Keep working hard teens and twenty-somethings.
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/08/12/mean-street-somehow-the-american-dream-lives-on/
Meet Lauren DiCrecchio (right), age 29. She has a buzz cut, a nose ring and tattoos on both arms. She likes French rap and ’straight edge’ hardcore music, but cares neither for politics nor religion. She is America’s future–and in less than an hour’s conversation, Lauren gave me hope that the American dream will somehow live on.
Lauren works a kiosk at the giant King of Prussia Mall, selling language-education software. But that’s only a part-time gig. Her main job now is driving a FedEx delivery truck and she loves it.
Fact is - Lauren just loves working. “Forty hours is easy,” she says. Fifty, sixty hours, no problem. “Seventy is normal. But I was working 77 hours and to keep driving at FedEx, I had to cut my hours,” she says. So Lauren recently gave up her third job at the mall’s Apple store.
Across America, we debate just how much the government should tinker with the economy. Does it need trillions of dollars of intervention? Meet an industrious free agent like Lauren DiCrecchio, and you take heart. The government isn’t going to fix all our problems. We are.
meanstreetIt isn’t only that DiCrecchio has a great work ethic. It is that she gets on with it–the sometimes-grinding, sometimes-frustrating business of making ends meet.
One in ten Americans is unemployed, but Lauren has no problem earning multiple paychecks. “I know people. And I know people who know my work ethic,” she says.
Lauren spent eight years at Wawa, a big mid-Atlantic subs-and-salads chain, three years at Hot Topic, a teen retailer, and four years at the mall’s Apple Store. Amid all those hours, she got a degree at Delaware County Community College (paid for by Wawa) and another from Temple. She just repaid the $25,000 in loans she took out to attend Temple.
Not that Lauren’s life is perfect. She still lives with her parents. And she has had trouble translating her Temple degree into a job that makes use of her graphic design major. But you won’t hear Lauren moan or groan about it. She is too upbeat and too busy working.
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