingly knocked back as AI steals their would-be jobs, that they are being forced to stay for longer in their first jobs at the student bar, the cafe, and the restaurant jobs longer, which in turn locks the next generation out?

And, if not a paper round or working at McDonalds, what are secondary school and university aged students who want – or need – to work doing instead?

Ivy, a 20-year-old student from London, says: “When I started looking for a job at 16, I handed a CV of cat-sitting and charity shop volunteering into a local cafe. “They proceeded to train me for four shifts and have me prepare food and coffee but never paid me or followed up on their offer of future employment.”

Now, she says, “finding traditional work during the holidays without experience is very difficult, so many opt for zero-hour contract work. It saves on thousands of Indeed applications and unpaid trial shifts that lead nowhere.”

In the UK, hospitality is by far the biggest user of zero-hours contracts, with roughly 28.8% of workers on these arrangements. Across the economy as a whole, just over 1.2 million people are estimated to be on zero-hours contracts, and in hospitality specifically more than half of businesses use them.

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“Agency work allows you a lot of flexibility and it’s a good way of gaining experience on the job. However this comes at a cost; shifts will often be cancelled last minute, employees sent home after the legal minimum shift length and it can become impersonal when it is your first day with particular colleagues or a new venue every day.”

 “The lack of respect and personal relationship agencies have with their workers definitely affects the quality of service as well.”

I know people whose younger siblings tend to earn money through things like online tutoring or selling clothes online. And, to be fair, those are pretty resourceful ways of adapting to how things are now. Still, there is also something quite sad about it.

This means that before these kids begin their real first careers, they’ll never experience an actual workplace. And if current trends around working from home continue (nearly half of all British employees spend at least some of their week working from home, according to Statista), then perhaps many of them never will. 

A first job is as important a milestone as a first relationship – especially ones where you are literally at the bottom of the ladder. Even in our relative youth, my friends and I like to swap stories about our first jobs, because they feel so universal. 

The customers you wanted to punch in the face but had to smile politely at while telling them how right they were. The inexplicable grudge some forty-odd-year-old manager would hold against schoolkids for the crime of not being free at midday on a Monday. 

My partner tells a story about having to lob bags of food waste over his head into bins as a teenager, which would inevitably split and spill all over him. (I’m not really selling the whole first job thing here, I realise, but the point is it builds character!)

There are countless examples of op-eds and features written about how today’s youth don’t engage with the real world: that they are obsessed with their phones and have rotted their brains with social media. And that may be true. But if we cannot offer the teens and students of today this very formative experience, their first real entry into society, how can we be surprised when they end up disengaged from that society?

For many, an after-school job wasn’t just about money. It was about gaining independence from your parents, getting good references for your future employers, and gaining confidence in yourself.

But the disappearance of low stakes environments where young people learn how work works will only contribute to weaker social skills, worse long term employability, and delayed adulthood – problems that are already being fueled by myriad other crises in this country. 

Sweeping hair in a barbershop? Stacking shelves? Working behind a bar? Tell us about your first job in the comments