> “Being from the lower class can be an obstacle,” says Seals. “We found that having a job on campus, in food service or whatever, seems to harm you. I think it signals class, which is part of the reason we’ve got inequality issues and a lot of people are shut out from entry-level employment.”

This is not going to be a popular opinion, but it also signals relatively low levels of skill/initiative. Some teacher told a class of mine at one point that no member of the class should ever work a minimum wage job as even coming out of that class, there was probably something more profitable that we could be doing and some niche that we could be pursuing.

In the age of the side hustle and the boundless opportunities of the internet, working a min wage job points to you not succeeding at 5 other potential options before that. You couldn't get an internship, you couldn't freelance, you couldn't get a tangentially related job (lots of people I know did research in a lab if they didn't get an internship), you couldn't find something to sell to someone (friend sold sheds one summer), and you couldn't find a miscellaneous source of money (mine was hackathons and innovation challenges), so you served coffee to the people doing those things.

You either didn't think of those options or you failed at them while plenty of peers succeeded. Neither is flattering.