9. In season one, the cast really did work at the T-shirt shop, with Vinny telling Vulture, “We did the first season for nothing, zero dollars, except whatever we made at the Shore Store.”
10. Shop owner Danny Merk even revealed their salary to Vulture: “They started off at $10 an hour, then it went to $15, and then I think I gave them 20 bucks an hour at the very end.” The hardest worker? If you asked Merk, he’d say Pauly D, with Jenni and Sammi proving talented at the cash register. Meanwhile, he says the worst employees were the Situation and Snooki.
11. After the monster success of the first season, the cast reportedly got a major pay raise, earning $10,000 per episode, per the New York Daily News. By the series’ end in 2012, they were bringing in $100,000 per ep, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
12. Ever wonder where GTL came from? You can thank production, who found the cast’s daily routine of going to the gym, hitting the tanning salon and doing laundry so tedious and mundane they were afraid they didn’t have a show.
“We were writing on a dry-erase board—because we always were like, ‘OK, so-and-so went here, so-and-so went here’—and every day we’d write ‘gym, tanning, laundry,'” Salsano revealed to Vulture. “Then we got lazy and just started writing ‘GTL.'”
