I strongly disagree that "working a minimum wage job has no connection or relevant to adult life." The self-sufficiency I gained when working for minimum wage at 15 helped put me on the path toward "lucrative professional employment" years later.
The experience of being paid according to your actual value, particularly when you're young and virtually worthless, is an important lesson you don't find in academics or extracurriculars.
"One of my earliest childhood jobs involved shoveling manure at my uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. Things were going well until my uncle explained that no matter how well I performed, I would never be promoted to farmer. Or even cow. I had hit the manure ceiling.
I consider that experience my first economic stimulus package—the unwelcome realization that my current job was a dead end. While my classmates were building snowmen with carrot noses (mostly the girls) and carrot genitalia (mostly the boys), I started to do some serious career planning about how to get out of the fecal relocation profession and into the warm embrace of a loving corporation. I studied hard, and I earned money for college by mowing lawns, shoveling snow, shoveling even more manure, and (my personal favorite) shoveling frozen manure covered with snow. I saved my meager funds, and with the help of my parents, who both took extra jobs, plus a few scholarships, I clawed my way into college."
The experience of being paid according to your actual value, particularly when you're young and virtually worthless, is an important lesson you don't find in academics or extracurriculars.