Tiger Chen

In my senior year of high school, wanting to make some money, I began to work at the pizza chain Papa Johns. Prior to this, I had actually been searching for a part-time job for quite some time on Indeed without much luck. Turns out, if you don't have any prior working experience, not many companies want to hire you. However, after more than a month of searching, I was finally able to land 2 offers: Papa Johns and Panera Bread. Panera offered me a higher starting salary, but Papa John's was significantly closer to home. It was a tough call, so as all intelligent people do, I decided it with a coin flip. Heads, Papa Johns it was. Little did I know how good of an outcome it was.

Before starting, I talked to the manager about what my hourly wage was to be as well as some other basic procedural stuff. He told me that I was to work 3 days a week and that my pay was $10 an hour. I thought that the pay was on the lower side, but it was my first ever service job so whatever. As a side note, I was also told that I could make tips at the cashier as well, however it was fast-food, so I didn’t expect much from it.

During my first shift, I was shown the ropes as I took orders, answered calls, folded boxes, and generally kept myself busy with takeout pizza tasks. However, as the hours passed by, I noticed that I seemed to be making a metric ton of tips. As it turns out, after my shift had ended and my tips were counted, I had made $110 from tips alone in the 4 hours of my shift. Apparently, out of all the Papa Johns stores in the area, the store that I worked at pulled in an unusually high number of tips. So much so that the cashier would regularly make more in a shift than even the managers. The money I made in tips would have far outweighed the extra hourly money at Panera. Throughout my time working at Papa Johns, I would also hear my friend tell me stories of his brother’s nightmarish experiences at Panera bread, and I wonder what it would have been like if the coin had landed on tails. It goes to show that, sometimes, outcomes in your life really are up to chance.