No, they paid for everything with cash, not credit.
We don't actually have more disposable income, we have huge amounts of debt.
Ummm, they had as much debt back then but the wages were lower and it didn't seem like a lot, compared to now.
I bought my first property, ten acres with a year round creek running through it covered with old growth Ceadar, some of them 15 feet across. $6000. I built a nice house out of 16 inch sqare cut timbers from some of those trees and a bridge across the creek.
I really liked that house, but three years later a fellow came along and offered me $40K, which was enough to pay down my parent's debt so they would be able to set money aside for retirement, with enough left over to purchase a Moto Guzzi Motorcycle so that I could travel. I didn't fit well into society back then and a motorcycle suited my needs.
Many of the trees had to come down as they were plagued by ''core rot"
Back then, you couldn't give Cedar away unless it was cut into shake blocks or split for fence posts. I sold a railroad flat bed car full of fence posts to a store in south west Alberta and a bunch of shake blocks to a small shingle mill in our town at the time, now long gone.
People back then had "overdraft protection" which at the time was similar to a line of credit and wrote checks rather than use credit cards. Slower but not that much different.
Things such as firearms were cheap, until they weren't. Just like everything else, as they became more scarce and desirable prices escalated.
You may be to young to remember "Company Stores" they were very real and they were mostly OK but in some cases the people that ran them were very nasty when it came time to collect on the credit extended to the miners or loggers that I knew.
Those stores carried everything from work clothes to dress clothes, dry goods and canned goods and usually had a big liquor section.
The miners and loggers lived right at the worksite or in small towns or communities built by the companies they worked for.
Many people didn't have vehicles and the only transportation was often a company run bus. The closest towns were often a day's drive away.
Prices at the ''company store'' weren't higher than in town but because many of the customers were uneducated and the credit was very easy, with loan shark type interest rates it didn't take very long before the workers couldn't make enough money to leave, because the store had a deal with the company to pay off the credit line before paying the workers.
Things were different back then, but poor decisions were just as normal then as they are today.
