I Worked a Weekend Side Hustle. Here’s My Story.
You remember the song “Six Inch” by Beyoncé? That was my anthem.
She grinds from Monday to Friday / Works from Friday to Sunday…
I mentioned before I did waitressing in college up until 2017. It was actually nontraditional waitressing: I worked weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, private house parties and fancy opening events everywhere between upstate New Hampshire and Cape Cod. (So much of my life is snubbing the traditional…) I worked for several catering companies as my weekend side hustle of choice, often working straight through Saturday and Sunday doing so.
This helped me feel more in control of my life before I got full-time temp work in 2016. With this gig I had at least a little income coming in before getting my full-time temp role. Sometimes I miss it, if you can believe it. I quit the job in early 2017 after getting a raise that made working the weekends unnecessary. Having the weekend to myself was worth more to me, as nice as it was.
Which is the secret sauce to enjoying your weekend side hustle, now that I’m thinking about it. It’s much easier to grind away when you like the work.
My Pay and the Other Pros
If you look up “catering staffing boston” you’ll find the company I worked with on the first page. They had a flyer on a bulletin board I found on campus, and I started working for them despite having zero prior waitressing experience. The hiring process consisted of a phone call to ensure I wasn’t a serial killer and then a “training session” where they had me hold a tray and walk across the room. Boom, in.
The pay varied from job to job but paid better than minimum wage at the time. They wrote my minimum pay down at $13.50 an hour in 2016, which was my pay maybe half the time starting out. If I worked an event at Harvard or MIT, I’d get paid a little over $14.50. If I was a “home accommodator,” i.e. waitressing at someone’s house, my pay would bump up to $16 or more PLUS TIP. My highest hourly rate was $18 an hour when they had to get someone in last-minute. Shit was nice.
Besides the paychecks, I counted the free food I got as an extra bonus. Oh my Lord, that food. I had to pause writing this so I could fully enjoy the memories of all that free food I’d eat and take home. This was especially helpful in keeping down my grocery bill – there’d be time when I’d bring so much food back from the weekend that I’d make it to the next weekend before finishing it. One of my favorite places to work was during Kiddush at a local Jewish temple, which is basically an after-party brunch for socializing with the congregation. They had this phenomenal kosher caterer do the same thing every Saturday and I’d lug home pounds of food. That egg salad was the stuff of dreams.
“Duh, Darcy! Of course rich people food tastes good! We’re not here to read about food, we’re here about the WORK!!!!!”
My bad, got carried away there.
It was decent pay for relatively easy work. All you had to do was show up on time and do as you were told. This generally meant putting down linens, placing cutlery on the tables, getting buffets set up, passing out appetizers/dishes/drinks, and collecting dirty plates at the end of the night. Simple stuff.
My co-workers were all a great bunch, too. The rest of the waitstaff, and the caterers that hired us, always made it an easygoing atmosphere. It helped too that these were always celebrations – weddings, grand openings, dinner parties, and more weddings – so it was always a happy place to work as well.
No Weekends to Myself and Other Cons
The time commitment was the biggest con for me. Yes, it was great to have a weekend side hustle with flexible scheduling. No, it wasn’t so great to have commutes anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 HOURS, depending on where you were scheduled to work. If the job required a carpool, you might get paid for the travel time. Otherwise, tough shit. Sometimes too the parties would run way late into the night, running hours after your shift was supposed to end, and you can’t exactly leave the caterers high and dry unless you don’t mind losing out on the best shifts. These late-runners also don’t include the long drives it sometimes took to get back home (looking at you, Cape Cod weddings).
The company scheduling was also a hot mess. Everyone’s calendars looked different from each other’s, with some shifts appearing for Worker A and completely different ones for Worker B. The office also wasn’t consistent about communicating with you, sometimes emailing you about a job and sometimes calling you. It got a little confusing at times, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker.
And there you have it! This job was nice while I was broke and scared, but once I got on solid financial footing it wasn’t worth it to me anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stuck with it; then I look at my stress-free lifestyle and go, nah. My free time is more valuable nowadays. J