My great-uncle worked in Brazil for 15 years waaay back when (he’d be in his 90s now) and they had a similar problem; I’ve heard some of its aspects from Spain and Morocco, specifically the parts linked to “working at a factory means you have to be there at certain times, whether you feel like it or not” - that can be hard to understand for people who previously were farm workers, as there’s relatively few times when watering half an hour sooner or later will make a noticeable difference. Too many of the workers would grab their pay on Fridays and not come back until they were out of money, which for the sober ones could be one or two weeks and for the drunkards, Monday with eyes the color of the confused smiley (sample: ) and some interesting notions of “verticality”; often and specially for the drunkards, their women hadn’t seen a penny.
For a while, they had a strategy of giving the pay to “the legitimate one” (the wife or assimilable): if they did that, the women split the money up according to things like how many kids each one had, and they made sure their man was at the factory on Monday, and sober. “Sadly”, and I quote “it was illegal so we had to stop doing it that way.”
The US right now occupies a unique place in the history of the entire planet, in that food takes up a very small percentage of our monthly income. We are used to the fact that we can buy literally thousands of calories by spending two bucks at 7-11. We spend about 9.5% of our monthly income on food (cite). Food expenses are something that most families don’t have to worry too much about.
In 1930, people spent 25.3% of their income on food. Calories were precious and expensive. It was a luxury to bake a cake with a lot of eggs. The sugar that you put in your coffee wasn’t a negligible expense- it’s something you budgeted for.
When it’s taking a quarter of your income just to feed yourself, there isn’t a lot of room for extras. With modern transportation, shipping, retail, and credit, we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, where average people have access to a huge amount of stuff. Back then, it wouldn’t take much frittering away of your paycheck until you started hitting the necessities.
My mother went back to work full-time when I was three (almost unheard of in the '50s) because of my father’s drinking. He most definitely drank his wages away. He’d borrow from friends, pay them back on pay day, then borrow from my mother so he could drink some more.
This. Drinking away the paycheck included the ancillary “benefits” of getting piss drunk at a bar.
Anecdote alert: I used to work with an alcoholic. He never had 5 bucks in his pocket. Owed back taxes to the IRS. The year when he was finally paid up, he got a $1400 refund check. That night he asked me to have “a drink” with him. By the end of the night, he blew the whole amount. He bought the whole house rounds and bar t-shirts and hats and kept flashing it around.
I pulled him aside and begged him to stop. He said that he wasn’t going to live long so why not enjoy it while it lasted? He died at age 45. I guess he was right in the sense that there was no reason to save for retirement.
I’d like to know this info as well, but I’d suspect cultural differences would muddy the issue:
I’d bet more people lived in extended families back then – elderly living at home, providing some child care, or perhaps being so helpless that they amounted to an extra child to care for.
Both my uncle and may father emigrated from Italy in the 1950’s and were still, at that time, able to find rooms under the “warm bed system” That is, they shared a room, and it’s bed with another man, whose work-shift was different than theirs, so they occupied the bed a different times. They didn’t stay under that system for long.
In short, you can save a lot of money on housing if you’re willing to seriously infringe on your privacy – if you’re willing and if you’re able to find it.
I live in the San Francisco area and legit spend almost 50% of my salary on housing. My rent is $875 a month (one bedroom) for what could be legitimately called “low-income” (GHETTO) housing. And that’s before gas/electric/cable/internet. (I make around $2,000/mo IF I’m LUCKY! on-call/random worker.)
That having been said: I’m a hard core alcoholic, and though I might buy three jugs of vodka from different stores in any given week, that BARELY puts a dent in my income. I’m including assorted mixers even, and the once/twice a month I venture to the bar at the Chili’s down the block to have a couple drinks/dinner just so the bartender will pretend to be my friend.
That having been said, what makes me think people are “drinking their paychecks away” is a need for some reason to do this in public in the most expensive way possible.
My father managed to do it quite easily. When you’re drinking and buying drinks for women and pals, it goes very quickly. Eventually, it consumed him and then killed him. My brother took up where he left off, and his wife and kiddies did without essentials quite often because of it. Luckily, he was able to climb out of the bottle before he followed the same path as daddy dearest.
I was talking to an older uncle of mine who discribed, as a youth, his mother sending every payday to the local bar to find his father and get his paycheck from him while he still had it. If he failed, no groceries that week.
That business of drinking away the paytcheck is still, to some degree, alive and well. Back in the 80’s and 90’s I worked for a small aerospace firm here in Boeing territory. We hired around 300 shop workers, at not too shabby a salary. The paychecks were distributed just before lunch every Friday.
Around 11:00 AM every Friday, the parking lot would have an influx of 20 or 30 wives, arriving in time to intercept the old man and collect the check before he got a chance to take it to the nearest bar.
My grandfather was an old time drunk (who also made booze during prohibition). Drinking your paycheck away can also include: getting drunk and wrecking the car (which requires money to get fixed); getting thrown in jail for brawling (which requires money for fines); getting drunk and spending a lot of your money on female barflies (which is pretty self explanatory). In short, drinking your paycheck away is short hand for a series of poor decisions that harm the economic well being of the family.
True story. I was going out with a couple of friends of mine. It was right after payday. I wasn’t drinking because I was driving and I’m not much of a drinker anyway. But one of my friends planned on drinking quite a bit. So when he cashed his paycheck he gave the money to me and asked me to hold it for him so he wouldn’t lose it. But it was his money and he didn’t tell me to limit how much he spent so every time he asked me for money I gave it to him. Right up to the point where his money ran out.
Now he didn’t spent it all on drinking - there were also lap dances involved. But he had gone through an entire two-week paycheck in a single day of bar-hopping.
The drinking away of paychecks, both now and in the past, is what makes me impatient of a stereotype I often see in old movies and comedies: the “horrible harridan” wife who disapproves of her drinking husband. She commits such crimes and going to his place of business on payday to collect his check and prevent his drinking it all up. This was the core of an old Charlie Chaplin short, and she was the villain and he the comic hero of the piece.
Then, of course, there are all the W. F. Fields comedies, where the unhappy wife is the bad guy of the piece, and the drinker just a regular guy trying to get around her and have fun with his cronies.
I know prohibition was a bad idea and a failure, but in the days when women and children were dependent on husbands for food and shelter, you can see how it got a start. And I wonder how these old comedies would seem if written from the hungry family’s point of view.
I remember talking to a guy who grew up, many years ago, in Switzrland. He mentioned that in Europe, drunk is not funny - unlike Charlie Chaplin or WC Fields, or Bluto from Animal House. He said the general attitude to a drunk was “why can’t you control yourself?”; they were looked on as pathetic, like someone who pissed their pants in public. The best example of this is the movie La Vie En Rose, where her drinking is made to look pathetic.
In North America, we seem to think it is frat-boy-funny.
I think we misunderstand what it cost to live way back when. Food and lodging consumed much of the paycheque; clothing was probably the next highest - not because they had a lot of clothing, they didn’t, but because it was usually hand-made by people earning about the same wage. A new set of shoes was a big deal because it was a significant cost. So I bet 50% for lodging was not unusual back then, it just didn’t get you a decent apartment with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and security.
I have seen guys who are out of control in bars; if you are sitting aorund, a new round of drinks arrives for a group of 10 or 15 every half hour, andthe drunk at the end inists on paying and whips a few twenties off a roll every round - it won’t take him long to make a huge dent in his weekly take-home. If he does this Friday night, Saturday, and SUnday afternoon he’ll be broke by Monday. 10 or 15 drinks at 4 to 6 dollars each is a lot of money even by todays standards.
In those days too, before washing machines and day care, raising 3 or 4 kids was a full-tme job. The wife couldn’t just leave, court ordered support was as rare as its enforcement. (One thing I read was years ago that some employers would fire anyone who for whom they got a garnishee order so they did not have to deal with it…)
Sadly, that’s a “was” in many European countries. In the early 1980s in Spain, someone who “didn’t know when to stop”, someone who “lived inside the bottle” was seen as a pathetic loser; nowadays getting “blind drunk” is viewed by many as the goal of partying
And one of the things which has led to this shift in attitudes has been the new regulations on drinking, which have turned alcohol from “something you learn how to deal with from your parents” into “something forbidden that you learn how to chug from the biggest loudmouth in your class”.
My grandmother’s flat in Barcelona was bought in 1937 for 999 pesetas (you didn’t start paying transfer tax until the price was above 1K); it’s about 90m[sup]2[/sup], which is considered “standard” for a family of 5. At one point during the 1940s it housed 24 people, four of them in a 4.8m[sup]2[/sup] room. No, not 48: 4.8. For someone living like that, a round at the bar could make a significant dent in income.
I’ve heard it was often a problem for Irish (probably British as well) workers that they would actually get paid their week’s wage in the pub. Sometimes it was because the pub was owned by their boss who then would reap the benefits of them liquidating their income, but if I recall correctly there was also the scam that whoever was giving out the pay packet could then expect a pint to be bought for him. Behaviour like this was common enough around the time of the 1913 lock out but I believe similar shenanigans continued into the more recent times amongst navvies in Britain. For all I know it could still happen. I wish I could dig up a cite for it, I believe it was featured in the historical novel, Strumpet City.
) and some interesting notions of “verticality”; often and specially for the drunkards, their women hadn’t seen a penny.