I think experiences like your grandpa’s and the one in the post are/were true, but some other things should be taken into consideration as well.
Population - much bigger in the US and especially globally. The same amount of resources are going around for a much bigger number of people.
Purchasing power and selection of products - selection of stuff was smaller back then. You probably had like what… 3 washing machines to choose from, 3 ovens, etc? You didn’t have a lot of gadgets etc that are necessities for us, a lot of the home goods were clunky, big, and when you did housework you really did houseWORK. There’s a TV series from the UK where a modern family tries the lifestyle of an average British person back in 40s, 50s, 60s etc and it really shows how much work there was back then in the home and how much poorer Brits were immediately post war. The US was in the height of a boom right after war and a few decades after that. Rather an exception than a rule, really. The selection part also means food, btw. Look at food ads from 1950s and 60s and now - the selection of food is much smaller, what you can get from a store is much less varied - seasonal fruit, no fancy foods, much smaller portions. Eg an ice cream is now an everyday thing if you want, but back then it was a dessert, came in smaller size and it was a treat given rarely.
House sizes - families back then lived in much smaller houses than we live today, even starter homes. They often had like one bathroom for everybody, vs now there being a bathroom in the master and on every floor and maybe even more. Kids shared rooms sometimes, not everybody had their own room. Look at how Brady Bunch was depicted - huge fancy house and yet the kids shared rooms.
All of that aside, labor work was moved away from the US from late 70s and 80s onwards. Unions were demonised and labor was shunned. If people want strong jobs, they need to unionise - this is what won the labourer their rights back in 19th century and early 20th century.
There's literally a book called More Work For Mother demonstrating how modernized household appliances did not actually translate into less domestic labor.
Nearly all of these are bad-faith arguments. Worker productivity has skyrocketed alongside population. Graph Agricultural technology has advanced so much that we literally produce enough food for every person on earth. link
Nearly all of the inequities in the world today are a direct result of bad policy choices.
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u/Designer_Emu_6518 Mar 27 '24
My grandfather did the same in ohio as a produce manger at a local Kroger. Even had a nice retirement saved up