At least in the USA ZEnith numbers were 5 digits after the ZE prefix for a total of 7. I suspect that was true in Canada as well.
I grew up in California in the 1960s and the one heavily advertised number was ZEnith 12-000 pronounced “Zenith 12 thousand” which was the state-wide emergency number for the California Highway Patrol. 9-1-1 was then a decade or more in the future. At that time CHP was the local law enforcement agency for many of the rural parts of the state in addition to its highway duties everywhere. So having every citizen everywhere know how to contact them was important.
Per that wiki, ZEnith 12-000 was still in use as late as 2006 (!) though CHP also had an 800 number (1-800-tell-CHP). As of today the website says they just have the 800 number. Plus of course 9-1-1.
Maybe this was true in certain parts of the country, but in the 1960s I never encountered nude swimming at YMCAs or Boy Scout camps. There was certainly nudity in the communal showers, but once you went out into the public pool, even in an all-male sanctuary, everyone wore bathing suits.
None of the schools in my area had pools for PE, so it never came up. By the time I got to college in the early 1970s, though, “tank suits” were required for swimming classes.
It was similar in Wisconsin, again due to the strength of the dairy industry, though the margarine law changed much earlier here (in the late '60s or early '70s). There were, back then, stores just over the state line (particularly in Illinois) which specialized in selling “Oleo” to Wisconsinites.
I knew that “white goods” are home appliances (refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, clothes washers, etc.); until I looked it up just now, I had not heard of “brown goods,” which are apparently home entertainment electronics (TVs, stereos, VCRs, etc.)
Why was margarine such an in-demand product that people would go across state lines to get it? I can understand people going out of their way to get cigarettes, alcohol, and stuff like that, but margarine?!? It’s written on that storefront at least 3 times, but I only see cigarettes once.
I forgot about that. Yes, we were paid in cash (and coin) in envelopes at the end of the pay period.
(at $3.65 per hour it didn’t end up being that much)
Regarding nude swimming, maybe it was a holdover from the hippie era, but we had a lot of co-ed naked swimming and people were pretty nonchalant about it. I think those days are probably over.
I think that part of it was the debate about the relative healthiness of margarine versus butter – particuarly at that time, as I remember it, it was believed that margarine was a healthier option, as it doesn’t contain cholesterol.
Plus, there’s the phenomenon of artificial demand caused simply by the inability to easily get something. The entire premise of Smokey and the Bandit was the inability, at that time, to get Coors beer east of the Mississippi.
Yup, Procrustus pretty much nailed it, lots of places also counted furniture as brown goods too.
The national figures of spending upon these items was deemed important as an indicator or the direction of the economy since these were parlty considered to be elective spending, if figures went up then it meant the economy was doing ok, if they went up a lot then the government might increase interest rates to control inflation - which hardly ever worked.
I should have mentioned that this is all UK centric - you Murricans might have other terms for the same things
Around here banks had Friday evening hours. They’d close as usual Friday at 3PM in order to allow the staff to get supper, then they’d re-open from 5 to 7 PM, Fridays only. Most people got paid on Friday and would head straight to the bank; and then often eat out on Friday night, which might well be the only night of the week they didn’t eat at home.
Even people with bank accounts often had no credit cards up until about the 1980’s; and most places weren’t set up to take them anyway, with the possible exception of an individual store card that would only be good at that store.
I took a trip around the country [USA] in the late 1970’s, and what I carried was travellers’ checks.
Traveler’s checks are something else in the dustbin of history. I think you can still buy them, but many fewer places accept them. In some places you would need to go to a bank to cash them, when they used to be accepted by most hotels.
I recall traveling with a thick book of traveler’s checks, making sure to have some small denominations.
The term “white goods” is at least somewhat familiar here in the U.S., though I suspect that it’s fallen out of use. I also hypothesize that it was used more by people who worked in the industry than by consumers.
There’s a catchall term of “durable goods,” which would cover both categories, that sometimes gets used by business and economics journalists, but again, I don’t think it’s a particularly common term in everyday parlance.
Before credit cards were accepted by grocery stores, my elderly aunt and her friends used travellers cheques. They were conscious that they were potential targets for purse snatchers and didn’t want to carry large amounts of cash for their grocery shopping.
Well, if it’s any consolation I, like @casdave, am in the UK, and I had no idea what brown goods were. Checked with Mrs Trep, and she’d never heard of the term either. It might be a generational thing, but so much of casdave’s post matches my experiences that I would have thought not.
The inability to get your hands on your cash is something I remember well. Where I worked in the early 80’s you had to be paid directly into a bank account; but every Wednesday you could write out a cheque/check and these would all be collected up by Personnel (as HR were known in those days) for one of the company drivers to take to a local bank to cash.
Between cash and direct deposit, we had a period when many people were paid by cheque. To cash a cheque at a bank, you needed to have an account at that bank. Except for wages cheques: banks realized that (a) most wages cheques were good, and (b) companies wouldn’t use cheques for wages unless the workers could cash them.
I recently re-watched Smokey and the Bandit and forgot that it was about smuggling Coors beer. I grew up in the 70s and remember hearing about people taking a trip out west to where it was available, and return home with cars full of Coors and probably sell it for a decent profit.
There were also companies, like Thillens, which would come to worksites with armored check-cashing trucks, allowing employees at those sites to cash their checks immediately.
