Quote Originally Posted by life on mars View Post
I was earning , buying and supporting a family in the 70 's and it was poor pay , and tough , commodities were way more expensive, then due to no real less competition on the high street .

School uniforms were pricey from specialist shops or M&S , now you have bigger supermarkets driving those prices down including M&S

TV'S were a premium,had to bust a gut to get one on HP , now everyone has one , plus many more in bedrooms ,plus cable TV costs , never-mind, I pads, tablets, mobile phones , PC'S , folk now have a lot more .


Myself and my colleagues cycled, walked , or got a bus to work , now the same car parks are rammed with cars some very top end , with some having more than one on the driveway, its all so much attainable and rightly so.

Holidays back then were a luxury , we had to settle for home based breaks at Butlins, Trecco Bay , now with a bit of saving you can fly your family to Spain within modest income earning families.

Things are way better now for the working person , in terms of wages and rights, and I'm only talking about factory workers, posties and rail worker type jobs .who were lower paid back then,not many having to walk to work now ,thank god .
I was working before the 1970s and I would say the average working man was probably better off in the 1970s than today.

An ordinary working man could afford to buy a house on his own wage. In most parts of the UK there was job security and if you got bored then another equally well paid job was easy to find. Unions were strong and I don't remember any zero hours contracts. Beer and food seemed much cheaper in relative terms but I've not looked at the figures. You were very silly if you bought a TV instead of renting like most people. They were always going wrong and the shop would send someone around to fix it for free. There were not so many cars on the road, but that was a good thing. People were flying to Spain for cheap holidays in the 1970s if you liked that kind of thing but many preferred to holiday in the UK.

I would say that people were happier and friendlier then but this is just my opinion.