Working in New Zealand

There are jobs available but like any other place it might be a bit hard to find the job that you are after. I should note that places like fast food providers and supermarkets usually hire a lot of people. To work in New Zealand you either need to be a resident here or hold a work permit (I suppose people who have Australian residency are able to live and work here without any problem).

My work experiences:
I used to have a part time job in a restaurant while I wasn't studying. It was a very good experience because I got to learn about all the new foods here and all those deserts and drinks! Working there helped me to get used to the different accents here. The funny thing was that I had a kiwi coworker who used to talk allll the time and I was only understanding the overall meaning of the conversation lol Sometimes I was just laughing when she was laughing without knowing what we were laughing at (well I didn't want to be annoying to keep asking her to repeat her sentences) but after a while I started to understand her much better! all in all it was a job and it was paying.
The cons about that job was that we had to run around all the time and sometimes do more than we were able to (because they didn't want to have pay more people in those shifts so we had lack of staff), because of that we were rarely feel appreciated since the manager was not satisfied most of the times.
The other thing that I didn't like was that sometimes people weren't that nice. I should say that there were a lot of other nice people though. I was meeting a loooot of people in one day so of course I was meeting few that weren't that nice. One of them that I still remember was a woman who was making fun of my accent (I have an American accent) and kinda making fun of the whole me! It didn't feel good at all but well I was in the work place and I had to be nice to them in return. I guess there are hard times in every job so don't get disappointed if things aren't very pleasant.
The other hard thing about that job is that you might get body pains because of a lot of work (it might depend on the type of body though).

Working in a supermarket:
Being in checkout is quite nice, you got a big space and you see a lot of people. Again because we see tones of people daily, there might be some nice customers between them and some angry or even mean ones. Your job is to serve the customers, be friendly at the same time, have a conversation with them and a big smile on your face. It might get hard though cuz you might get very tired after some hours or even get an irritated throat! The good things about this job was that I got to learn all the names of the fruits and get better at English. I met a lot of lovely people and again its a job and it pays :)
One of the cons about this job is that you can get very dry hands after work (because you're touching a lot of things at work, like products, water, money and etc.).The second one is that if the company decides that there shouldn't be any chairs for the staff while working, you can end up with very sore feet and legs! (depending on person to person, the leg tiredness might last for a day or two after the work day).

Starting a small business with companies that want to use you to sell their products. Never EVER do it if you are after a part time job that would give you the freedom to study at the same time! If you do it as a part time job you will end up losing money and also time! This kind of job requires a lot of work and lots of effort. I'm not even sure if it's a good idea as a full time job for some couple of reasons:
- In this type of job you receive about 15%-24% of the sale BUT you have to pay for the brochures (you need them cuz that's how customers will buy from you) and they sell the brochures in bulk which wont be cheap.
- You will be responsible in taking the goods to the customers which will waste your time and money (cuz you have to pay for the petrol).
-You will have to handle the customers. You might trust someone and they will steal from you by not paying you! So you will end up losing money. An advice: NEVER EVER accept cheques! what they do is they just write a cheque and give it to you. You go to the bank put it through and bang it gets bounced back! The bank wont do anything, the customer will avoid you and other people will help her/him with it. You will be left with hundreds of dollars that you have to pay to the company otherwise you'll get into a serious problem! What you do is that you go and pay them using your credit card and pay interest on it. Your earnings will be in a negative way. To sum it up, its a terrible idea and it wont pay you at all.