Originally Posted by
YVR Cockroach
I will surmise that spending money freely (on expenditures such as dining out) was probably rare for those who either lived through the great depression a.k.a dirty '30s (few in numbers these days) - probbly such as your parents - or their children and perhaps even grandchildren. The event made a very profound and lasting impression, instilling a great sense of thrift for a couple of generations. The great recession some 80 years later brought some of that back which resulted in some restaurant bankruptcies. Perhaps good times and easy credit (through credit cards, the use of which was still a bit of a rarity in the early '70s?) precipitated the right environment for a new slew of restaurants to cater to the mass market, much as cruises used to be exclusive.
Yes they both vividly remember The Great Depression and talk about it every day. St. Louis for one and Kansas City for the other, but the tune is much the same.
My parents both had "charge cards" from the mid-1960s onward, but those were issued by the local department stores. For times when there was something big planned, my Dad would go to the bank and withdraw many hundred dollars in cash. He once received a $500 bill in such a withdrawal, which I had never seen before (and haven't seen since now that I think about it). Restaurants of course would accept local checks in those days. The cash situations were when we were travelling out-of-town as a family.
When I first started to travel as a teenager, I did not have a credit card; I would take American Express travelers cheques -- this was the early 1980s. You would countersign your own signature at the redeeming bank. I first noticed credit cards in the late 1980s, my own was in 1987.