Yeah, my brothers and I would get our allowances, hop on our bikes, and ride down to the corner store to buy candy and such. My mom didn’t keep that sort of thing around. There were tortilla chips, and she would make loads of bean and cheese burritos for snacks, but junk food we had to buy ourselves. When I got older, she loosened up a bit and would sometimes buy 6-packs of sodas. For a treat, we were allowed to share a can. When we went to the movies, I would buy myself a regular bag of M&Ms to take with me into the theater and eat verrrry slowly. No way did she spring for theater snacks (nor do I).
With 3 boys and an earth-mama disposition, my mom would have been horrified on several levels at the idea of buying junk food for us to eat whenever we wanted.
Similarly, I think my mom would be horrified at the idea of me not having enough money for that kind of food. I think she was always afraid of the idea of me not eating because I wanted to diet or because of money–that time when I came back from college all emaciated, she was so freaked out that I didn’t have enough for vittles and such.
Well, being too thin was never really a problem in our household; we’re all built sort of peasanty-like. Not overweight, but certainly strong and healthy.
Regular snacks, like a box of cookies or something, no – my mom bought those with the rest of the groceries. Candy and gum, yes. I think most of my allowance went for Atomic Fireballs.
While in high school - I worked for my dad, in his shop - for $1.50 an hour.
This was after school - every day - plus saturdays all day. During Summer break, yup - full week.
I was not only expected to buy my own lunches - I also had to buy my own snacks/pop out of the shop cooler (if they were there).
He helped me buy a stereo, but I had to pay every dime of it back, and yeah, school supplies, toiletries, hair cuts, clothes I also had to (or was supposed to, he was not happy that I didnt have enough) buy. I remember overhearing a conversation between him and his then wife about how the water bill had gone up when I moved in (I took 5 minute showers) etc…And hell if I got into the cookies/snacks in the kitchen - the then wife actually had the lunch meat figured out to the slice, so if I got a sandwich, there wouldnt be enough for the “kids lunches” for school.
I won;t say we were rich or well off - I really don’t know - but 4 bedroom house (I had 1/2 of a converted garage as my room), 2.5 newish cars, etc - this was 1982.
I probably should have felt priveledged that he lent me the tools I needed to use in the shop.
I’ve worked every day since, (never been un-employed for any real stretch) I’m 43, and I still don’t think I really know how to relax and have fun. I can be generous, but I have a harsh reaction when people say “buy me something” or “I want that, get it for me”.
30 fuckin years… and I still remember it like it was last week.
Is this toward me? Dad is roughly 70 - putting him born around 1940 - in Wisconsin, on a farm - I remember taht because he had to milk the cows before he went to school (walking two miles uphill both ways in the snow).
Mom also born similar time - she’s a different story - I think born in 1943 - we had a falling out later in life that never got better, but growing up, I know she did what she could, but allowences (if we got them) were for us to do as we saw fit. Most snacks/food was always in the house. Once I started working (I moved back with her after 2 years with dad) I gladly helped out around the house with stuff.
(as an aside, Mom passed about 8 years ago, Dad’s still with us, My dad and I get along fine now when we talk - every 3/4 weeks or so)
(WTF is wrong with me tonite, this is not stuff I normally talk about - to anyone)
I farmed in Wisconsin with old guys who’d farmed in the 1940’s. Did it make them mean? Well, on one hand, they still used horses, and didn’t have electricity in the house. On the other hand, when the Japanese cut off the supply of hemp in SE Asia, the Navy paid Wisconsin farmers to supply it. Did they smoke it, too ? Hell yes!
I helped on the farm from an early age. Even at 5 years old I would be put to work as a tool gopher while dad was working, or flashlight holder, and was given more jobs as i got older. Initially, dad kept track of hours for me, but eventually he made me keep track myself, and would pay me every week for the work I did. A dollar or two an hour when I was really young, but I’d get raises every so often, and he was paying me $6.50 an hour in H.S.(mid 90s).
I never got an allowance, though he would hand out extra cash every once in a while(still does, tbh.)
More or less the same here- my Dad bought certain snack foods he liked when shopping and I could graze on those pretty much all I wanted, as long as i left a few for him.
Sometimes, like when we went to see a movie as a family, then I got extra.
Pretty much; not the Great Depression, but Dad was a 1938 vintage, Mom a 1940 and Spain was an economic blackhole throughout their first twenty years.
But most of my classmates (whose parents were of a similar age) got more allowance and had less expenses to pay for; most of them could ask their parents or grandparents for candy and extract some, or say “aw, Mom, my allowance ran out, please give me more money for candy” and get it. In 8th grade, a teacher asked (I don’t even remember what the excuse was) how much allowance we were getting: my 150pta was the highest, but I pointed out that asking only “how much weekly allowance are your parents giving you” was inaccurate; we needed to look at “how much weekly income do you get from different sources.” Once people added what they got from other relatives, my 150 was the lowest and a friend had gone from 25 to 400, putting her as the “richest” student in the class.
So having lived through the lean years wasn’t the only factor. Mind you, my parents were unusual in many, many ways.
I had an allowance, but it was crap - 50 cents a week (in the nineties!), when they remembered to give it to me. So junk food was paid for by my parents since there was nothing they could reasonably expect me to buy with my own money. I’m not sure what I even spent my allowance on, though I have memories of regularly buying licorice from the school canteen even though I hated licorice, because there was nothing else I could afford. Heh.
I did not get an allowance. I did all the grocery shopping beginning at about age 8, so I bought whatever I wanted to. We weren’t big candy-eaters, but I bought it sometimes. I did buy too much pretzel/potato chip-type snacks. Most of the time my father would give me a blank check and wait in the parking lot of the grocery store; sometimes he would come in, but he was a pain in the ass and embarrassed me asking questions. I worked better alone.
Yes, we did buy our extra treats with our allowance. It increased from per week of 15 or 25 cents when we were really little to a high of $5 when we were 15 (1984). The standard treats were ice cream after dinner, and a snack cake with our bag lunch. Occasionally our father would buy chips or doughnuts. And he would make popcorn for us to take to the movies (he would always pay for movies).
I remember taking the allowance to the candy store where you could get a bagful for the 25 cents. That one-cent pink gum sticks that tasted like the stuff the dentist used. Wax harmonica. By the time I was 11 or 12, I could use the allowance ~$3 to go to Burger King with my friends when we got out of school early on Wednesdays.
We could also save up for toys or other items we wanted, since we didn’t get anything besides necessities except on our birthday or Christmas. I remember saving up for a notepad in rainbow colors where the layers of the pad spiralled. It was the Holy Grail for a few weeks till I finally could afford it!
Never really had an allowance growing up in the early-mid 70s. Sometimes I would get a few coins for taking out the garbage or washing the dishes. Sometimes dad would just give me a little money. If a friend and I announced that we wanted to ride our bikes down to the Dairy Queen, mom might ask if we needed any extra cash. Riding our bikes down to the Dairy Queen was kind of an event. It involved biking up the hill on a fairly busy road, then down another hill, through a cornfield (my favorite part), past a factory, and through the “bad” lower-income part of town, which wasn’t really bad at all. I don’t remember snacks and candy being something highly coveted, though. It was fun, to be sure, but cap guns, balsawood airplanes and the county fair could be moreso. Candy was just one part of being a kid, and our consumption was rarely scrutinized (to our knowledge), so I don’t recall the need to hoard or constantly acquire either, except perhaps on Halloween when it was more of a contest. Plus, my grandfather lived with us the whole time I was growing up, so he was always good for stuff like that.
One snack related story: One day in July or August I had a friend over, and there was a rain shower. Afterwards, we went in the backyard and found some muddy spots where the grass didn’t grow very well, and started to slide around in them barefoot like a slip-n-slide. The muddy patches grew and grew, and when my dad saw what we had done, he got supremely pissed at us and started yelling, us standing there all muddy with our heads bowed and our knees together and our hands clasped in front of us, full of shame, trying to explain what we were thinking. Half an our later, dad felt bad about the yelling and offered to take us to the 7-11 for chips and pop and stuff. What’s a little grass (in a backyard full of trees anyway) when you can see your kid and his buddy have a great time on a perfect summer day?
Yeah. Mom and dad were big on health food (still are, too). Snacks were by and large along the lines of wheat crackers and string cheese and carrot sticks and fruit. As a little kid without the means to get to a store if I wanted something else I could occasionally beg a ride to the store to procure it, but mostly was out of luck. Once I hit high school age if I wanted something I’d buy it, and suffer the We Do Not Approve looks if I had the audacity to buy a bag of, say, regular potato chips (rather than, say salt-free baked corn chips).
Yes, we had to use our allowance to buy any extras. Strangely, my mom considered chips a staple food then (probably because she really liked them and that was before fat was bad), so really the only “extra” we had to buy was candy and other stuff my mom considered too ungourmet for her tastes.
My mom was also one of those people who has to (and has always had to) make everything gourmet. Even frozen pizzas, which were a rarity because she preferred making her own dough, were doctored with special herbs and goat cheese. It used to drive me nuts. I just wanted a normal pizza, dammit. I still remember detassling corn and babysitting all summer, in part so I could have enough cash to buy pizza from Little Caesars. It was a wonderful day when I could join the ranks of the legally employed and work somewhere absent of boiling heat, razor-sharp corn stalks and little kids demanding piggy-back rides and still manage to get normal store-bought pizza.
Hee. Mom decided to make her own pizza when I was a young teen – my review was it “almost tastes like real pizza”. We celebrated report cards at the local pizza place (about the only time we ate dinner out) and sometimes got take out local pizza, but I didn’t discover the joy that is Pizza Hut until grownuphood.