My First Job: 9-to-5 Is So... 20th Century

In fifth grade, I answered a want ad and got a paper route, covering about one third of the houses in my small hometown in Missouri. I started with 34 subscribers (only 20 or 25 percent of the houses on my route took the paper), delivering Jefferson County’s local Monday-to-Friday afternoon newspaper, the Daily News Democrat. After school, the delivery truck would drop off a bundle of papers at the end of our driveway, and I’d roll the newspapers at our kitchen table and put rubber bands on them, then load them into the saddlebag baskets on my bike and head off on my rounds. Every other Saturday I’d go out “collecting,” knocking on each of my customers’ doors and asking for the last two weeks’ subscription fee.

The next summer I began taking advantage of a seasonal business opportunity – selling custom-printed Christmas cards, door to door. I learned about this program in a boys' magazine. A company sent me their catalog of Christmas card designs and I would take it from house to house, asking mostly housewives whether they would like to order some Christmas cards with their family's own customized greeting or sign-off, in time for them to be printed up and delivered back to them for use by October. They could order quantities as small as 25 at a time, or more if they wanted. I took the orders and collected a deposit, then sent it all in to the company, which sent me a big crate full of everyone’s different cards, in October. At this point I delivered the cards back to the customers who had ordered them and collected the balance of the payment due.

The following summer I launched another business, mowing lawns. My dad took me to a used lawn mower outlet and with my paper route money I bought a mower, then went door to door asking folks if they wanted their lawns mowed every two weeks. I lined up a pretty good clientele, and along the way learned how to disassemble a mower, sharpen blades, rake grass cuttings into compost piles, and so forth.

So by ninth grade I had found three fairly decent money-making activities, and I kept at them until the day I graduated high school and went off to college. However, I wouldn’t call any of these undertakings an actual “job,” in the sense that most people understand what a job is. None of them paid a salary, and none required me to put in any set number of hours.

Two of my younger brothers, meanwhile, soon acquired the other two paper routes in the town, so the three of us Peppers brothers managed all Daily News Democrat deliveries in Herculaneum, Missouri. We often traded off our routes, so if one of us was competing on a sports team or participating in some other after-school activity, the other two could cover for him. We continually canvassed for new subscribers, and by the time I was a senior we were delivering afternoon papers to about 250 customers in total. My brother Gary used his paper route and lawn-mowing money to buy himself flying lessons, soloing his first plane before he even got his driver’s license, but I have to confess I squandered most of my money on dates.

Today it seems the traditional 9 to 5 office job may disappear altogether within just a couple of more decades. “Information workers” already work anywhere, anytime with their laptops and smartphones. They don’t need offices and, more and more, their value is being measured not by the number of hours they put in but by the results they achieve. Moreover, predictions are that by the year 2020 more than 50% of all US non-government workers will be working entirely for themselves, rather than for some corporation, large or small. The vast majority of these freelancers, independent contractors and entrepreneurs will be younger workers – mostly Millennials.

You may disagree with me, but I think this will be a good thing, on balance. Yes, there will be some pain involved – all change involves pain, and we should try to alleviate it the best we can. But 9 to 5 work is disappearing primarily because large corporate organizations are just not as creative or agile as smaller companies and individuals are, and as the pace of change continues to accelerate, creativity and agility are becoming more important than simple scale and cost-efficiency.

If I were in sixth grade today, I might still choose to mow lawns and deliver papers, and maybe I’d go door to door offering to clean people’s barbecue grills, as well (something that, as an adult, I’d certainly be willing to pay for!). But rather than selling customized, pre-printed Christmas cards, I’d probably offer to help people format their cards with family pictures. By ninth grade, however, I’d want to be coding apps to do it more quickly.

Photo: Petrified Collection/The Image Bank via Getty Images